I’ve been to a lot of presidential campaign rallies over the past
two years. The best, without a doubt, occurred on a frigid night back
in January, when Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses. His victory rally
was in Des Moines, at a place called Hy-vee Hall, and the
event—no surprise—was loud, joyous, and shot through with a
deep sense of history. “Years from now,” Obama told the audience,
“you’ll be able to look back with pride and say this was the moment
when it all began… this was the moment, this was the place, when
America began to hope again.”
There were other exciting rallies, and many that were less exciting
than they were revealing. Take, for example, one held by Hillary
Clinton in Southern Oregon in early May, long after it was clear she
would lose the nomination. Her advance staff had to take seats away, so
as not to let the press see empty chairs, and the supporters lining up
to get inside were overwhelmingly white and often very misinformed.
Philip Frisby, an 84-year-old former cement truck driver from Grants
Pass, told me then that Obama believes the national anthem is a war
song. “His patriotism goes one way,” Frisby said. “His way.”
There were other telling rallies. In June of 2007, Dennis Kucinich
supporters gathered in New Hampshire in the back room of a restaurant
that, if it wasn’t a T.G.I. Friday’s, was a close approximation. The
candidate stood near a table of vegan finger-food and promised victory.
There was Ron Paul, in July of 2007, telling a large crowd near the
Google headquarters in California about the perils of empire (while on
the periphery, some of his more paranoid followers warned about the
impending union of the U.S. and Mexico). And there were rallies in
Washington State: Obama at KeyArena on the eve of our February
caucuses, Clinton in a muggy hangar at the Port of Seattle during the
same period, John Edwards at a Boeing union hall.
There’s an art to pulling off a good campaign rally, and it is the
Obama campaign that most effectively mastered it this cycle. Their
skill was on vivid display on October 19 in Tacoma, at what was
probably my last big political rally of this campaign season. The
setting: a small outdoor baseball stadium in a working-class section of
a working-class city. The speaker: Joe Biden. The positioning of the
stage in the late-afternoon light: perfect.
Biden gave a strong speech, in front of what was reportedly the
largest crowd he’s had this fall, but more important may have been what
the Obama campaign bluntly communicated before word one. Stevie
Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours” played over the
ballpark loudspeakers. A giant American flag hung from the top of the
right-field stands. And in every camera sight-line, there were placards
and banners bearing the simple, winning message that the campaign has
hammered home ever since Obama’s historic win in Iowa: Change.
