Classical Chaos: September 2008

ok, details! First off - these 'reports' about the crowd being hand-picked or whatever is just nonsense. They sent out an email on Saturday, and it was on the news, and then it was first come, first serve Monday morning at the GOP offices to get tickets. We got our tickets very fortunately. I called the GOP office on Saturday and talked to the lady and told her we had reserved tickets but that I had 5 kids and wouldn't be able to get there Mon. morning, would there still be tickets left, and she said to call her back on Monday and she'd let me know. So I called her back on Monday and she said all the tickets were gone, and I almost started crying. I told her that I had talked to her on Sat, and she thought there would be plenty of tickets, etc.....and then she says 'I remember talking to you! I set 2 tickets aside for you this morning'.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   I couldn't believe it!   How nice was she?   She did that for a couple of other people too. So I went in Mon night and had our tickets!

We got there around 3:30 and there was already a really long line. Turned out we were still towards the front half of the line. Shortly after we got there, the line was really really long, and we were seated for probably an hour and the line was still entering the building. It was so much fun seeing all the media. Being a journalist would be so cool. We saw Carl Cameron from Fox News near the enterance. He paused and smiled for me. (I still haven't forgotten your terrible treatment of Fred, Carl!)

The music and the initial speakers were realllllly loud. Painfully loud. It seemed somewhat better when Sarah and John came out. They stayed in the middle, and talked for 10-15 minutes, and then they started taking questions. It seemed like it was a lot of questions, but the news said they only took 13. The event had been billed to run until 10:30, so when they said they were done right before 8, I was a little bummed. 10:30 would have made for very long, probably getting boring by then, but I wonder how that got advertised like that. They got some good questions and gave some good answers for the most part. Someone asked all the naysayers on her foreign policy and gave her a chance to rebut that, and I thought her answer was kind of shallow, really. But I saw the lady who asked the question on the news and she said she liked Sarah's answer, so whatever. Her answer was basically 'I'm ready on Day 1, I know foreign policy, you can ask me about it' The lady who asked the question was in front of me and she wanted to ask a follow-up question but didn't get a chance. Someone at some point asked Sarah something about oil and she went off saying it was nonsense that Bush went over to Saudi Arabia asking them to increase their production for us. It was awesome.

Sarah was really good. She looked and sounded exactly like she did on TV. John McCain sounded even more passionate about things in his answers than I usually hear on TV. They work really well together. A lot of the questions were for one or the other, and so after they answered it, the other one would jump in and add something, or the other person would say 'do you want to add anything'.   It really seemed like a partnership. I know I've read things implying that Sarah will make the VP slot a useless one, but that really doesn't seem to be the case.   They worked really well together.

Here are pictures!

My cool t-shirt I made.