The Daily Background

I just got back from the Obama event at Dartmouth College in Hanover New Hampshire. It’s about 78 degrees outside and sunny today, so the crowd was pretty hot. There seemed to be several thousand people there, and Hanover is a pretty small town. I had heard beforehand that there might be as many as 5,000 people expected to attend, although I don’t know if that’s right or not. The Obama campaign is just saying the rather vague “thousands” at the moment.

I got there at about one o’clock and joined one of the gigantic lines which snaked around corners and down sidewalks. Security seemed to be kind of tight, and there were a couple of cops with dogs sniffing around (which is something you never see in this town). The main topic of conversation in line seemed to be how big the line itself was. They started letting people in at about 1:30 or so, at which point we could see that the crowd really was pretty huge- I saw a couple of people I knew, including Dylan of Minipundit.

Then after some live music that people got pretty tired of, Congressman Paul Hodes (the newly elected Democrat from the NH-02 district, whom I voted for last November, pictured right) took the stage and very enthusiastically introduced Obama. Volunteers had passed rally signs back through the crowd, and people seemed pretty anxious to get one and wave it when Obama took the stage.

Obama gave the latest version of his stump speech, which includes the usual jokes about where he got his name (father from Kenya, mother from Kansas), and why he went into politics. He focused more heavily on the Civil Rights Movement than I’d heard before, and talked about Bloody Sunday and his commemoration of the event in Selma, Alabama earlier this year.

Since it’s Memorial Day, he naturally talked about honoring veterans, and not letting them become homeless (although he did not mention the statistic, approximately one third of homeless people in the US are veterans). Obama also talked about universal health care, which got big applause and of course ending the war in Iraq. When the current president steps down, he said, the whole world would breath a sigh of relief (another big applause line that got people waving their rally signs).

He also talked about how the current Administration has told people they were on their own, and how this was such a dramatic contrast to the democratic ideal of everyone being “in it together.”

The crowd was very diverse, which is saying something both for New Hampshire, and for Hanover as well. There were all different types of people there, of all different races and ages, and everyone was pretty excited. I’ve been paying some attention to the size of the crowds that candidates have attracted in various places around the country (Obama consistently draws the largest crowds by far), and this was probably one of the larger crowds that any candidate has brought in New Hampshire so far in this cycle, if not the largest.

Update: Obama’s people are now saying there were 5,000 to 6,000 people present. Here’s some more (better) photos from the Obama team…

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