At the Target Center. Having trouble with the wireless.
They started letting folks in shortly after 1:40 I think there are already more people here than there are for your average Timberwolves game.
Obama is going on at 4. I’m going to power down for a bit to save on battery, but I shall return. Firemarshalls just had them open the floor more because of hte crowd.
UPDATE: Sean phones in to say that the Target Center is almost full and there is still some time before Obama takes the stage. A senior Obama official told Sean that there is 20,000 people in the Target Center right now. Only three sections have any seats remaining.
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As of 3 pm there are still people lined up to get into the building all the way past Floyd B. Olson Memerial Highway (MN 55). If they were still here with us, Floyd, Nellie Stone Johmson, and all the other northside progressives would be proud of us today!
Other blogs are reporting that Target center is 1/3 full…I’m on the radio right now, is the Target center full?
I’m in here and it’s packed like sardines. There are four sections behind the stage where seats are available.
My daughter and wife told me the line went on for blocks. It took them over two hours to get into the building. It’s packed now.
Mike, for once you need to stop listening to your self. There may be a few nose bleeder seats that are behind the stage, and a handfull of seats behind the media risers that are not taken. But that is more than made up for with the shoulder to shoulder jam pack folks on the floor. Whatever the capacity is for the Target Center is, add a couple thousand for the people on the floor. This place it tightly filled.
I just took pictures around the whole arena. The flash doesn’t work too well at this distance, but it clearly shows this place is brim full up into the 2nd deck.
If your party had half is much hope, and even a little bit of positivity they wouldn’t be so fractured and frustrated right now. Someday you’ll start listening to the truth, instead of trying to make up your own!
Flash http://centrisity.com
Ambinder had an incorrect attendance number that has since been fixed.
It was packed. The nose bleed areas wheren’t all full, but I was in the upper decks and it was shoulder to shoulder.
I got there by One and finally got into my seat by 3.
Sean,
You should stop comparing Barack to the Timberwolves ASAP. I’m pretty sure he could take them on in basketball and beat the team. Love ‘em, but the two organizations are about as far apart at this point as Calista Flockhart and Subway Jared’s old self.
It was packed and a kos diary has some photos of the lines outside: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/2/1942/46050/1001/448523
i was there. barack obama was really, really great. the place was quite full, and unlike most political events for either party, the crowd looked like america.
and being a great speaker is not the only part of the job, but it is an incredibly important part of the job of being president. our most effective presidents - clinton, reagan, roosevelt, lincoln (not saying they are in the same league) - were effective partly because they could lift spirits and cause people to believe in them and in themselves. and it sure helped them getting elected in the first place.
Check out Star Tribune photos for the evidence on the crowd lined up outside to get in, and the crowd inside.
After hearing Senator Obama was expected to arrive at 4PM, I went to the adjacent restaurant where I had a cup of soup and tipped my waiter for a total of $4.
I then entered the arena and found a seat high up in section 228, behind the stage. The view was for the birds, and the acoustics up in the rafters make
for difficult comprehension of speeches.
But I saved myself the 2 hours standing in line, and also avoided the vendors that priced their bottles of water and cans of pop at $4.
Did Obama say anything that we haven’t already heard him say in many televised appearances that can be accessed via CSPAN and the networks? He mentioned when he looked in his Senate desk and saw the carved names that revealed the ‘previous occupants,’ he found the name of Paul Wellstone. I think this might have been something he saved for the Minnesota audience. Guess the short guys and the tall guys all get the same desks …
Comparing this event experience to John Edwards at the Carpenters Union, I felt more excitement at the smaller venue with the closer proximity to the candidate. The intimacy of the Union Hall and the better acoustics made for a better event. Parking at and near the union hall was free, but it was a darn cold walk on the coldest night of the whole year.
Photos look awesome and I am glad for the staff and those who stood in line for many hours - it turned out great.
I also think it is awesome that 20,000 people turned out for a democrat - doesn’t really matter who that democrat is.
The republicans in Minnesota must be a quiverin’ tonight - yeah!!
I heard he spoke for almost an hour - I just couldn’t imagine listening to any stump speech for an hour - that seems a bit much.
But, i agree with Virtually Speaking - that smaller venues add something better to seeing a candidate.
The Wellstone thing was definitely for the Minnesota crowd - as, just back in June in an article for The Nation, he referred to Wellstone as a “gadfly”
‘Obama’s deference to these boundaries was hammered home to me when our discussion touched on the late Senator Paul Wellstone. Obama said the progressive champion was “magnificent.” He also gently but dismissively labeled Wellstone as merely a “gadfly,” in a tone laced with contempt for the senator who, for instance, almost single-handedly prevented passage of the bankruptcy bill for years over the objections of both parties. This clarified Obama’s support for the Hamilton Project, an organization formed by Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and other Wall Street Democrats to fight back against growing populist outrage within the party.’
you can read the whole article here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060626/sirota
I’m glad Obama filled the Target Center, but I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. Bush filled the Target Center and the Xcel both. What’s probably a bigger deal is that Hillary doesn’t think she can get more than a few thousand and has picked a smaller venue.
Right….on SuperBowl Sunday during the SuperBowl with less than 24 hours notice before the event. I don’t think it’s bad, frankly. I wouldn’t think it would be bad for any candidate. I think the saddest was Romney this evening….first event, 15 people, second event 100 people and the “large” event was 500.
Good for Obama. Too bad the Clinton smear machine is
going to defeat him.
My wife and I were talking about the Obama cabinet before the event. Edwards for AG, Richardson of Sec. of State, Biden for Sec. of Defense. Hillary will take over the as Majority leader of the Senate.
Max — He is a baller. Sean
You just knew there was going to be sour grapes crying by the righties that this is an instant success!
Brodkorb probably needs to watch the news results.
Reporting 20,000 attendance & 10,000 overflow.
Now that I have that unpleasantness out of the way:
GREAT!
It would be even better if there was coverage, for those of us who could not attend, but really wanted to.
Ewards as AG would be a Bobby Kennedy moment.
Edwards on the Supreme Court wouldn’t be bad either.
Mockingbird — I’m writing it up right now and will be posting it soon. Sean
Mockingbird,
Why on earth would you compare John Edwards to Bobby Kennedy? Bobby Kennedy was a great crime fighter, after trying to bring down the mob. He believed in Civil Rights, although his record is mixed considering he ordered the FBI to wiretap Martin Luther King, Jr. after believing King had ties to communists.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200207/garrow
John Edwards is a slick, rich trial lawyer. He has no accomplishments in the U.S. Senate to further the anti-poverty “crusade” he talks about. If John Edwards wanted to do something about poverty, he could divest half of his holdings and give them to the poor. He would be living in a 7,000 square foot home instead of a 14,000 square foot home and still have enough money he would never have to work again for the rest of his life.
In no way is Edwards qualified for the Supreme Court. He has no experience in the federal court system (as an attorney or a judge). He has no record as a legal scholar either.
For all of you Edwards fans, here is a Bloomberg article dated October 11, 2004 (when Edwards was running with John Kerry) and titled, “Edwards Says He Still Would Have Voted to Authorize War in Iraq.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=apXyrHjc4RSs&refer=us
Oct. 11 (Bloomberg) — Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards said last week’s Central Intelligence Agency report confirming the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq hasn’t convinced him it was a mistake to authorize President George W. Bush to take military action.
“The vote on the resolution was the right vote, even in hindsight,” Edwards, a first-term U.S. senator from North Carolina, said in an interview aboard his campaign plane on Oct. 8. “It was the right vote to give the president the authority to confront Saddam Hussein,” he said. “That’s what would have given the president the power that would have allowed the weapons inspectors back into Iraq.”
The comments reflect efforts by Edwards and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, the four-term senator from Massachusetts, to deflect criticism by Bush and win support among a growing number of voters critical of the war. Edwards and Kerry say the U.S. Senate vote Oct. 11, 2002 was intended to give the president more leverage against Saddam Hussein and wasn’t an endorsement for invading the country.
A Gallup Organization poll of 1,016 Americans taken Oct. 1-3 showed 48 percent said the war was a mistake, a 10 percentage- point increase from a similar poll conducted by Gallup following the Republican National Convention early last month. Fifty-one percent said the war wasn’t a mistake, down 6 percentage points from the earlier poll.
Kerry and Edwards may say their vote to authorize force wasn’t a vote for immediate war, “but from the point of view of a citizen,” their argument is “fairly opaque,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist and Senate expert at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “The distinction I think is lost on most people,” he said.
CIA Report
Last week’s CIA report provided Edwards and Kerry with fresh ammunition for their attacks on Bush’s handling of the war. Charles Duelfer, who was the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, told Congress that Iraq didn’t possess stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that its program to develop nuclear arms was in decay by March 2003, when the U.S. invaded.
Also last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that he hadn’t seen “any strong, hard evidence” that connected Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
Mark J. Rozell, director of the Public Policy Program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said Kerry and Edwards hoped their votes would be viewed as supporting “a president’s authority to make the decision to protect the country from potential harm.”
`Flawed’ Information
The senators, he said, “acted based on the information that they had at the time, which in retrospect was deeply flawed.” Their positions then and now, while not inconsistent, “have left themselves open to Republican charges of flip-flopping,” he said.
Bush made that point at a speech in Wausau, Wisconsin last week. Kerry is “claiming I misled America about weapons, when he himself cited the very same intelligence about Saddam’s weapons programs as the reason he voted to go to war,” Bush said.
During the Oct. 8 presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, the president explained his decision to invade by saying he “saw a unique threat in Saddam Hussein, as did my opponent, because we thought he had weapons of mass destruction.”
Stephen Schneck, head of Catholic University’s politics department in Washington, said that Bush put Kerry and Edwards on the defensive about their votes to authorize an attack.
`Justify’ the Vote
“You’d think that underneath it all Kerry and Edwards believe their vote to authorize war was a mistaken one,” Schneck said. “But, they cannot say so; they’d get crushed for flip- flopping and for undercutting our troops in the field. So, instead, they must reaffirm their Iraq war vote while, in the face of the deteriorating support for the war from voters, coming up with more prudent language to justify it.”
Edwards, in the interview, repeated the argument that Bush was too hasty in starting the war against Iraq, when he should have been focusing more on the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America. “Knowing everything that we know today, we think the war, the invasion of Iraq, was a diversion of the war on terror that took our eye off the ball, which was Osama bin Laden,” Edwards said.
In addition to Kerry and Edwards, 27 other Senate Democrats and all but one Republican voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing Bush to use the U.S. armed services “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate” to defend the U.S. “against the continuing threat posed by Iraq” and to enforce all relevant UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq.
Congressional Authority
Although the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, over the last half-century lawmakers have instead voted to give presidents the authority to determine when force should be used. In 1950, President Harry Truman led the nation into the Korean War without a declaration of war, labeling the conflict a “police action.” In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson used a congressional resolution rather than a declaration of war as the authority for U.S. action in Vietnam.
Rather than declare war, members of Congress now “pass the ball to the president and say, `OK, you have the power to do it if you want to exercise it,”’ said Rutgers’ Baker.
The Iraq resolution, which also passed the U.S. House of Representatives, specifically declared that Congress was granting the authorization required by the 1973 War Powers Act, a check on executive power that requires the president to consult with Congress before the start of any fighting.
During the 2002 debate on the Iraq resolution, Edwards said that “almost no one disagrees with these basic facts: that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a menace, that he has weapons of mass destruction and that he is doing everything in his power to get nuclear weapons, that he has supported terrorists, that he is a grave threat to the region, to vital allies like Israel, and to the United States, and that he is thwarting the will of the international community and undermining the United Nations’ credibility.”
Non-Combat Solution
At the same time, he said he hoped the Senate resolution would increase the chances for a non-combat solution. “Bipartisan congressional action on a strong, unambiguous resolution, like the one before us now, will strengthen America’s hand as we seek support from the Security Council and seek to enlist the cooperation of our allies,” Edwards said at the time. Edwards, in the interview last week, said the U.S. could persuade other nations to send troops to Iraq in part by making reconstruction contracts more widely available to their companies.
“Part of the incentive of getting other countries involved is to open up the reconstruction process,” he said.
He also said that NATO should be providing more troops in Afghanistan. “What we have to do is secure the parts of the country that are now in control of warlords and drug lords,” he said. “We also have to deal with the growing drug trade in Afghanistan, which has blossomed again.”
Newcomer
Edwards, 51, is a relative newcomer to foreign-affairs issues compared with Bush, Kerry and Vice President Dick Cheney, a former secretary of defense. Edwards spent 20 years as a trial lawyer before winning election to the Senate in 1998. A mill worker’s son, Edwards amassed a fortune of between $19 million and $70 million working as a personal injury attorney, according to financial disclosure documents filed with the Senate. Earlier this year, he campaigned against Kerry and others for the Democratic nomination for president, winning the South Carolina primary and placing second in most of the early primaries before dropping out on March 3.
On the campaign trail, Bush, 58, attacks Kerry, 60, for putting Edwards on the ticket. “You can’t be pro-patient, pro- doctor and pro-trial lawyer at the same time,” the president said at a Waterloo, Iowa, rally over the weekend. “You have to choose. My opponent made his choice, and he put a trial lawyer on the ticket. I made my choice. I am for medical liability reform now.”
Legal Limits
At the vice presidential debate on Oct. 5, Edwards defended his legal activities, saying: “I’m proud of the work I did on behalf of kids and families against big insurance companies, big drug companies, and big HMOs.” At the same time, he says that he and Kerry would put more restrictions on malpractice lawyers in order to reduce the number of cases.
Since Kerry picked him to be his vice presidential candidate on July 6, Edwards has kept a relatively low profile, campaigning in mostly rural areas in states such as Iowa, Florida and North Carolina that the two campaigns say are up for grabs. That may change after the vice presidential debate, where post-debate polling showed that Edwards held his own against Cheney, 63.
Based on Edwards’ performance in that debate, “one would expect that would raise his profile for the rest of the campaign and make him a greater asset,” said Joel Goldstein, a Saint Louis University law professor who wrote “The Modern American Vice Presidency: The Transformation of a Political Institution.”
“Up until now, particularly recent weeks, he has been critical of the administration for Iraq and the economy, but he hasn’t been getting much attention,” Goldstein said. “The focus will make him into a more prominent national figure.”
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Office_of_Special_Plans
The OSP filtered and manipulated intelligence information presented to Congress prior to the vote. This was clearly illegal and undoubtably a impeachable offense.
This is a general note to everyone. Can we please stop posting whole articles to the comments? It just takes up way too much vertical space. Please link to the article and post a few paragraphs that you think are pertinent.
CHRIS -
If you are the poster I believe you are,
again, you are a runaway train!!!
Attacking BOTH Bobby Kennedy & Edwards, shame on you!
You must grasp the qualifications of the Supreme Court first.
Where are there qualifications about federal experience? Where does it even say you had to be a judge first?
Then, you should apply your “slick” definition for the guys that Bush appointed! If that’s a negative comment.
After all, THEY were the ones playing games to get past the nomination process! CON jobs on the bench. So I would be careful about “slick” — Dealing with several different interpretations of that word you chose to use - IF you need a lawyer, I am heartened to hear you would want a DENSE & UN-“slick” one!
That’s the usual disconnect one gets on the politically radical right. Did Scooter Libby pick a lawyer who was not “slick?”
Chris - You have a point about Bobby Kennedy not having been strong enough to stop messing with Martin Luther King. Perhaps.
Maybe you should tell us the name of your candidate of choice.
And who you think is a good judge on the bench.
What do you KNOW the qualifications to be? BY STATUTE.
Chris,
Great points about slick liberal elite trial lawyer John Edwards.! I agree 100%.
You won’t catch any wealthy, successful, multimillionaire Republican Presidential candidate saying they want to do anything to help anyone who is poor.
If they did, they would have to divest half of their holdings and give them to the poor. How stupid do you Dummocrats think they are?
Great Job, Chris!
Check out this post that has a map of the line to the Target Center. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/3/112250/8699/683/448841
Mockingbird,
President Bush’s picks for the Supreme Court John Roberts and Samuel Alito both had experience as federal appellate court judges prior to being appointed to the Supreme Court. Both had extensive federal appellate practice prior to being appointed to their respective courts of appeals. Both also had experience as either assistant White House Counsel or assistant attorney general. Alito also had experience teaching law school. Both were found to be highly qualified by the American Bar Association.
John Edwards only had experience as a trial attorney in the state courts of Tennessee and, notably, North Carolina. He has no federal experience whatsoever, let alone federal appellate experience. There is quite a leap between the state courts system and the U.S. Supreme Court.
My ideal candidate would be someone like Theodore Olson, who was a Solicitor General (the attorney who represents the United States in all cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court) and an assistant U.S. attorney general.