Edwards Rally Review

since I already emailed my review to Uncle Peter I can just paste it here. I'm a bit less riled right now since I just learned that Alouette is a "plucking" song. So that's entertaining me right this second.

Ugh, I was so disappointed, Let's see if I can accurately describe it.

Well, John and I showed up at the University an hour early so we decided to go have coffee as there weren't that many people there, (they were expecting about 2000). So we went out to get in line at about 3:45 and the line was HUGE!!! So we decided to just wait at the beginning of the line and watch everyone go in and wait until the end. It was SOOOOOO disorganized but anyway they decided to have a red ticket line and a blue ticket line and let people show their tickets and go in (they had to be visually looked at for security reasons). So they started to file through security, cross the fogler library steps, then go on to the mall. Firstly why didn't he just speak on the library steps and let people be on the mall???? So Edwards was going to speak at 5 (news time) and they started the lines flowing at 4. Now with 7000-8000 people there this WASNT enough time. So around 4:30 they started panicking and decided that people weren't walking fast enough so these 4 guys were SCREAMING AT PEOPLE to WALK FASTER, MOVE IT, MOVE THE LINE, GET GOING, COME ON PEOPLE GO FASTER it was ridiculous, and they kept on screaming until about 10 of 5 when they decided that they were NEVER going to get everyone through the security so they decided that it didn't matter if you had a ticket or not they just needed to get people on the mall, so they opened the floodgates and let people in. So much for security? Anyway they made the brilliant decision that on a college campus they weren't going to allow backpacks on the mall, so that was another issue entirely.


I don't know, I have a million complaints about it, I know it was 'news time" but wouldn't you think you'd plan it for 5:30 or 6:00 so people that actually work at the university could go to the rally?

So it started with some guy stumping for Mike michaud, I don't know who it was but he was a BAD speaker and stumbled over his words. Then Stephen King got up and he was VERY GOOD, Baldacci, just did his thing skimming over the issues and then Edwards went over his talking points and left. I mean, you couldn't get a LESS enthusiastic crowd, they just did nothing to rile people up. They didn't talk about Maine and Maine issues, they didn't even have the friggin unions there.

Anyway, I was so disappointed with it that I just call Kerry's coordinator in Portland. I walked away feeling MAD about the whole thing.