Bristow, Va.
Barack Obama’s rally at Nissan Pavilion on June 5 has all the makings of a rock concert. Outside the venue, merchants at tables near the gravel parking lot are hawking Obama kitsch–T-shirts, pins, caps. I can’t resist buying a pack of “Hope For The Future” Obama playing cards from Kelly, a native San Franciscan with blonde dreadlocks, a pierced lip, and numerous tattoos including a pentagram at the top of her sternum. She says she’s been following the Obama campaign for the last ten weeks on the road, selling her wares and clocking 25,000 miles on her odometer. Inside the gates, vendors are busy working concession stands, and I’m not the only one disappointed on this 85 degree day that the 24 oz. cans of beer normally on sale here have been prohibited. It’s a little after 4:30 P.M., about 90 minutes prior to Obama’s scheduled arrival, and a southern rock band, Jody Lee Petty, is on stage finishing its act. When one of the band members shouts out between songs, “Let’s give it up for change in America!” the crowd, now filling about two-thirds of the pavilion’s 10,000 seats, applauds wildly.
But the band’s uninspired renditions of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” leave the crowd cold. Not that there seem to be many southern rock junkies among the attendees, who are mostly in their 20s to 40s, roughly half African American, half white, and predominantly middle class–judging by their attire and the cars in the parking lot, where there are plenty of Fords and Chevys, but not a Prius to be seen. The Obama campaign has tried in vain to appeal to white working-class voters. They’re not here.
The 10,000 people who do show up, however, are bubbling with eagerness to see Obama in person. Why have so many people, many of whom had to take off work, come to see Obama?
The first person I ask is a 51-year-old Obama volunteer, Fred Van Doren of Woodbridge, Va. He says he has never voted before, but was inspired by Obama’s “spiritual values and integrity.” So, earlier in the day, he shut down his jewelry store in order to serve as an usher at the rally. Van Doren’s support predates the Iowa caucuses, when he began “intending” Obama’s victory with others on an online forum. “Intending,” he says, is the spiritual practice of deliberately intending for something to happen. Van Doren is adamant that “intending,” based on the bestselling book The Secret, is a “spiritual, not religious” practice. “We didn’t pray or do any weird Kool-Aid drinking stuff like that.”
Van Doren seems to have a lot in common with the average fan at this rally. Ask one why he or she is here, and the answer isn’t Obama’s pledge to end the war or fix the economy. These fans have come because of Obama himself. Denise (her middle name) “just happened to feel sick” about noon so she could leave her job at an IT consulting firm and see Obama, whose most appealing characteristic is the “inner strength that he exudes.” Irene, a 55-year-old who works for the military, tells me that she’s “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and finds Obama’s “humble spirit” and “charisma” invigorating. “If God is for you, who can be against you?”
There is a commensurate disdain for Hillary Clinton. “I would have punched you in the nose if you told me you were with Politico,” Van Doren says jokingly (I think), before informing me that the Washington, D.C., newspaper has a pro-Hillary bias. “I don’t trust her,” he says, uttering verbatim the response I also get from three others when I ask if they would like to see Clinton as Obama’s running mate. Rendee Turano, a single mother from Falls Church, took her daughter out of school to attend the rally. Hillary Clinton “made me embarrassed how she ran as a woman,” Turano says, adding that she was disgusted by the “race-baiting she’s done and her husband’s done.”
They all expect to put that nightmare behind them quickly. Now, before we know it, Obama is taking the stage with Virginia governor Tim Kaine and Senator Jim Webb.
Senators Webb and Obama seem like a natural fit on stage together, heightening speculation that Obama will choose Webb as his running mate in order to shore up his weakness on national security and with white working class voters. Webb, who saw combat in Vietnam as a Marine, vouches for Obama’s courage, saying that during the primary the senator from Illinois “stood up to sometimes withering attacks with measured responses” and displayed the “confidence and steadiness we want to see in our commander in chief.”
When Obama rises to speak, he returns Webb’s effusive praise, saying: “If you’re in a fight–and we’re going to be in a fight–you want Jim Webb to have your back.”
Obama’s speech hits all of the usual notes: He will work to end global warming, fix the economy, lower gas prices, improve education, and end the war in Iraq. With Webb beside him, Obama appears at ease saying the American people “don’t want all this for free. They want to be called to serve. They want to serve in the military as Jim Webb and his son have served in the military. They want to serve in the Peace Corps.”
“We’re involved in two wars,” Obama says, “one war that we must win against those who killed in cold blood 3,000 Americans–al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the northwest provinces of Pakistan. That is a war that we must win, and we must incapacitate those who would do America harm. But we’re also involved in a war that I believe should have never been fought and should have never been authorized, should have never been waged in Iraq, and that war has to come to an end.”
The crowd goes just as nuts for obliterating al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan as it does for withdrawing from Iraq.
Of course, the crowd goes nuts for pretty much anything Obama says.
At one point, Obama says: “This election is not about me, it’s not about Hillary Clinton, it’s not about John McCain, it’s not about any of the candidates. It’s about you.”
Don’t tell that to his fans, however. One, finding Obama much too humble, yells: “You’re our solution, Obama!”
John McCormack is deputy online editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
