Barack!

Yes, tonight I went to the Obama speech in downtown S. Paul. It was pretty wild. We parked at 6:55, and encountered a line that was, oh, ten blocks from the Xcel Energy Center. We tried to find the end of the line, which took us another six blocks. Another four blocks formed after us. It was incredible. Literally tens of thousands of people all waiting in line. (Quick note: I just read these lines on MPR's website "You're noting the diversity of the crowd, right? As it wound down Cedar, there were Somali women on cellphones walking with men in yarmulkes." That was us! The only Frum Jews in a crowd of 40,000! Anyway, back to the story). We took a bunch of pictures, which will be going up tomorrow, and generally had a really great time in our two hours of standing on line. It was pretty funny, because all the people there were of course huge Obama supporters, and then there was us, four schmendricks who wouldn't vote for a Democrat for anything less than thirty-thousand in cash. Not that we broadcast our political views of course. After winding our way to, oh, five blocks from the arena, the cops came and told us that there was no more room. Officially Barack was only going to speak at 9:30, and like I told several people, now that he had said that his name was kind of Jewish it meant that he was on Jewish time and he'd speak at 11:00, earliest. It was only 9:10, so instead of giving up right then and there, like most people did, we ran the five blocks to the entrance, and encountered another line which was slowly snaking in. We hopped in, and it was there that the whole point of the evening was manifest. I somehow got into a conversation with a teenage kid, and asked him if he was Jewish. Of course he was. I happened to have my Tefillin with me, and asked if he'd like to put them on? Of course he did. So we made a Bar Mitzvah, right there in front of the Xcel Energy Center, with a large crowd looking on, and it was really wild. As I wrote, there'll be pictures up tomorrow. Who would've thought I'd get a Karkafta in the middle of a Barack Obama rally?
Anyway, we heard Barack begin to speak just as we made it past the Secret Service (they took away my laser pointer :(, but don't worry, I'll get over it) and up the escalator to the nosebleeds. At first we found seating in the stairs of the aisle, but then we were told to move for safety reasons and spent the rest of the speech standing, trying to see.
The man is a great speaker, but you already knew that. As pointed out in some article I read earlier this week, he has an incredible talent for cursing out McCain like there's no tomorrow and then accusing McCain of cursing him out, and this all being very unfair or something. And the crowd loved it. I couldn't hear several lines in the speech because the cheering was so loud. I myself didn't even clap my hands once, because why would I want to do that?
After it was all over we ran downstairs, and I came this ( - ) close to shaking his hand. Dang. Michelle came over, but I quickly withdrew my hand, because after all, though they may be pathetically low, I do have standards. We finally left at 10:30, after waiting for twenty minutes outside the X for him to come out.

So why did I go? It was really cool, a chance to see the next President, and oh yeah, that Karkafta. My first one too.