After the storm, the crowds. At the last rally of his presidential campaign – more than 600 days after he announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois – Barack Obama gathered around 100,000 supporters to Manassas, Virginia.
He was uncharacteristically late – more than an hour, in fact – after bad weather in North Carolina delayed his departure. On board that delayed flight, the press corps was buzzing with wire photos of the candidate crying through his comments about his grandmother. From the press area, Obama’s tears were not visible. Seen from the press buffer close to the stage where the photographers work, his public emotion was as striking as it was rare.
So he began his last rally – in the DC suburbs that one of McCain’s advisers described as lying outside the “real Virginia” – with a profound thanks to his crowds. All the tens of thousands who have waited for him for hours in so many battleground states in the general election, stretching back to the primary states at the start of this long contest.
They had enriched him, he said, and lifted him up when he was feeling down. Now it was time to vote, and to work to turn out the vote, no matter what the weather tomorrow. No matter how hard it rains.
So what better note to end his final rally than the classic South Carolina tale of the state representative who taught him how to be Fired Up and Ready to Go? His Virginia audience barely needed the chant and call. But the candidate thrived on it, at a late hour of a long campaign, when he sorely needed some firing up.
