Well, I live within about a 15 minute walk from Otterbein University, venue for tonight’s debate.
My sons and I all applied for tickets but due to the demand we were unsuccessful. That was annoying due to my house’s proximity to the debate, for a start parking would not be an issue, but proximity meant that checking out the surrounding events would be really easy.
So, a little background on Westerville. Westerville is a suburb of Columbus, sitting on the north-east corner of the larger city. Westerville is a beautiful city, known as Tree City USA due to our plethora of trees. It’s also the birth place of prohibition being the place where the US temperance movement started. In fact Temperance Row is on the Otterbein campus, flanking the building imaged above. And it is a wonderful place to live, quiet, somewhat funky (in all the best senses), peaceful and, thankfully, no longer dry.
It was not quiet today though! Let me précis this by admitting I have not had a real up close experience of the polarization of current American politics. Yes, Ohio is a key state in the electoral process, but apart from doing data entry for the second Obama presidential campaign I have had very little contact with the extremes of recent politics. Well, tonight was quite the eye opener! Westerville has a downtown (confusingly called Uptown) that is the epitome of quaint. Uptown has one central block flanked by two access roads and this is where the various supporters set up.
Initially the two largest groups were supporters of Elizabeth Warren and trump who set up on opposite sides of the street. Inevitably this led to quite the to and fro of chants! Just for the sheer hilarity, my favorite was the following exchange:
MAGATs — “Four more years. Four more years”
Warren supporters — “Boring! Boring!
After a bit of a wander to check out the venue for the debate I walked back to Uptown to find that The Yang Gang had showed up, and had showed up in numbers. They had also brought, or at least were celebrating, an Andrew Yang 18 wheeler that drove back and forth through Uptown to uproarious cheers. They were also the funnest bunch of supporters and despite not fully agreeing with Andrew Yang’s policies, I cannot help but to enjoy the “Math” branding (full disclosure, I am a scientist and my mum was a maths teacher). We were now approaching 7pm and the crowd was really building. There was a decent showing from Amy Klobuchar’s
supporters, but strangely there were few Biden or Bernie signs or T-shirt’s, at least where I was stationed.
So, Westerville is quite old and is great for being a very sidewalk intense place. However, the sidewalks can get quite narrow, especially in Uptown. This gave the police major headaches as they tried to coral everybody on the sidewalks. As we were penned in, a group of trump supporters tried to get through the crush to cross the street to join the rest of the Swamp dwellers. They weren’t having a great deal of success until somebody piped up (paraphrasing) “Come on, let the Nazis through”.
So that was about it, debate time was approaching and I was hungry so we retired to the bar (as pictured at the beginning) that was
hosting the Beto watch party. It wasn’t a political decision to go to the watch party hosted by Beto’s Ohio team, I’m still on the fence about who will be the best candidate, but they had the best judgment with regard choice of venue. And the take home message? I was already engaged about the upcoming elections and the need to make a change, and a major change at that. But tonight’s experience, viewing both sides of the argument, my goodness I am going to fight for all that is right. So goodnight. Tomorrow is going to be a beautiful, but just a slightly more dull day, in one of the best places to live.