Last night Georg and I watched Obama's speech with Joe, S. and D. at a convention watch party at Broad Street Cafe. We were lucky enough to get a table right up front near the screen, so I'm not sure how many people were there. 150 maybe? The place was packed, standing room only all the way back. Joe handed out buttons he had made (he runs a CD duplication business and has good graphics equipment for label printing) so the folks there were the first people in Durham to have "Obama-Biden" buttons.
It was a great way to watch the speech. There was lots of applause and several times the crowd erupted, cheering so loudly that we had trouble hearing the next few words. It was so inspiring to see it like that, surrounded by enthusiastic fellow supporters. It was a very good speech, and the positive energy in the room added so much. We all walked out of there so fired up. S. and I made plans on the spot to canvass on Saturday.
I do have a couple of small complaints about the venue: first, we thought they were going to be showing the convention all night, and they didn't actually turn it on until 9:30. Just in time to hear the "ordinary American" from Pittsboro, but we missed Al Gore and Stevie Wonder. Second, I thought they'd have it on a big TV or something, instead they were projecting the video stream from someone's computer. So the video quality was quite poor. I wish now we'd recorded the evening on C-SPAN so we could see the speeches we missed, and see Obama's speech with TV quality. But alas, we didn't think of it. Maybe one of the "on demand" channels will have it.
The funniest thing that happened was just before Obama spoke, one of the campaign workers held up a cell phone to the mic. She had on the line another field worker who was at Invesco Field, right in the middle of it. And he was totally incomprehensible. I guess because of the noise level in the stadium, he was yelling into his phone and was very distorted. Add more distortion from the mic and what we heard was Charlie Brown's school teacher. "Wa-wa, wa-wa-wa waaaaa!" Someone from the audience yelled out "Tell him to wave!" and then people started pointing at the throng on the video screen and saying "There he is! I see him!"
The campaign workers had a signup sheet and I hope they got lots of new volunteers last night. I noticed on this week's phone bank that I had a much better rate of volunteer sign-ups. It might just be the luck of the day, or it might be that the convention is encouraging people to volunteer.
Leave a comment