February 5, 2008
Barack Obama Comes to the Bay State--Long Lines Ensue
People, so many people, mostly young people, people everywhere. There were so many people waiting in line for Senator Barack Obama's rally at the Seaport World Trade Center last night that the campaign turned the queue into a phone bank, handing out lists of voters and asking people to use their cell phones to plead for support. There were so many people waiting in the cold that a nearby Dunkin' Donuts had to prematurely close its doors after it sold every ounce of coffee in stock. So many people.
Like any rock star worth the name, Obama showed up late---although no one really knew what time things were supposed to be starting in the first place. The campaign's invitations said the doors would open at 8 p.m., and this Bostonist showed up at 6:30. By then the line was already several blocks long, and it would soon wind up and down the streets near the waterfront.
After three and a half hours of waiting outside, we were cold, on a first name basis with a lot of new people, and increasingly paranoid that people were cutting in front of us in line. The site was said to hold 8,000, and everyone was worried that they would get left outside.
After finally finding refuge (but no chairs) in the giant conference room, the event itself was well-orchestrated but anti-climactic. There were introductory speeches from Fitchburg mayor Lisa Wong, Governor Deval Patrick, Senator John Kerry, and Senator Ted Kennedy. Obama finally took the mic a few minutes before 11 and gave a compelling address that lasted almost an hour. Still, either sheer exhaustion or the need to get to a soon-closing T station meant that Obama ended his speech to a noticeably diminished crowd.
Obama, as he mentioned several times, owes a huge debt to Boston, where he gave the now famous address at the 2004 Democratic convention that brought him into the national spotlight. Bostonians returned the favor by coming out in massive, Dunkin' Donuts-closing numbers for him last night. It remains to be seen whether that will translate into a victory today, and whether we'll get the feeling back in our toes.
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Thank God for C-SPAN
YES WE CAN!
I am reading this on February 7th, with hindsight. But you should have possessed a great deal of hindsight even by the 5th. This was your New Hampshire all over again, with the romanticization of long lines of people standing for long hours in freezing cold. This, mind you, happened with Eugene McCarthy in 1968, this happened with McGovern in 1972; to a lesser extent it happened with Mondale toward the end of his disastrous general election campaign in 1984.
May this serve as a warning (intellectually speaking) to you and other excessively impressionable observers. I suspect Obama himself was carried away with unfounded optimism (note the text of his "victory" speech in Chicago on election night, which must have been written with the expectation of a Second Coming and remained unmodified).
That's the nature of the intoxication politicians often suffer as a result of rubbing elbows with adoring crowds.
Richard Nixon, an expert on masses if nothing else, understood the dissonance perfectly back in 1970 when he started addressing himself to a "silent majority", that which remains invisible and inaudible. How right he was became apparent in 1972 when he scooped 49 states of the union (good Massachusetts excepted) and 60% or so of the votes.
The intoxicating power of masses crowded in a city square or in a sport palace may help carry out revolutions, violent or otherwise, by skipping the ballot box. But whenever the ballot box is the medium, public opinions tend to be far more conservative, _far far_ more conservative. Few historians would disagree with the notion that the French Revolution would have been defeated in a referendum in 1789, the excited crowed in the Bastille notwithstanding.
And that is good. It's good that the great masses view revolutionaries with skepticism. That is the most important check on the impulses of world redeemers, right or left.
But I don't really belong here, no Bostonian and no Bostonist. Thank you for indulging my ruminations.