Of stony floors and tops of heads: seeing Howard Dean in the flesh…
So, I thought I’d get this down for rememberizing sake. (My rememberizer not being what it used to be–or if it ever was.) It was a long day and that first part of it would be better off not being rememberized, but when I got home I changed into my natty blue suit (the old one from days of yore, that groovy blue, is it cornflower blue? or maybe more of a seersucker blue? is there such a thing as seersucker blue?) the reason: I’d never been to a paid politicking session before (that is, *I* had to pay…) and I’d only decided to go at the last minute, because it was in my neighborhood, after all.
So, I strolled down the street in my swiffy blue suit and did my best not to get run over in the dark (success!). A muchness of walking later, and I arrived: feeling rather gleeful that I get to skip all the lines: having had the foresight to pay in advance. There was this nifty looking fellow with a turban and a long pointy gray beard. Little did I know, that I would keep seeing him all throughout the night. Even so, I didn’t say hi.
They let me in and I strolled up the escalators (the Montgomery Park building is pretty swell, soaring (I almost said souring, can you belive it?) rafters and the like and great glass elevators crawling up the walls like so many snails… well, two. There were all kinds of folks hobnobbing around the place. Old and young and finely dressed and scatterbrained. I was feeling pretty fetching in my blue suit (buoyed by the not-so-lipstick-leaving kiss, from her, on my way out the door) and I beetle-lined right on over to the buffet line.
What a strange assortment of foodstuffs! It was Greek night for the Dean campaign, I guess. Olives, and triangular breads, and hummus-y looking dips and things, and goat cheese and chicken on a stick that looked like fried shrimp and cheese cake that was far more cheesy than cakey and some thing wrapped in a leaf that I can’t, for the life of me, remember the name of.
There were huge cameras roaming around the vasty room and pinning down specimen under their flinty lights. Asking questions like: why do you like Howard Dean and other claptrap. (Not that the question is silly, but I don’t see what the point is chatting with those one-eyed monsters. Chat for 20 minutes and they’ll cut you down to a 5 second soundbite, making you look however they want…)
Sadly, I had forgotten my wallet at the home and couldn’t partake of anything more scintillating than water. Though I did down that with great good gusto, mind! Everyone was clogged together in groups, firmly ignoring the bluegrass(?) band playing at the front. They were all right, in the sense that their music didn’t make my ears bleed. I was thinking thoughts like so: Hullo! Why don’t these blighters hire some local color? I mean, we’ve got some pretty good bands around these parts… Well, actually, I don’t know if this band was local and maybe I’m being a narrow-minded stooge, but they just didn’t scream Portland! to me while I was listening to them…
There was this guy who sidled up to me at one point (well, I don’t know if he sidled or not, because I wasn’t looking) and said: well, you look like you know what you’re doing…
And I said: Well, actually, no…
And he said: What do you think they’re going to do? Is he just going to come out?
And I said: Actually, I don’t know. I’ve never been to one of these things before. Probably they’ll have some speaking (though, I should have said “speechifying”! I don’t get that word out nearly enough).
I introduced myself. He unzipped the beer that he had snuck in. A man after my own heart, I thought, wishing I’d thought of the sneaking of the beer thing. He also said he’d gone in with a borrowed student ID. He was wearing a strange multi-colored scarf, wooly jacket combo. From Michigan. Living in NE. We commiserated about the crappy economy and how tough it was for people our age (twenty-something) these days. Welcome to highest unemployment rate in the country! (well, maybe we’re not the highest in the country anymore, but we’re still not doing so great.) He said, we have got to get this guy (our president) out of there!
At that point, all of these suits started streaming out of this upstairs room and coming down the deactivated escalators from the third floor. Things seemed about to start!
A very tall black man who… ///flashback///I had held the door open for him as I entered! Only, he waved me through the door and he ended up holding the door open for me! It’s always a weird feeling when that happens… ///flashback/// whose name I can’t remember, but he’s one of the campaign dudes in Oregon. A co-chairsomething or other of some such and such a thing. His job was to get the crowd all fired up, which you really have to do in Portland. (I think all the clouds and lack of sun send us into a kind of half-sleeping funk which takes a certain amount of energy to penetrate.)
He said, Hello Portland! or some such thing.
There was a vague mutter back from the audience. He laughed and then did some good old audience firing up stuff. By the end of it, everybody was feeling quite warm and toasty. I was even whoo-whooing a little bit! (I would’ve felt better about his speechifying and rabble-rousing if he hadn’t been reading from a paper, but que sera… Case in point: As I look out at your enthusiastic… while eyes are firmly glued to paper… you see? A bit of dissonance there.)
(It was around this point that someone knocked over my new friend’s beer, that he had set down on the ground in order to clap. Mustache-man looked sheepish, but scurried off quickly. My new friend, a true Portlander even though he’s from Michigan, scooped up his beer faster than my eye could see.)
Then, a very popular former governnor, Barbara Roberts (?) and some other fellow–both fellow co-suchandsuches for the Dean Oregon somethingorother–came on and did some more speechifying, only they did it tag-team style!
They kind of switched lines like movie stars do at the Academy awards when they’re reading off the names of the nominees. They did this cute little thing where she would say something like (and I’m sorting of making things up here, because my rememberizer’s so bad:
Imagine having a president who can balance the budget!
And then he would tag-team in and say:
Imagine having a president who eats a la peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!
(Well, not really, but I do wish that they had thrown in some humor in there. Maybe a non sequitur or two. That’s what’s missing from politics these days: non sequiturs! Anyway, their whole thing was very cute and I was sort of chuckling and grinning along.)
Finally, the man of the hour came on, and boy was he sprightly! I mean, spry. Or, basically he seemd to have a lot of vim and vigour. He was quite energetic and enthused and I thought, now, there’s a man who’s had a satisfying dinner! Maybe they had lamb kebabs up there in that upper room, or something.
Dean went on to give a very familiar speech (one I’d heard most of back in August at that rally thing I went to), but which had some interesting additions. The new additions being tried out on the crowd, perhaps? (Sadly, my brain is remarkably short on details.) The amazing thing about Dean is that, in spite of not always gauging the crowd very well (if you’ve seen some preachermen do their thing, you’ll know what I’m talking about) and sometimes stumbling over his words a bit and sometimes saying words that are completely the opposite of the word he means to say, the crowd just adores the man. He has a lot of enthusiasm, that’s part of it, but the only thing that I can think is that he’s really telling people what they want to hear.
Which goes something like this: “There’s one lie that people li
ke me always tell to people like you during election time. And that’s: vote for me and I’ll solve all of your problems. Well, I’m telling you right now, I won’t solve all of your problems. Only you have the power to make this country the way you want it to be. This campaign isn’t about me, it’s about you taking your country back. You have the power…” and then he says that some more times. And he sounds like he means it. And he doesn’t sound like a politician. And I wish he sounded more like this during some of the televised debates I’ve seen him in.
And basically, I think that he’s got a pretty damn good shot at becoming the next President of the United States. I like him.
I tried to go shake his hand after the speech, but about 800 other people had the same idea. So, I settled for riding down the escalator after him. As I was riding down it, he walked beneath me, about fifteen feet away, and I saw the top of his head. Startlingly, there was this spontaneous clapping and chanting that sprang up when people realized that Howard Dean was walking by them. It was neat. I started walking home.