Following up on his State of the Union address, as is his custom, President Obama is taking a quick tour of the country to give speeches that reinforce his SOTU speech. Today he's in Idaho; tomorrow he will be at the University of Kansas.
It's always with a lot of skepticism that people wonder how many tickets will get picked up by the general public in order to see a Democratic president in a traditionally Republican state. I knew from my volunteer efforts with Kansas Democratic Party what many outside of Kansas don't know: Democrats here are not as alone as we think.
Students at Kansas University started camping out at 2:00 a.m. Wednesday morning for the tickets that were available to students and faculty. Eventually the line snaked all the way around campus. By a little after 11:00 all of them were gone.
The public were told to pick up tickets at the Douglas County Fairgrounds at 5:00 p.m. I knew people would be lining up early for them too, and I actually wavered a little about going to get myself a ticket. I live in Topeka, and Lawrence is an easy 25 to 30 minute drive for me. After checking with my office about the schedule to see if I was needed Thursday, my boss gave me pep talk and basically said, "Oh! You GOTTA GO SEE OBAMA!" I figured after that I would have a lot of regret if I didn't at least go try.
I got there at 3:00 and was probably about No. 300 in line at that point. The first woman in line had gotten there at 7:50 a.m. She was joined by others, and at about 10:00 a.m. Fern Coffin got there from Olathe with her daughter and granddaughter and started her wait. Fern is 100 years old and became the media darling of the day. (make sure you watch the raw video also at that link). I hope by the time President Obama gets here, his advance team has told him about her. He will be the first president she's ever seen in person; she's a Republican.
(As I'm looking at the links from the news this morning, I notice Fern and her daughter and granddaughter have tickets with a green bar; you'll see others waving their tickets around that don't have that green bar. I think they are in for some special treatment on Thursday.)
I was just ahead of the couple with the baby in this news clip from KSNT and just behind the two black women you see posing with their tickets (one is in light blue). I'm a little camera shy. :-p And there were plenty of people who lined up for tickets!
So as you can already surmise since you saw shots of the people behind me in line and the people ahead of me in line, I did get a ticket!!! I'm so excited. Suffice it to say there are PLENTY of people in Kansas who want to see President Obama. I'm looking forward to a great day tomorrow, surrounded by happy, enthusiastic people. Right now it's not looking like the venue is going to have much if any seating at all, but I remembered this morning that's kind of what we wound up with at the Brown v. Board stuff at the Kansas Capitol years ago too, and it wasn't too bad. It's not great but not horrible either.
I will have to be more of a people watcher tomorrow and snap some pictures of the very diverse crowd that will be there. The most disappointing thing about the dKos community is your assumption that everyone in the Midwest is white and conservative. KDP obviously dropped the ball when it came to GOTV in November, but that doesn't mean there aren't people here who vote Democratic. And there are still people here who are civil enough to just be excited about any presidential visit.