Obama and the Queen of Soul in Detroit

I'm not much for attending major political events, or going to see big-name politicians. When I was at grad school at USC in 1984, I saw two campaign appearances.

At the first one, Walter Mondale had to answer some particularly obnoxious hecklers by bellowing, "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. This is the school that produced Donald Segretti!" No, they didn't throw tomatoes, as Susan Estrich has recalled, or if they did, their aim was bad enough so I didn't notice. Then again, they probably didn't know who Segretti was, anyway. It was a great put-down, but the jecklers just kept on shouting, "Reagan Country!"

Later that same fall, I saw a campaign appearance for the Republicans. Vice President Bush spoke. The USC mascot, Traveler, paraded around with its rider --presumably Richard Saukko -- in full regalia. The introduction was by Moses himself, Charlton Heston. It was all very... regal and distant.

Politicians -- good politicians, anyway -- tend to be very practiced at saying things they think their audiences want to hear. So, convinced I will end up hearing nothing of value at all, I have mostly tended to avoid them. I went to a couple of Obama campaign events in 2008, but as I recall, I had another reason to be there.

Barack Obama, as President, has proved particularly disappointing to me. While I have found him to be a forceful, authoritative speaker, but his actions have only rarely seemed to match his rhetoric. Nonetheless, when I found out that he had chosen Detroit as the location for his Labor Day appearance -- not just Detroit, but a location in Detroit that is very familiar to me, on a surface lot by the Detroit Riverwalk just East of the Renaissance Center, I saw it as a family opportunity. So, on Friday I walked across most of downtown Detroit on a blazingly hot afternoon to the AFSCME 207 Local Office to pick up tickets. This would be a chance for both myself, Lori and the kids to see a current President of the United States.

The experience? Probably the hardest part was getting to my regular parking lot -- it took 3 approaches and several detours to get to a passage that was open. By the time we got to the lot, the pre-speech activities has started. Not that we cared. John Dingell spoke. Sander Levin spoke. Debbie Stabenow spoke. Several Union officials spoke. Then, we got the big highlight:

Aretha looked good, and sounded better. And the band leader was just... cool.

Finally, Obama was introduced by a member of the AFL-CIO. Elianna climbed on my shoulders to get a better view. 65 pounds for half an hour is painful, but it'll be ok once my shoulders stop hurting. Obama said all the right things today. There were predictable chants in the audience -- "Four More Years," mostly. The Segretti minions were missing. The audience was decidedly mixed: Black, white, union, non-union, and nearly all festive. Elianna remembers he said something about building a new bridge, and that seems about right.

After the event, we went in to Greektown for pizza. In the meantime, Fox News created a new "scandal" by doctoring the warm-up remarks by Jimmy Hoffa. I can't wait to talk to the kids about that.

Picture from the Detroit Free Press