anastasiav | "My attitude is Go for it"

Well, I walked down (it was actually five blocks) and stood around in the lovely afternoon sunshine with the crowd outside the Expo. There were a lot of people - A LOT - who had tickets but who were not let in for some reason. The "didn't get in" line stretched from the Expo back to the corner by King Middle School. Some unhappy people there.

Eventually I walked down the other side of the street, through the throng of protesters, and down to an almost deserted area across the street from the actual Expo parking lot. For some reason the throngs of protesters had camped out up across from the Expo building itself, so once you cleared the crest of the hill you could no longer see and only faintly hear them (they were ringing cowbells, like it was some sort of bobsled or skiing event). So, if their goal was for the President to see them, they totally failed.

I'd say that about 30% of the people outside (not counting the people in the line who never made it inside) were Obama supporters. Another 30% were polite dissenters, in their docksiders, polo shirts, and US Navy ballcaps, ringing cowbells and holding handmade signs. The other 40% were crazy people. I'm not saying that because I disagreed with them, but simply because they were acting like crazy people. Signs about how Obama was actually an alien. One guy dressed as a pirate, complete with a LIVE parrot on his shoulder. Long haired guys telling us "the end is nigh". That sort of crazy. It got kind of old after a while.

Also, the Expo building borders a neighborhood in Portland that has a really high percentage of immigrants and low income folks, so the Obama supporters I met were a very diverse bunch - Somali immigrants, schoolteachers from King Middle School, low income folks who were clearly amazingly proud that the President of the United States was speaking only feet from them. One woman had set up a rusty grill on her front stoop and was selling "Obama Burgers" as her children hung out in the playpen nearby.

A lot of people (including me) were listening to the speech on radios or phones, but it was hard to hear anyone else's media because of the combination of the cowbells and the constant drone of the helicopters overhead. After the speech ended, a lot of the protesters started to figure out that they were not in a prime location and began to filter down towards us. Then the police came out and moved the barricades back a couple of feet. Then a long-ish wait, until we finally saw the garage door open in the Expo building, and the limo pulled out and whisked him away.

From where I was standing, I could just make out his outline, slightly bent forward in the car to look out the window toward us, waving.