The Daily Background

You can find a full recap of Obama’s event in Lebanon, New Hampshire here. What follows are several of the sights and sounds from the event.

Observant readers will notice a certain well known television anchor directly behind Obama’s head. (Yes, it’s Brian Williams of NBC!) Here’s a blowup of another photo:

Obama took several minutes to shake hands outside the Opera House. Here’s a video I took of the tail end of Barack’s handshaking marathon:

It’s really remarkable, but the almost cliché analogy about him being greeted as a rockstar really is true. As soon as he said he’d try to shake as many hands as possible, there was this tremendous surge of people towards the police line, all reaching their arms out, trying to shake his hand, or, barring that, at least brush their fingertips against his coat.

Obama’s motorcade has swelled in recent days to 3 large Greyhound-style buses, an assortment several Several Secret service SUVs and vans, and a few State Trooper cruisers as well. Oh, yes, and the people you see in this photo constituted perhaps 1/6th of the line of people waiting to see the Illinois senator, which snaked around several blocks.

A man credentialed by the Obama campaign went up and down the blocks-long line with a pair of black labs that he said were therapy dogs for people to pet while they waited.

Also working the line was Jay Buckey, a Democrat and former astronaut running to replace Senator John Sununu (R-NH).

Photographers dotted the windows of the Opera House, which also doubles as a town hall.

And here’s the overflow crowd of several hundred that they were taking photos of (or at least part of it). About 800 people had already gotten into the Opera House/town hall by this point.

Obama arrives, surrounded by Secret Service agents.

Speech time.

Telling it like it is.

Meanwhile, top Obama aide and media consultant, David Axelrod (left) chats it up with the New York Times’ political reporter Adam Nagourney (right).

Later on, Axelrod could also be spotted schmoozing with ABC News’ Chief Washington Correspondent George Stephanopoulos (right) and other reporters.

Of course it wasn’t just national press. Here’s a photo of the local NBC-WWLP 22 News reporter Jaclyn Cashman does a “walk shot” from outside the event. You can watch a video of the report she filed (including her walk) here.

Do they have a crush on Obama? All signs point to… Yes.

Hope, Action, Change. Pretty good slogan. An aside: right after I snapped this photo, two press photographers stepped up beside me to get it as well.

Once in a while in a small town, the mail will get delayed because of political events. Not because of traffic (heck, the guy’s on foot anyway), because the mailman is interested in the event going on.

For a candidate who only got 18% of the senior vote in Iowa, and for a state that has a lower than average population of senior citizens, it was perhaps surprising that so many older folks were there. Then again, it probably didn’t hurt that there was a senior citizen’s home nearby…

Of course, this isn’t to say that there weren’t plenty of young folks too.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog