Adventures in Democracy

Yesterday we spent six hours waiting for Obama. We started off sitting on the curb next to a woman with curiously stubby arms and eyelinered eyes. She was friendly and polite, but told the volunteers who came around every four minutes with registration slips that she couldn't vote because she was on parole – I had to stop myself from asking what she was in for, or out for, or disenfranchised for. She was accompanied by her son, a skinny teenager with a moptop who was constantly a mixture of pensive and searching for food.“I got strawberries, grapes, two donuts, some trail mix, and a sandwich,” he boasted. “Iowans are great.”

“We got here at 9:45,” his mom said. “I thought it started at 10. Turns out we’re early.”

Jorge had also been there since 10. When I arrived, he had a neat little sit-upon going, a tidy area of curb, delineated by his plastic baggie full of fruits, the novel he’d been reading, the Naked juice he would later chug in a single gulp when the line actually started to move. He seemed much better prepared than the woman and her son, who’d shown up with nothing but the clothes on their backs and an umbrella, which, as Jorge told them, wasn’t allowed inside the grassy area where Obama would be speaking…

“Oh,” the woman said. “Well, this is a three-dollar umbrella! I’m not going to just throw it away!”

“I can take it back to my apartment!” Jorge said. “It’s right here.” So she handed it over happily and Jorge ran it back to his house, then returned to sit in his area and munch strawberries and collect stickers from the constant stream of volunteers. (None of us considered the fact that we would inevitably be separated in the crowd, and that nobody had exchanged phone numbers - up in Jorge’s apartment that three-dollar umbrella will likely sit until the end of time, or until someone needs it, anyway.)

Once we were eventually let inside the barriers, I was surprised by the fact that, in twenty-first century America, people were this willing to sit in line, then literally stand on a grassy knoll for five hours. Mal and her girlfriend wound up being shoved to the tightest-packed corner of the area in which Obama would be speaking. The arrangement wasn't quite fair. They’d been there similarly early, and had also been one of the first groups let into the area by security, only to be told, when they clustered around the stage, that “You’ve got to MOVE TO THE CORNER." This from someone’s dad in a fishing hat, a glassy look on his mustached face. “You gotta MOVE. People are going to come in here and we’ve gotta FILL UP THE SPACE.”

People stared at him, their faces a strange combination of liberal Democrat and stubborn as hell.

“You gotta MOVE,” he said again, making bulldozerish movements with his palms at us, as if he could use the Force to shift us from our hard-won positions to much, much crappier spots. “You can move now, or security’s gonna come in and move you later, but either way you gotta MOVE.”

Mal and her girlfriend, being polite, did move, and ended up having zero room in that corner. They literally stood, one behind the other, for four hours – there was no sitting or squatting for them. We were more fortunate – we had the good luck to be standing directly behind a tough-looking little woman who looked back at us, her green eyes enraged like a horse being mounted, and said, “No WAY. I been in line since 8:30. If security wants to come in and move me, sure, but I am not taking this from some volunteer.”

“Yeah, it’s totally unfair!” I said righteously, and so Jorge and I disregarded the imperious dad’s warnings and stayed put, and security did not show up to herd us like cattle to a shittier spot. For some reason, German phrases like “So eine Frechheit” and “total unverschaemt” and “Es macht doch gar keinen Sinn” kept creeping into my head – I put it down to the fact that Germans wouldn’t have moved either, but as it turns out it was a simple case of overhearing rather than thinking: we’d somehow collided with the two German tourists who’d wound up at this rally, two blonde young men who stood, out of their element, in rain slickers. In conversation over the next four hours, I put much energy in trying not to mention “You know, when I lived in Germany” or “Well, in German…”, so I wouldn’t have to make German small talk while stuck in a crowd all afternoon. 

In this and in many ways, it was like being on a plane, except worse. Going to the bathroom was an awkward affair, full of “Oh god excuse me” and “Could I please get by? We’re coming back…”, and the bathroom itself, when encountered, was a sticky Porta Potti with nowhere to put your purse and strange crap on the seat. We were dehydrated, but luckily there was Liz, a second-year Workshop student, who moved in the front of the crowd behind the barricade like a patient stewardess, passing out topless bottles to the masses. We keened, “Liz!!!” and she sent some our way, though drinking the stuff was torture because you knew it’d just go directly to your bladder.

Although we stood in denial for a good hour at the beginning of it, eventually our legs gave out, it began to rain, and the three of us sat under jackets, bemoaning our fate. God bless Nana, who’d somehow made her way into the stadium and as the crowd began to form had just casually walked up to us, like, “Oh hey guys! Cool to see you here!”, no planning, nothing. Moreover, she had brought in not just a giant purse – which we’d been told we weren’t allowed  – but a bag with food, little gingersnaps, and an umbrella, and reading materials. I felt like she was my mother. “Mom, can I read your Hemingway? Can I have a cookie?” God bless her.

Finally, at around 4, things started to happen. It got a lot lighter – the clouds hadn't rolled away, but spotlights had rolled in, big white beams of light that illuminated the crowd. Rising from our seated, cookie-induced stupor, we noticed that the media was lined up behind us on a stage, looking a familiar combination of bored and excited. People began to point to rooftops – look, a sniper! Look, a lady sniper! There they'd appeared, these black foreign figures with binoculars and no fear of falling. Something was happening. 

And then, and then, a man and a woman in suits came on and began uncovering The Podium. It was here that I realized how close I actually would be to The President, and I shrieked a little bit when they painstakingly, with much tape, put up a blue “Forward” sign on the front of the Podium. One man came out and set a cup of water on a shelf beneath; another acolyte set a binder of speech upon it.

After that, things happened in a blur. People took the Podium: a reverend, a large black man with a booming voice, delivered the opening address – a boy choir (man choir, okay) sang the national anthem  – a blonde corn-fed Iowa student spoke, since apparently she was in charge of this sort of thing - 

And then all of a sudden there was Joe Biden, who I’d never previously been excited about, but who, in person, was quite sandy-haired and handsome. He spoke - we freaked out - and then he waved a hand towards the left and who should come out but Obama. 

Seeing him in person was swoon-inducing. I jumped up and down shamelessly, in either a parody or real echo of a teenage girl meeting the Beatles, and then noticed that around me people were doing the exact same thing. It was unreal: for so long his features had been mere images to me, but now they were three-dimensional. 

From thirty feet away, though, I could feel the exhaustion radiating from him. His voice was gravelly and he didn’t speak about Hope anymore, or Change, but rather tax cuts for the middle class, no dependence on foreign oil, hooray. I'd gone from bored to jubilant to a bit sad; it was as if four years in the world’s most interesting job had made him, by turn, much more boring. 

But then:

“Four more years! Four more years!” started in one corner and spread across the crowd into a pumping chant that rang through the city. Slowly, too, you could see real genuine happy start to bloom on Obama’s face. instead of just exhaustion – as the crowd pumped its fists, he smiled out at us.

“You, in Iowa City, you did it,” he said. “I wasn’t the change – you did it.” It seemed true, at that moment – as if we’d sapped him of his life-force and drawn it into ourselves, and now here we were, a campus full of young people, ready to do something anything to hope. Because we were seeing the president, in person, and so we knew that anything was possible – and so we chanted, and we forgave him the boringness and the negativity of his speech, because he was our Obama and we wanted him to be happy, goddamnit. 

At the end, Michelle Obama walked out for just a second, waved to us, and he put his hand on her back – and strangely, just that action made me hope so much more than anything he’d said. It was like after all this would be over it would be just them again, and it would be okay, whether it was four more years or none at all.