I just picked a random box score from last season’s Ohio State basketball season. Well, it wasn’t that random. I chose the Michigan game because I figured that was definitely sold-out. Apparently, 18,451 people can watch a basketball game at Ohio State’s Schottenstein Center. But, the thing about basketball games is that there is a court in the middle of the stadium with baskets and benches and a table for scorekeepers and there are cheerleaders. Those people aren’t counted in the official attendance and there’s only ten players and a couple of refs on the court instead of a thousand people or more crammed into folding chairs. That’s why there were several thousand empty seats in the upper decks for Obama’s rally today. Where would you rather sit? On the floor, or behind the stage in the nosebleeds? I swear they are so desperate to try to diminish Obama’s advantage in charisma that they’ll grasp at any straw.
As for the Richmond appearance, the Washington Post reports that 8,000 people showed up. When Old Dominion played at Virginia Commonwealth University this past season, 7,617 fans attended. Maybe the jackasses at Gateway Pundit will call me when Mitt Romney can outdraw a college basketball game.
Here’s a Mitt Romney “rally” from last week: (below the fold, because it starts on its own):
See the difference?
Why do you even bother arguing with Gateway Pundit? It’s he the guy Tbogg tagged as “the dumbest MF’er on the internet”? And would the Gateway Pundit be from Missouri? If so, how does the idiot forget 2008 in St Louis? Doesn’t he remember this(and that’s not even the best picture to show how large the crowd is)?:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/us/politics/19campaign.html
Where in Portsmouth was the Romney appearance, exactly? Cuz my first thought, and I can’t be the only one, was “yacht club.”
The fish pier.
Yes, but crowd counts for the Romney event didn’t include the several hundred mackerel who showed up.
hard to hear the applause of the mackerel
Well, the applause are rather thin, sounds like tens of ppl in the audience. can’t believe he’s attacking Obama on the gap between rich and poor. I know he’s just following Rove’s instruction, but I can’t see this working out well for MehMoney
BooMan,
I got my 18,809 number from the wikipedia page for the Value City Arena, which is what the inside of The Schottenstein Center is called.
BTW, there were no seats or folding chairs on the level where the BB court is. Just people standing. People were still trickling in even as POTUS was speaking, which was over 2 hours after we got out seats.
Here is a post & pics I put up yesterday after we got home.
http://libertystreet.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/obama-rally-columbus-ohio/
Are you saying some of the empty seats were probably held by ppl who used standing room on the court? how many ppl were standing?
The video of Meh’s speech with the thin applause is pertinent I guess because it was the same day, but the classic for me remains his Otterbein Univ appearance where we see the student nod off as MehMoney starts in on the price of office products
right, so you can cram a lot more people on the floor if there are no chairs.
Honest Question:
Why do you think most of the white males >50 abhor Obama?
I swear, I don’t understand the complete animus except in terms of racism. but I keep being told its not racist.
To quote a ruler of the only SE Asian country to ever formally declare war on the US: “‘Tis a puzzlement”
I think there is a certain level of animus that is a given, simply because he is a Democrat. Just among my family and friends who are, in large part, Republicans; I recall that there was a certain level of built in disgust for Clinton. But amongst a not too small percentage of these same people, the disgust for Obama is off the charts. Some if it might be attributable to the increasingly nasty rhetoric that has entered out politics in the last decade, pre-Obama. But certainly not all of it. If I listen long enough to what some of these same people say, you will almost always get to a racial component. Not to say that they rant and rave about it. But it will creep into their opinions in some way. I don’t think for many of these people, it is primarily racial. And I don’t think that these people consider themselves to be bigots, but humans don’t do well when it comes to an honest self examination of our own biases. And when one hears so many opinions couched in racial language and subtle racial references, one can only conclude that it is one of the driving forces that is in play here. And this often comes out in a group setting where one feels a certain comfort level that those they are talking to are part of their own “tribe” and are likely to hold sympathetic views. Logically, it is hard to deny that the fact the Obama is black is a major driver of some people’s dislike for him. It is not so much his policies they dislike. It is the fact the he is representative of the changing demographic landscape of the country, which they see as increasingly unlike the country in which they comfortably grew up and now see as becoming slowly unrecognizable and harder for them to find. Fear is the most base human emotion, and we see that largely playing out in this case.
most white males over 50 probably have limited personal contact with African Americans. what they know about AAs is from stereotypes from the media. The only stereotype in which Barack can vaguely be considered is the so-called “magic negro”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_negro
Spike Lee derided it, but I would argue the magic negro (Sidney Poitier in Defiant Ones is the prototype, but on a lesser scale Morgan Freeman in Armageddon) helped elect Barack. Stereotypes of black women, btw, were principally mammie/ Aunt Jemima or whore, hence the white problems understanding Michelle (and more egregiously, Anita Hill). But how the Obama admin has played out is challenging, to say the least, to the world view of the typical white male over 50 – and therein lies the problem. How many can completely readjust their world view? since there’s so much at stake, maybe more than we’d think. The republicans are acting so stupidly (war on women, unions) the middle class and working class white men must be feeling tremendous pressure to adapt or die.
my 2 cents
I believe it’s because Barack Obama slaps up against the delusion that they’ve believed all their lives.
Also, too? That ’empty arena’ photo zombie Breitbart et al are posting? It was taken before the event started.
Flop sweat.