Posted on 09/01/2012 6:09:04 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Obama campaign says it will fill stadium for convention’s finale By Amie Parnes - 09/01/12 06:00 AM ET
Team Obama promises it will fill every one of the seats in Charlotte’s mammoth football stadium Thursday night when President Obama closes the Democratic National Convention with a speech accepting his party’s nomination.
For weeks, Democrats have been concerned about filling Bank of America Stadium, home to the NFL’s Carolina Panthers. They feared a devastating image of an enthusiasm gap if Obama spoke to empty upper decks at the venue.
But the Obama campaign says it’s got it covered, and that all 73,778 of the stadium’s seats will be spoken for. The campaign also insists this success will showcase a ground operation that will help Obama win North Carolina for a second cycle in a row this November.
“We’re confident we’ll be full,” Jen Psaki, the traveling Obama press secretary, told The Hill late last week. “We have a great ground operation in North Carolina and we’ve registered more voters than any other state.
“Our goal is to leave North Carolina better than we came in,” Psaki added.
Obama set himself up for a challenge when he decided to recreate the image that closed his 2008 convention — an address to a packed, enthusiastic crowd at Denver’s Invesco Field.
This speech comes four years into Obama’s presidency, and in the midst of a slow economy that is the Republican ticket’s No. 1 argument for replacing the Democratic president.
Obama’s supporters say the most pivotal part of Thursday night’s event is the president’s speech and not the optics and spectacle surrounding it, but they acknowledge a partially-filled stadium would give Republicans more fodder in a state where Romney leads in most polls.
“This isn’t 2008 and this isn’t Colorado,” said one former administration official. “And I think the fear is that the campaign aimed too high on this one. After all, this is a southern state, which leans red and only helped Obama win in 2008 by very slim margins.
Steve Elmendorf, who served as deputy campaign manager for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, acknowledged that filling the stadium is a “challenge.”
“They’re taking on something that’s hard to do,” Elmendorf said. “And they’re doing it in a state that isn’t one of their core states. But I give them credit for trying.”
Late last month, a slew of tickets were still available for the acceptance speech at the stadium.
In an attempt to fill the empty seats, Team Obama put in place a “9-3-1” program that would provide supporters with one ticket to the acceptance speech after they volunteered for nine hours over three shifts, an effort it says will expand its grassroots.
Last week, credentials were handed out on a first come, first served basis, a campaign official said, with North Carolinians across the state having the opportunity to line up to receive a credential.
“Demand for these credentials was truly amazing,” the campaign official said. “Tens of thousands of North Carolinians received credentials, making this truly the most open and accessible convention in history.”
While the campaign won’t say how many tickets for the speech have been handed out to date, they say credential distribution has ended for the time being, with the caveat that anyone in the state who is still interested in attending can sign up through the “I’m there” program to know if and when additional seats will be given out.
Republicans say they don’t have any doubt that Team Obama will fill the stadium to the rafters but that the efforts will be contrived.
“The rule is standing-room-only,” said Ken Lundberg, a GOP strategist. “The campaign knows that, and there’s no question they will fill the stadium. If they have to bus union groups from Miami, New York and Kalamazoo into Charlotte, that’s what they’ll do.”
Several union officials and others close to labor say they hadn’t heard anything about busing in union members to help fill seats for the speech.
But Lundberg added that the “key indicator that night will be energy.
“People at the closing speech are the president’s strongest supporters; if their enthusiasm is anything short of the night Obama first won the office, that’s a clear sign of trouble,” he said.
Campaign officials say they are guaranteeing a memorable final night in the swing state.
“President Obama’s speech on the final night of the convention will be truly be historic, and we are so glad that so many North Carolinians will be there,” one campaign official said.
There was an article posted here that had them giving away tickets as far as Atlanta, GA.
The very fact that the “Obama” campaign has to state that they will fill the stadium seats with supporters is proof that they have had to resort to passing out thousands of “free” seat tickets to the “Obama Stash” loyalists. I believe the DNC in Charlotte, NC will be boring and passe. I also believe that very few people and voters will be tuning in whether via TV or the internet, etc. We shall see!!!
By having to make a headline statement like that, one would necessarily have to assume there was a real problem in getting the job done beforehand.
Maybe they will use the Jedi mind trick from the Superdome and wrap the blue seats with a random array of different colored trash bags to create the illusion from a distance that the place is full.
They did the same to the lower tier of seats at Daytona and when viewing the in-car camera recordings from my customers, it really looks like the lower stands are full even though the stands were empty for an SCCA non-spectator race. I didn’t notice it but the wife of the driver saw it immediately.
Filling the stadium isn’t good enough.
Unless there are folks lined up outside who are unable to get in the filled stadium, the event is a failure.
I wonder how those highbrow liberals will be able to put up with standing or sitting next to all those smelly street people or occupy people?
Here’s some better stuff from the referenced link at gateway.
Florida Family Association sent out an email alert on August 29, 2012 which reported the following two sub headlines:
“DNC approves Jumah for 20,000 Muslims.” “RNC adopts anti-Sharia plank at convention.”
The email alert and Floridafamily.org website provided a link to the DNC web site calendar of events which at that time and up until yesterday afternoon included the Juma event, which the original DNC website listed as an “official function.”
However, since then, the Jumah event was removed from the DNC web site calendar, and there is no reference at all to the event. A supporter noted in an e-mail, “It was still there 5.30 PM on 8/30/2012 and at 6.30 PM it was gone! I looked everywhere but it’s not listed anymore.”
(See video at the bottom of the page here.)
Not only has all trace of the Jumah been deleted from the DNC webiste, the Jumah was slated to be held today, far from the DNC, at a location seven miles from the Convention Center.
One can only speculate on the kind of pressure that was exerted on the DNC to disassociate itself from the Jumah. Prior to the cleansing of the DNC website, it was announced by the that Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference and, some think, in line to be considered to succeed Pope Benedictus XVI, had been refused the opportunity to give the closing benediction at the DNC, as he did at the RNC.
The group sponsoring the assembly is far from the mainstream Muslm community. The Grand Imam for the Jumah will be Siraj Wahhaj, Imam of the al Taqwa Mosque in Brooklyn, who was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade center bombings. He is well known for his ability to be considered ‘moderate’ by much of the media, on the one hand, and for his inflammatory statements, such as the one he once gave in a speech, when he said that it was his “duty and our duty as Muslims to replace the U.S. Constitution with the Quran.”
Both Wahhaj and Jibril Hough, who is associated with the “Bureau of Indigenous Muslim Affairs” and a co-leader of the event, are heavily involved in the separatist American Islamist movement. </i>
"In fact, we've registered more voters than there are voters in the state. It's like a miracle or something!"
I saw somewhere the 20,000 was more like a couple of hundred(?) ..... it also looks like the DNC changing their mind and having Cardinal Dolan pray could be interesting ....
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2925183/posts
Giving away free tickets and food again? Or is it to be cigarettes and alcohol?
LOL.
The balloon drop should be a hoot, inflatable audience and balloons. I am reminded of the automatic pilot scene in “Airplane!.” Picture Andrea Mitchell less annoyed than she was after Palins Speech.
Should be fun.
So THAT’S where Charlotte is putting all of their homeless.
There was recent news the homeless were gonna be kicked outta town for the DNC.
“Busing in union thugs?”
Nah. Every wino in North Carolina. Only cost a few truckloads of Thunderbird.
Organizers of “Jumah at the 2012 DNC” had expected up to 20,000 Muslims from across the country to pray on the first day of a three-day cultural event. But only a couple of hundred unfolded chairs to sit in the park’s shade.
“This is much more than a prayer service,” Dr. Zudhi Jasser, a Muslim physician from Arizona and a conservative political ally of North Carolina’s former Republican U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick, said before Friday’s event. . “It’s not about Muslim. It’s Islamists,” said Jasser, president of the Arizona-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy. “These guys are like the (Muslim) Brotherhood. What happens in America is that most people aren’t able to tell the difference between regular Muslims and those that are part of a political movement.
Jumah in Full Bloom - An Islamic Festival to Jump Start the DNC
I don’t think so. They won’t cheer, cry, and faint on cue like his supporters.
Sounds like it will be even easier for some patriots to infiltrate the event. Just sayin’.
Racist! No hoodies or tats! /s
Instead of balloons, 0bama money will be dropped from above after his acceptance speech.
It’s all about an image. Obama with a stadium filled with people cheering him on. It’s all just smoke and mirrors. As if the people who don’t like the job he’s done will someone think “gee a lot of people still love and trust him, I guess I should too.”
lol
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