35K Attend Obama Rally in Springfield, MO

Barack Obama, his wife and daughters attended a rally tonight at a high school football stadium in Republican stronghold Springfield, MO. This is John Ashcroft's and Roy Blunt's home. This is the headquarters of the Assemblies of God churches. This is where Jerry Fallwell went to Bible college.

The Springfield school district estimates a crowd of 35 to 40 THOUSAND people crowded into ever nook, cranny and cubbyhole in the stadium. It has seating for 8,000. Five times that number came to hear Obama.

Here's a Google map satellite view:

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Photos of the rally after the jump.

People began showing up at 5 a.m. for a rally set to begin at 9 p.m. The line stretched two (2) miles! People had to wait in line for hours, then walk two miles, then stand for a few more hours to see the Democratic presidential nominee. If you don't live in a very, very red section of the country, I'm not sure you can understand the significance of this. I live here and I'm not sure I understand what happened.


Amber Arnold/ Springfield News-Leader

Someone posted this video of people waiting in line:




Some came from Oklahoma, like (from left) Alyssa Siers, 15, and her mom, Tressy.


Amber Arnold/ Springfield News-Leader


Even the rednecks came.


Amber Arnold/ Springfield News-Leader

There were some very happy Democrats.


Amber Arnold/ Springfield News-Leader

Including Betty Burk, of Fair Grove, MO


Bob Linder/ Springfield News-Leader

The late hour made it difficult to get a good photo to show the size of the crowd. Here's the best one I've found.


Amber Arnold/ Springfield News-Leader

I don't think Obama can win in southwest Missouri, but I do believe he's putting a scare into the Republican machine here. And that can only mean good things for the future.

Can Obama win Missouri? I think so, and evidently so does the Obama campaign. Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden and his wife, Jill will be in the Kansas City suburb of Lee's Summit Monday morning. Sen. Hillary Clinton will be in the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles later that day. And all of this is forcing the McCain campaign to send Sarah Palin back to Missouri Monday for a rally at the state capitol in Jefferson City. A few months ago Missouri was a slam-dunk for McCain. Now he's making campaign visits here the day before the election.

For about a year now I've been thinking America might need a second revolution to take the country back from the neo-cons who were destroying her. I'd been thinking of an armed revolution. Now I see I was wrong. There IS a revolution taking place, and not a single shot has been fired.

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In response to my much esteemed colleague

I am somewhat overwhelmed to be in the company of such nationally recognized bloggers when I hail from just the unenviable state of Florida, especially the likes of our blog here.

That said, can I just say about Gadfly's post and its comments that it never seemed the Republicans were whiney when they were in the majority and our feeble, really feeble, Democratic minority stopped them. We were evil and the Republicans were just whatever.

Now, we are whiney whether we take a stand or fold. Even in victory, we lose because of the positioning of the media.

This is ALWAYS the fault of the follower. PR and marketing teaches a simple truth: FIRST to the market wins. Your message doesn't have to be true. It doesn't have to reflect reality. This is the lesson Republicans have learned.

Be first. Then, follow up. Follow up loudly. Follow up again. Follow up after the last whimpers. Follow up with the message and stay on it.

It is a lesson Democrats have not learned. Our willingness to speak freely and not follow the crowd have proven to be our folly. We don't speak in lock-step. We don't follow like lemmings to the sea. It is our very essence that defeats our ability to win the message.

For the Repubs, it is most like the Palace Guard in the Wizard of Oz - one great mission for all and only absolute defeat forces the abilty to concede, which is just a matter of language now.

We start out different with many voices. We are different; therefore, it is difficult to speak with one voice. As with any marketing, too many choices creates an inability to chose.

That is the establishment Democrat. Frozen.

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Act like a liberal Democrat, dammit!

If you're a proud left of center liberal like me, read Rick Perlstein's article, "Will the Progressive Majority Emerge?" at The Nation to understand why we are not alone. In fact, Americans agree with us more often than not contradicting what the news press and broadcast pundits propagandize. We are not a "conservative country" no matter how many times the doh-dee-doh-doh media declare that we are.

Attacking this misperception, Perlstein summarizes and shares insights from the Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007, which involves "a massive twenty-year roundup of public opinion from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press." A few have already written selective bites from the Pew survey whereas Perlstein digs deep supplementing the findings to include multiple sources, the National Election Studies (NES) survey, and numerous polls on how American attitudes about the role of government have shifted toward progressive ideas.

People! America sounds and thinks more progressively than we've been told, what Perlstein describes as "the most favorable climate for liberalism in a generation." Some grafs that could make conservatives gulp hard:

Is it the responsibility of government to care for those who can't take care of themselves? In 1994, the year conservative Republicans captured Congress, 57 percent of those polled thought so. Now, says Pew, it's 69 percent. (Even 58 percent of Republicans agree. Would that some of them were in Congress.) The proportion of Americans who believe government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep is 69 percent, too--the highest since 1991. Even 69 percent of self-identified Republicans--and 75 percent of small-business owners!--favor raising the minimum wage by more than $2.

The Pew study was not just asking about do-good, something-for-nothing abstractions. It asked about trade-offs. A majority, 54 percent, think "government should help the needy even if it means greater debt" (it was only 41 percent in 1994). Two-thirds want the government to guarantee health insurance for all citizens. Even among those who otherwise say they would prefer a smaller government, it's 57 percent--the same as the percentage of Americans making more than $75,000 a year who believe "labor unions are necessary to protect the working person." ...

... Want hot-button issues? The public is in love with rehabilitation over incarceration for youth offenders. Zogby/National council on Crime and Delinquency found that 89 percent think it reduces crime and 80 percent that it saves money over the long run. "Amnesty"? Sixty-two percent told CBS/New York Times surveyors that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to "keep their jobs and eventually apply for legal status." And the gap between the clichés about what Americans believe about gun control and what they actually believe is startling: NBC News/Wall Street Journal found 58 percent favoring "tougher gun control laws," and Annenberg found that only 10 percent want laws controlling firearms to be less strict, a finding reproduced by the NES survey in 2004 and Gallup in 2006.

You suspected it all along. Now it just might be true: Most Americans think like you. Nearly two-thirds think corporate profits are too high (30 percent, Pew notes, "completely agree with this statement...the highest percentage expressing complete agreement with this statement in 20 years"). Almost three-quarters think "it's really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer," eight points more than thought so in 2002.

If only there was an American political party that unwaveringly reflected these views, as a matter of bone-deep identity. You might think it would do pretty well. Which leads to the aspect of the Pew study that got the most ink: "Political Landscape More Favorable to Democrats," as the subtitle put it. When you compare Americans who either identify themselves as Democrats or say they lean toward the Democrats with Republicans and Republican leaners, our side wins by fifteen points, 50 percent to 35, the most by far in twenty years. As recently as 2002 it was a tie, 43 to 43.

Plunge below the surface, however, and this stirring tale becomes disconcerting. Yes, again and again, the views of independents track the views of Democrats--more so, in fact, with every passing year. Pew says it's "striking" that 57 percent of independents think government should aid more needy people even at the price of higher debt. In 1994 it was only 39 percent. When asked their opinion of statements like "Business corporations make too much profit," independents answer the same way as Democrats: about 70 percent agree. On questions like "Are you satisfied with the way things are going for you financially?" the chart is amazing: Republicans, independents and Democrats clustered together at 65 and 64 percent in 1994. But Republicans have increasingly answered that question in the affirmative--81 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, the lines for independents and Democrats headed down, down, down, nearly in lockstep, to 54 percent today.

Pew says independents are thinking like Democrats, and that fewer and fewer want much to do with the Republican Party. In 1994 independents gave the GOP a 68 percent approval rating; now only 40 percent do. And the percentage of people who call themselves Republicans has dropped from 29 percent in 2005 to 25 percent today. But these people are not signing up as Democrats. The proportion of those who call themselves Democrats has held steady, in the lower 30s....

...The pattern--Democrats losing because they don't look enough like Democrats--is nothing new: During the 2002 election Democrats did such a poor job of selling themselves as better protectors of middle-class interests that Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research found only 34 percent of voters saw a difference between Democrats and Republicans on prescription drug benefits to seniors.

Go read Perlstein, a lengthy read (much more than I have snipped) but worth every word. I doubt you will hear the press connect and articulate these attitudinal changes sufficiently because... "The stubborn oxen on TV and in the establishment media who tell the American people how to think are part of the problem too."

What will the Democratic Party do about an auspicious moment, "the most favorable climate for liberalism in a generation"? Perlstein offers this caveat: "They rarely ask the public to vote for them as Democrats." We can only hope that Democrats will remember their ABCs...

Always. Be. Closing.

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Republican Justice Department Scandals--The Next Generation

Underlying the Gonzales 8 scandal is the fear that the Bush Administration has improperly used the Justice Department to influence election outcomes. This morning Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers has published an in depth look at the issue. He suggests that

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.

The Justice Department disputes his conclusion that the Justice Department has been politicized to help Republicans and hurt Democrats at the polls, but his evidence is broad and deep. This might be where the Justice Department scandal is heading. Gordon reports that:

Former department lawyers, public records and other documents show that since Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights Division have:

-Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall, but that litigation was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until after the election.

-Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants if their identification didn't match that in computer databases, prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of applicants mistakenly.

-Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million.

-Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting purges.

Of interest to Blue Girl, Gordon reports that the Missouri effort to suppress minority voters was based in the White House.

In Missouri, where Republican Sen. Jim Talent was fighting to hang onto his seat and hold the U.S. Senate for the GOP, a Republican-backed photo ID requirement cleared the state House of Representatives by one vote in May 2006 after an intense lobbying effort in which backers alleged voter fraud in heavily Democratic St. Louis and Kansas City.

"The White House was heavily involved" in the effort to win passage, state Rep. Bryan Stevenson, the Republican floor leader, said in a telephone interview. Stevenson said he wasn't privy to the details of the White House efforts.

You really need to read Gordon's article.

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