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Campaign Crawlers

(Page 3 of 3)

"Right on," another young man walking by said. He looked at me, held up the corners of his T-shirt, and gave several long, cocky nods of his head as he sauntered by. The shirt had a picture of Hillary Clinton on one side, Barack Obama on the other. Bros Before Hos it read. Seventies guy's jaw dropped a bit. When he turned to watch the guy go the back of his sandwich board became visible: Capitalism Is an Evil Beast. Maybe, maybe not, but it definitely has some negative side effects like…Bros Before Hos T-shirts. The sun was setting. I'd spent five or six hours on campus and, shockingly, these were the first two Obama supporters I'd met.

So many massive Hillary Clinton signs hung on chain-link fences along the highway between McCarran International Airport and the Las Vegas strip that the former First Lady had abandoned the presidential race for casino-resort development. The decision of Edwards volunteers to place a couple of his own large adverts in the midst of this Sea of She was ill-advised. Taken in from afar they looked like sinking lifeboats. The class warrior's supporters on campus, even at the pinnacle of the rallies, were not much better represented.

Obama was another story. With very little warning, literally hundreds of Barack Obama supporters in Chavez-red shirts, bearing the slogan, "I'm fired up. He's ready to go," suddenly swarmed the parking lot outside of the debate venue. Police horses whinnied nervously as the mass encircled them, chanting, "Obama oh-eight! Be a part of something great!" Some carried gritty, traditional painted portraits of their hero, giving the march a definite international flavor. And some of these Obama people were feisty.

"Get behind a brother," an older black woman shouted at a middle-aged black man with a Hillary sign. "What's wrong with you?"

Boos and catcalls followed, no love lost between the two camps as the race tightens. Another argument broke out. This time a middle-aged white woman, shouting incomprehensibly, turned to me as I approached. "You're press?" she implored. "Do you see the provoking me for no reason?" I looked at her sign: Democrats + Illegal Aliens=End of USA. I decided she was probably being provoked for a reason. Not far away a disturbed-looking man wearing a shirt depicting Hillary Clinton in the crosshairs with the ominous slogan, "Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when you really need him?" watched a little too intently. No one provoked him. There were a lot of averted glances, some of which accidentally landed on his companion, a man wearing nothing but a barrel with suspender straps and carrying a large sign declaring the Nevada Supreme Court had "raped" him in some unclear, presumably metaphoric, way.

AS QUICKLY AS IT BEGAN, however, the whole circus began to peter out. Actually, the most persistent demonstrators turned out to be those who weren't flogging an actual candidate at all. And so, "I'm a Healthcare Voter!" competed with "I'm Voting For Kids!" to draw attention away from the "Clean Coal" contingent. Perhaps the opposition was able to strike a compromise. If they did, I wasn't there for it. I was in the spin room, where I heard, alternately, that Hillary had "stopped the bleeding" and Obama had finally found passion and "drawn blood." Both were positive.

Just before I went in, though, I saw a group working to get out the youth vote -- maybe for the kids, it's a conspiracy -- dragging around cardboard cut-outs of Obama, Hillary and Edwards for the photo-ops security denied them. Well, actually, someone enlarged a photo of Edwards' face and taped it on a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush. I guess he doesn't have his own cutout.

The young woman who explained this to me had a folder containing a petition with 50,000 signatures on it. She was going to hand it off to Hillary or Obama, but Secret Service told her to buzz off.

Shawn Macomber is writing a book on the Global Class War.

topics:
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Television, Supreme Court, Iraq, NATO