Some 75,000 people flocked to Portland’s waterfront Sunday to watch Barack Obama speak, making it the biggest rally the campaign has held to date. Thousands stood on the lawn, dozens watched from boats and from the bridge stretching across the Willamette River. A few kayakers held their paddles and tried to keep their kayaks straight as they watched the candidate, who stood on a makeshift platform.
Obama hailed Clinton as a “formidable candidate,” saying she “has been smart and tough and determined and she has worked as hard as she can and she has run an extraordinary campaign.”
And he’ll get a taste of the formidable campaign when he loses…bigtime… in Kentucky. So both Clinton and Obama will likely get the chance to deliver soaring victory speeches on Tuesday night (pointing to the one they won and downplaying the one they lost).
Obama also again displayed his rapidity in seizing on a political development:
He added a few lines to an otherwise typical stump speech, attacking presumptive GOP nominee John McCain for his ties to lobbyists, an issue the campaign is pushing and one the candidate spoke about with reporters earlier in the day. “John McCain now has had to get rid of five of his top advisers because it turns out they’re all lobbying, many of them for foreign governments. That’s because he practices the same kind of politics that we’ve grown accustomed to in Washington,” he said, adding that his campaign did not take money from PACs or federal lobbyists and saying he would have meetings on C-SPAN rather behind closed doors with lobbyists “in their Gucci shoes.”
But remember, nothing is in the bag until this lady has sung.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.