Former President Barack Obama opened his first Democratic rally of the 2018 midterm election cycle in Anaheim, Calif., on Saturday with an anecdote about how he was once kicked out of Disneyland for smoking cigarettes on a ride while in college.
“After [a Kool & the Gang] concert, because we were teenagers, you could still kind of hang out in the park, and so we went into the gondolas, and I’m ashamed to say this — so close your ears young people — but a few of us were smoking on the gondolas,” Obama said of his time at Occidental College, before he transferred to Columbia University for his junior year.
“These were cigarettes, people,” Obama added to laughs from the audience.
But Obama said his group was intercepted by “two very large Disneyland police officers.”
“They say, ‘Sir, can you come with us?’ And they escorted us out of Disneyland,” he continued. “This is a true story, everybody. I was booted from the Magic Kingdom.”
“I was booted from the Magic Kingdom.” Obama tells California crowd about his rebellious college visit to Disneyland https://t.co/HvrbzYN89C pic.twitter.com/agYVhZowlZ
— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 8, 2018
The speech, given at the Anaheim Convention Center to tout the candidacy of seven Democrats hoping to wrest control of their congressional districts from Republican incumbents, was a slight pivot from the address he gave at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Friday.
Obama did not mention President Trump by name Saturday, instead calling for voters to “restore some sanity in our politics” during the November elections.
“The biggest threat to our democracy, I said yesterday: It’s not one individual; it’s not one big super PAC billionaire — it’s apathy, it’s indifference,” he told the crowd. “It’s us not doing what we’re supposed to do.”
Former Pres. Obama: “The biggest threat to our democracy, I said yesterday: it’s not one individual, it’s not one big super PAC billionaire – it’s apathy, it’s indifference. It’s us not doing what we’re supposed to do.” https://t.co/dVx6e96jVt pic.twitter.com/U8YLvrage2
— ABC News (@ABC) September 8, 2018
