I saw Obama!

Since some of you were asking me about it: yes, I did get to see President Obama Thursday night inside Sony Studio’s cavernous stage 30 in Culver City.

So what was it like to see the man who won 48% of Santa Clarita’s vote? Well keep in mind it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a President in person (Reagan skipped out on my uncle’s 1983 graduation at the Air Force Academy; that was the last time I’d come close to the Chief Executive) . So, that said, it was more and less than what I thought it would be.

Things I liked: Jaime Fox, the emcee for the event, was funny, charismatic and entertaining. You can definitely see why he’s an A lister. Seeing the President’s security detail up close and in person, walking through the crowd, eying everyone suspiciously was just as intimidating as I imagined it to be. President Obama can really deliver a speech and work a crowd. His cadence, pitch, and body language are perfectly in tune with the words on his teleprompter. A man standing near me couldn’t help but grunt an “Mmmmmmm” every time he agreed with something Obama said, which turned out to be a lot. I think I saw one woman raise her hand, as if in a Pentecostal church, after Obama delivered something with impact and emotion. I loved seeing a bunch of reporters from TV networks, newspapers and radio stations all doing their craft. The photographers had some killer hardware that I studied in moments of pain and boredom.

Things I didn’t like: Obama kept us -the Hollywood liberals who work so hard on his behalf to indoctrinate America’s youth- waiting/standing for like 2 hours. Maybe it was the shoes I was wearing but I was physically exhausted afterwards. I didn’t like what came between Jaime Foxx and Obama (some singer from American Idol, and, I know this makes me sound bad, a children’s choir). I don’t especially like the Obama campaign’s phrase for 2012, “I’m in!” I was also hoping for more pomp and circumstance; I expected Hail to the Chief to be played, but then Mike Cruz reminded me it was a campaign stop, not an official Presidential visit. There was no Presidential Seal on the lectern either. Disappointed.

Overall, the speech was pretty damn good. Obama reminded us why we supported him in the first place. He outlined his Administration’s accomplishments since Inauguration, how it had to react to an economy that was hemorrhaging jobs (4 million in the first few months) and how it had stopped a terrible recession from becoming an all-out Depression.

He showed shades of his 2004 Democratic Convention speech (There are no red Americas, there are no blue Americas, there is only the United States of America!) by reminding us not to demonize the other side. At the same time he promised not to let “some folks” kill Social Security, or Medicare, or his new health reform law.

He talked up clean energy and commiserated on gas prices, saying that ultimately, our best path forward is to get off oil as much as possible. As a cycling/alternate transportation geek, I raised my hand, let out an audible “mmmmmmm” and said “Testify.”

On the foreign front, he didn’t say a single word about the continuing quagmire in Afghanistan, nor did he touch on why he and the Euros have started bombing Libya or what our end-goal is there. He found time to joke about the Bulls and Lakers but -and I know many of my readers will be disappointed- didn’t speak of what being born in Kenya was like.

Overall Cruz had the best analysis. He thinks Obama’s 2012 campaign will be modeled after Ronald Reagan’s ’84 campaign, the famous “Morning in America” campaign that reminded Americans how bad things were before Reagan’s first term in office.