Obama In Manassas

Late yesterday afternoon, your intrepid blogger decided to hitch a ride out to Barack Obama's final campaign stop (and in the interests of editorial balance, had John McCain been within driving distance on one of his final stops, I would have tried to go out to see him too, but no such luck) in Manassas. The fellow journalist who drove me out was clever enough to plot an alternate route out to Virginia, so we left late and zipped along until we hit a solid wall a couple of miles from the Prince William County Fairgrounds, and after a couple of miles of stop-and-go traffic, we parked in a housing development and trudged a couple of miles up the road and through some woodsy territory to the rally.

And let me tell you, readers, there were a LOT of people there. The fire marshals said 90,000 people. It looked a lot smaller from the area where the press were, right around the podium, until we turned around and saw how far the crowds extended behind us. It was a pretty subdued crowd, and a pretty subdued candidate who took the stage an hour and a half late. I was standing by the DJ booth watching the sound guys flip through a pre-picked list of about twenty tracks (they played U2's "Beautiful Day" a LOT) and saw David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, hanging around and chatting with folks. Everyone's focus was clearly on voting tomorrow.

In fact, the most striking moment for me took place after the rally. Thousands of people were walking down the sides of the street leading to the fairgrounds when the cops started clearing people out of the road. It was foggy, and there were no street lights--just the lights on police vehicles. The road is mostly wooded and uninhabited except for a gas station near the fairgrounds. And when the motorcade came by, those thousands of people, just outlines in the night, divorced from any particular time or place, stopped and cheered as Obama passed by. Except for the make of the Suburbans, it could have been pretty much any place, any time.