Well I'm dead tired after being on my feet for about 5 hours, but I'm still pumped from the electrifying rally in Boston this evening.
I'll just give you a few impressions I had from the experience.
The most striking thing that was absolutely unavoidable was the overwhelming youth of the crowd. I was with a group of 4 friends, all of us in our late twenties, and my 70 something father was also with us. When I arrived there with my father and girlfriend, we were stunned by the length of the line.
It probably stretched at least a mile, and maybe more. We began walking down the street trying to find the end of the line, and realized that it wrapped completely around a giant parking lot that was surrounded by a chain link fence.
Walking past the thousands of people, I was immediately struck by how young everyone was. I would estimate that 75 percent of the crowd was under 35, and it may have even been higher than that. Many were clearly college kids (BU, Northestern, BC, Suffolk, Emerson, Umass Boston, and scads of community colleges are in the immediate vicinity). Of course this rally was taking place late at night on a Monday, so a lot of older people probably didn't feel like getting home at 12:30 AM like I just did. Anyway this bodes well for Obama because most MA polls are probably vastly under sampling these younger voters who have only unlisted cell phones, and who appear ready to hit the polls en masse tomorrow.
Anyway, we decided to hop the fence to cut across the parking lot and save ourselves about a half mile of walking. Then a friend who had been waiting in line since 5:00 PM (this was around 7:00) called and told us to join him up front. We wisely decided to not vault back over the fence and walked to the front of the line, thereby cutting several thousand people (sorry everyone who was there!).
The crowd inside was very diverse racially which was nice to see in Boston (which isn't the most integrated city to put it mildly), but again, the crowd was almost totally young people with very few exceptions.
Local Reps. spoke, followed by Deval Patrick, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy. Each of them were impressive in their own right, but Kennedy was absolutely on fire. I get why he's called the Liberal Lion. He was bellowing out his firing fiery sermon and the crowd was lapping it up.
Mind you this was around 10:30 PM, maybe later, so people had been on their feet for hours by this time (the World Trade Center has no seating which was rough).
I was probably about 15 feet from the stage due to my immoral line-cutting so had an excellent view of the stage. Obama gave a great speech, but nothing I hadn't heard from him before.
What struck me was the man's charisma which is even more apparent when you see him in person. He was funny as hell, especially when talking about his "cousin" Dick Cheney. He also pointed out how people think he's naive, not tough enough, etc. He pointed out that he gets it, and that he's ready for the republican slime machine just as much as Hillary is.
The mood in the convention hall was electric, and you could feel the excitement pumping through the crowd.
He went on for about an hour, hitting on ending the war, healthcare, taxes, education, corruption, lobbyists, the environment, the economy, abu ghraib, torture, foreign policy, etc. People who ask "where's the beef?" when it comes to obama simply are not paying attention to what the man has to say. He went as in depth as he could given the venue and format (this was a rally, not a policy summit).
I am feeling pretty damned good about tomorrow, but am tempered (the Pats loss on Sunday burned me once this week already).
Well I'm bone tired and heading to bed shortly.
Gobama!
UPDATE I: The line was a mile long apparently!
UPDATE II: Wow fired up about the Rec. List, thanks. Of course I need to be at work in an agonizingly small number of hours so I won't be here to enjoy it. I hope everyone G'sOTV tomorrow and gives Obama a victory.
Peace!