Friday, August 13, 2004

Kerry and Bush come to town

We went into downtown Portland this morning to catch John Kerry in Waterfront Park. Originally, I had planned on riding my bike across the Hawthorne Bridge into downtown, but this time Sam said she wanted to go, so we drove.

We first started to realize how big the crowd was going to be when we couldn’t find a parking place within a half mile of the river. We parked about a dozen blocks away and walked to the bridge. About halfway across, we came up to the end of the line to get in. It was about 10:30 am at this point. By 11, the line was all the way across the bridge and shortly thereafter down the ramps to the east bank. The park area was rapidly filling up with lines of people coming in from several directions, and having to go through security. By 12, it became obvious that we weren’t going to make it into the rally, because our line was moving slow enough that the park was going to fill up long before we got there. It was about 90 degrees out by this time. In an hour and a half, we had moved about 400 feet and had at least twice that to go to the entrance. In retrospect, we probably would have ended up on the far side of a building 3 blocks from the event when the line finally stopped.

So we bagged it, walked back across the bridge to the car, grabbed something to eat and went home, arriving just in time to catch Kerry on TV. Kerry seems to have found his pace, and is a much better speaker now than he was during the primaries. It was pretty much his standard stump speech, but it would have been nice to hear it in person, like I had when another future President, Bill Clinton came to town to speak. There were at least 50,000 people there in Waterfront Park and probably 15,000 on the streets outside the park and on the bridge. Oh well, it was much cooler at home, at least.

This was in contrast to Bush’s simultaneous (and don’t try and tell me that was a coincidence) appearance 5 miles away in Beaverton. There were about 2000 hand-picked Republican attendees, no dissenters allowed. During the “Ask President Bush” staged photo-op afterwards, people asked “questions” that were mostly composed of unsubstantiated personal attacks on Kerry that Bush was happy to have aired, sparing him from doing the unpresidential dirty work himself. He didn’t contest any of this, just thanked people for the lies, nodded and smirked.

One woman requested that the president pray for the high percentage of “unchurched” Oregonians, reportedly the highest in the nation. Bush, of course, just nodded and smirked some more. This really pissed me off, as I’m very happily “unchurched” and have no desire to be otherwise. A large number of Oregonians feel the same way, in fact that’s part of the reason why I moved here 26 years ago. I don’t object to religion, just the idea of imposing it on those who don’t want it, and I’m afraid that all barriers (i.e. the Constitution) to a state religion would be down in a second if Bush were reelected…

- Bob Woods

Today’s editorial cartoon from the Oregonian.