Notes From a Rally

From Brazos to Guadalupe, from the Capitol gates to the GoVision screen at the corner of 10th. The cue for the cue for the cue stretched around the State Highway Building and looped back around to Congress. The crowd for the Barack Obama rally last night had started forming early afternoon.

Starbucks must have thought that Christmas had come early, while the diners at Restaurant Jezebel and Cibo tried hard to concentrate in their candlelit meals. Tax assessor candidate Glen Maxey worked the crowd hard as Black Joe Lewis kept the audience pumped ("I've handed out 4,000 of these," said Maxey, flicking through a stack of his fliers, "and a thousand Obama stickers.") There were volunteer sign-up sheets and campaign burnt-orange "Yes We Can" shirts, anti-Chinese Olympics protesters and bootleg button vendors.

Flash-forward an hour. Now wavering and even solid Clinton supporters were saying to strangers, yup, they were sold, they were behind Obama. They were inspired, the message of change and of being better, of re-aligning social justice, of shifting tax breaks from the super-corporations and back to investors in American infrastructure, of overturning the Bush tax cuts and subsidizing health care, of negotiating from a position of strength rather than extorting treaties.

It had worked. The Obama talk of a paradigm shift had worked, and the Democratic party may be starting to think about all those motivated attendees, all those new block walkers, all those new precinct captains that can trickle down into November.

It seems a little too much of a coincidence that it's almost a year to the day since Obama's record-setting rally on auditorium shores. Whether he got the same 20,000 numbers that he reached last time has yet to be estimated, but that was a sunny February afternoon: this was a Friday night with a chill in the air. From a distance, it may have seemed that the crowd was subdued. There weren't that many "Oh-Bah-Mah!" chants mid-speech, and few bursts of spontaneous applause. Mostly, the crowd was silent. That's because they were doing this little thing called actually listening.

And Obama talked. He talked almost exactly an hour. He talked about claims of his relative political inexperience by talking about his practical experience. He talked about helping rebuilding Chicago as an organizer working with unions and churches. He talked about running because of, as MLK put it, "the fiery urgency of now."

He bantered with the crowd: "Whatever happens, you all know the name George W. Bush will not be on the ballot," (hurrah, the crowd replied.) He messed with them: "He's coming back to Texas," (Boo! No! the crowd cried back.) He got the better of them: "The name of my cousin Dick Cheney will not be on the ballot," (mild uproar ensued.) "When they do these genealogical searches, you hope you'll be related to someone cool like George Lopez. Dick Cheney? That's a let-down."

They were jokes, but the jokes were important. They were the rests in the speech, the energy-builders for the policy statements, which came in numbers. And that's why, in some ways, Obama is not a change candidate, but a classical candidate, in the same way that classicism is a part of the architectural style of state buildings across the continent. He harkens back to a key part of the American political tradition. Rhetoricians built American politics. The ability to hold a crowd and a coherent argument for an hour was proof of leadership and content and intellect. A soundbite approach to political debate would have made Calvin Coolidge a great communicator.