Obama in the House!

Well, we did try.

I’m currently watching Obama speak on stage at my campus in Columbia, live, on CNN.  He’s less than three miles from my house.  I could probably stake out the road to the airport (there’s only one) and see his motorcade if I got up and went out to do it.  But I won’t.  I figure if I’m that desperate, I can always wait until 2012 and see him in Iowa.  Or not!  He’d be the incumbant, right, so there won’t be much of this giant crowd campaign stop kind of thing.

Anyway, Tracy and I went down there to get in line.  And we found the line, three blocks from the South Quad.  So we followed it… and found the end about 1.2 miles later.  That line was 6 people deep throughout.  My guess is that is about 15,000 people in total. 

So after we waited about forty minutes in line, we did the math, cut our losses, and went home.

Watching this video is making me seasick.  I don’t know what kind of poor setup they gave CNN for their live feed, but clearly it’s vibrating under the feet of fifty thousand camerapeople.  Not good, Missouri J School!  Way to show them how to put on a newsworthy event.

We might have stood in line longer if we hadn’t been surrounded by some surly, smoking college kids who were mad that they were waiting in line for the event.  I guess they thought they could just wander in.  I think my experience with DC events taught me that it’s never that easy.  It’s always lines and security and wands and more lines, and then you want to march, do you?  Well, it’s not really a march so much as a long line with placards involved.

Anyway, when we left the line, I don’t think that either of us was too disappointed.  I had already set our expectations for the event pretty low.  When we finally reached the end of the line, I told her, “This is it!  Here is your Obama experience!  Wait in this line until long after Obama starts speaking!”

So that was it, our Obama experience.  We did try, then we managed our expectations.  Now I have a great view of the event from right here in my flannel sheets.