Tonight I went to a town hall meeting with Senator Barack Obama in Lafayette, Indiana. Those of you who know me well are well aware of my feelings on the candidates, though I don’t consider Vdov the appropriate venue for that kind of analysis. As such I’d rather talk about the “Town Hall” experience rather than specifics about Obama and his platform. I had never been to one of these rallies before and it was a pretty interesting experience.

I had to show up and wait nearly 2 hours in line yesterday to get tickets for this town hall, and I showed up more than 2 hours early to get an even slightly reasonable seat. Now, it was a relatively small venue (a high school gym), and pretty much everyone had a decent seat, but I didn’t know that ahead of time. Getting into the venue was more or less going through an airport security checkpoint, only a bit worse. Not only was I “metal-detectored”, but I had a *very* complete wand scan as well. At about 5 o’clock, someone came out to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. This was interesting: I probably hadn’t said the Pledge of Allegiance since middle school. Then a pastor came out and gave a prayer. Another 20 minutes passed by before a major political figure in Lafayette/West Lafayette came out and gave a sort of pre-rally pump-up speech on issues important to her and those that would conceivably be addressed by an Obama administration. It was all pretty mundane up until the final speaker introducing Obama to the crowd. He was a regular guy from Lafayette who owned a small business, and who had obviously never given a major speech to that many people (over 3000) in his life. Most striking was his choice of attire. He was dressed in a ratty sweater and kakhis. I imagine this wasn’t intentional, though I have since decided that it was probably a play to the audience: before the big-wigs come out, get someone truly “of-the-people” to speak. Then he introduced Obama.

Obama looks exactly like you’d expect him to. The only other even pseudo-celebrity I have ever met/seen in person was Matt Fox (of Lost and other fame), and he looked completely different in person than he does on TV. Not Obama. I could have sworn I was just watching a youtube video or reading a Drudge Report headline when he took the stage. The only thing I’ll mention about the speech itself was that it was refreshingly original in structure. Yes, he talked about exactly what I thought he would talk about, tailoring it slightly to the Indiana audience, but the flow of the speech was new (at least as far as the videos I’ve seen of him previously … they are numerous). Standing ovations were abundant, as expected. However, it was only after the speech that things got really interesting.

He took questions. And the questions from the audience were interesting. The first question came from a middle-aged to slightly-over middle-aged woman who had obviously experienced some significant hardship in her life. There’s no question that she had real, serious problems that she was concerned about. But her 15 minutes of fame was ill-conceived. Instead of asking a well thought out question, she instead droned on about everything that was wrong with her life in great detail, to the point where it just sounded like she was whining. Then she says “what can you do for me *before* you get elected to fix all my problems?” Absurd. Here she actually has the opportunity to ask a real question and instead decides to kill her opportunity. I realized afterward that her question effectively boiled down to and would have been equivalent to her asking Obama to come over to her house and fix her broken down TV, an obviously ridiculous way to spend your time with a direct voice to the candidate. Obama did what he could: in this case all he could do is address some of the issues she brought up and those he had specific plans for, and try to come out of it looking good and with a cheer from the audience. He certainly succeeded.

The rest of the questions were fine. A cute little elementary school girl came out and asked a question her parents had obviously written down on a card for her about national and sub-national testing in elementary and secondary education, for which she received a standing ovation. It was a good question, and the audience responded in kind. Other questions were directed at specific issues, such as his thoughts on the election of supreme court justices (the most interesting of the questions and a policy of Obama’s I had not heard before), environmental policy, free trade agreements, etc. etc. etc. At the end Obama thanked everyone for their time and gave his farewell. After which he shook a lot of hands and exited the gym.

All in all it was a very interesting experience. Obama is a charismatic speaker, I think we can all agree on that. And regardless of your politics, I recommend trying to attend a “Town Hall”-like event in the future. It was really a lot of fun.