Obama's visit to Rolla

Barak Obama made a visit to Rolla today in a tour of a few rural Missouri cities to try and change some red counties to blue. We went to see the show and what all may or may not be going on around the visit.

The newspaper is reporting that a presidential candidate has never made a stop in Rolla before so this is a big opportunity for us. Yesterday people stood in line for hours in the 90+ degree heat to get tickets for the town hall. I wasn't quite up for that yesterday. I was interested but the boys wouldn't be...Instead of watching the speech the boys and I (and our babysitter too) went down to the area of town where he would be speaking to see what we could see.

The anti-abortion picketers were out - that was the first thing that we noticed and the fact that we would get really close and find a parking spot very easily. Believe it or not, we seemed to know most of the people holding signs. (Yes, it is a small town.) I was really surprised at the extreme lack of people hanging around though! We were there 30 minutes before he was scheduled to arrive and there were only a few people milling about on the streets. We weren't being shooed away either.

We didn't see Obama...his buses pulled to a back entrance of the building and he was whisked into the building. Of the 6 other people around us trying to catch a glimpse, one said that they saw him put on a jacket and was girded by police officers walking in a door 10 feet from the bus. No waving or greeting people...but really there weren't very many people to greet! We saw a ton of press though!

There were about 8 different stands selling different Barack Obama stuff - t-shirts, buttons, bears - near the public entrance. Everyone was getting checked by a metal detector that had a ticket before they could enter. One poor lady had a ticket and portable oxygen and they wouldn't let her in because you weren't allowed to bring in a bag!

We listened to his stump speech on the radio. He said it was a town hall, but he talked for an hour and then took questions for 15 minutes. Seems a lot like a corporate meeting than a town hall:) Unfortunately the visit wasn't as big of a deal for the town that I thought it would be. I was hoping that there would be some more hype and more fanfare. Instead it was three big buses and about 9 other vehicles pulling into town. He was prepped well because he at least pronounced the name of the town correctly. Clarie McCaskill has been by his side a bunch so I'm sure her aides were there to help with that!

We did look at a TV van for a few minutes - I guess that I could count that as a field trip for school! Unfortunately the engineers weren't interested in talking about anything that we were seeing though they didn't seem to mind us watching. We did see a clip of Obama getting on the bus at the last stop and talking about John McCain (based on a question).

That's my view of our presidential hopeful visit. No hand shaking or waves or anything...just a big black plain bus that was watching CNN on a huge flat screen as they came into town. The end result for me was not what he was after - he didn't secure my vote in November.