Posted by Jed Lewison on Sat May 10, 2008 at 8:33 PM Pacific
Bend, Oregon sees its first presidential candidate in 40 years
Barack visits Bend, Oregon's PV Power, a green collar employer focused on solar power
From the Seattle PI political blog:
P-I columnist Joel Connelly was in Oregon Saturday following Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as they continue campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Connelly reports that Obama became the first major presidential candidate in 40 years to visit eastern Oregon when he stumped in Bend Saturday afternoon (some may debate whether Bend is in eastern Oregon, but it is east of the Cascade Mountains). A crowd of about 2,000 jammed the gym at Summit High School to hear Obama, who is inching closer to locking up his party's nomination.
Obama was introduced by Bend resident Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medger Evers and the first woman to lead the NAACP.
Connelly says the crowd was enthusiastic but "there were a fair number of undecided" voters.
Connelly, by the way, is a great columnist -- his latest ("Obama shows he can go the distance on long, dirty trail") is a good read.
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Update: Just as I posted this blog entry, HMJ from Bend, OR wrote in with a wonderful writeup of Barack Obama's town hall in Bend. I've posted it along with a picture she was able to take.
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Obama came to our town of 80,000 today and spoke to a packed house of 2,000 in the gym of one of our high schools. Our town is mostly white, the greatest minority is Hispanics; we have relatively few blacks or Asians. Since you're in Nevada, you probably know Bend is right about in the middle of the state geographically. We have everything in our town from homeless working folks to weathy retired people (most moved up from CA). We've had lots of layoffs from good-paying jobs. At the town hall today were babies thru senior citizens. The overall mood was very pro-Obama and I feel good about that. Lots of applause in many places.
Since I had knee surgery recently and am still not good on stairs (and we were far enough back in line that bleachers were all the seating that was left), my friend and I got to sit in the ADA area on one side of the podium... in the second row. If you see the AP photo of Koko the guide dog, we were in the row behind Koko's blind master and a few seats down. So we had a good view, to say the least, only about 20 feet from the podium!
The speech was Obama's basic stump speech, which is very good. He spent the opening standing at the podium so that he could read the list of people to thank. Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D) came with him - he's not our rep, we have Walden (R), ugh, as our district is more Republican than Democratic. During the speech, Obama paced back and forth and around the podium as there were people surrounding him on all sides.
After the speech, Obama said he could take a few questions, but had only 25 minutes because he needed to get home for Mother's Day to spend the day with the women in his life. :-) As usual, the questions asked by ordinary citizens far surpassed any that the so-called professional media has asked at debates. One man asked about nuclear power and Obama used that for a general discussion on energy. He quieted my fears on nuclear (as I'd heard he was pro-nuclear) by qualifying it as only part of the energy equation and only if we can safely store the waste and the projects are not boondoggles. A young woman asked about student loans, as she has some from her undergrad days and is about to embark into grad school. Again, great answers from Obama. There was one question about "new math", Hillary's new math about Florida and Obama spoke about FL and MI. My mind kind of wandered at this point, but he did say he took his name off the ballot in MI so it wasn't exactly a fair election. There were a couple more questions that I've forgotten, and the last was about outsourcing jobs, from a guy who looked your typical blue collar, could have been a lumberjack if we had any of those jobs left. Not that I want all of our forests cut down!
I just found out from the friend that went with me that the local TV station broadcast it live, which I didn't know or I would have recorded it. The gym got quite warm with all the bodies, and there wasn't any (55 degree) fresh air coming in - no windows, and the doors were kept closed for security reasons. I suppose that's why Obama had his sleeves rolled up and no tie or jacket. Speaking of security, it was very tight. No large bags, no water bottles, no signs allowed. They checked everything and we went thru metal detectors and I got wanded (my keys and pants zipper set it off, but not the titanium in my knee).
As Obama came out, he shook hands with people on the way, then stopped and went to the podium; at the end, he picked up where he left off and came by us so we got to shake his hand. We got a little crushed by people behind us moving up (I had anticipated this and picked up my fanny pack containing my wallet and cell phone off the floor!) but my friend and I told folks that they should be careful as this was the disabled section so they backed off a little. An elderly man behind us was there with his family, including his 7-week-old great granddaughter and the baby got handed to Obama and had their photo taken. It was a pretty cool gathering.
I'm attaching two of the photos I took.
I'm sure hoping that Oregon will put Barack Obama over the top as you've suggested. I never ever thought our state would matter - we don't usually - and this attention is fun.
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Thanks for the report, HMJ!