Thoughts On A Rally

It may seem anti-climactic or untimely to write now about a Romney-Ryan rally I attended a few weeks ago, but I'm beginning not to care about the timeliness of my utterances. Timeliness is a strange value of democracies; Alexis de Tocqueville said as much in his Democracy in America and he was right about nearly everything. Democracies are mired in the present and subscribe to the primacy of the now; the past, no matter how ever-present, is rarely with us when our impulses are democratic. Technology, with its Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates, only increases the presentist turn. Stars and celebrities are made and forgotten within the 24-hour news cycle. So please forgive me as I demonstrate my utter indifference to the question of timeliness and continue with my supposedly already-outdated story unabashed.


I have the good fortune of living in a swing state. Politicians of all stripes visit my state, and sometimes my town, in the hopes of gaining those votes that matter most. I had a brief chat with Sen. Rick Santorum last week, after he signed my older son's sticker and before he patted my younger son's head and called him "Buddy." Within ten minutes of my conversation with this erstwhile (and possibly future) presidential candidate, I had chatted with the state Attorney General (who's running for governor), my representative in the U.S. House, and my state senator (who's running for Attorney General). And a few weeks before that, Tagg Romney was standing outside my office, in front of a big bus, and I got to shake his hand and have a chat.
We had a little French exchange, reminding me of another French exchange I had at a Republican rally in Iowa the night that Sarah Palin accepted the party's nomination for Vice-President. For all of the Republicans' Francophobia, I sure seem to keep finding the Francophile ones at these things. I think Jefferson would be proud. Maybe.


Anyway, the Romney-Ryan rally was interesting from the start. It took us three hours to make the 35-minute drive because of how backed up the traffic was on the unsuspecting highway. CNN reported an attendance of "over 4000"; the local paper estimated attendance was "over 6000." Politico probably had it closest when they later listed the attendance at 10,000. Part of the draw was the supportive music of Trey Atkins that preceded the main event, as well as the surprise visit and endorsement of the President and Vice-President of the National Rifle Association, who came across as inarticulate and out of the mainstream, a lethal combination.


Romney seemed more charismatic in person than on television, something I had observed when I saw him speak to a group of doctors in Iowa in 2007, though his physical movements and speaking rhythms still came across as somewhat awkward. Here is a man who I think would have benefitted from music lessons growing up. I've found that people who sing or play instruments (or even who just listen to a lot of good music) make better writers and speakers because they have an increased sense of rhythm, cadence, and pacing. Some dance lessons or organized sports might have helped with the physical awkwardness as well. But I can imagine what the media (or the Republican primary process, or the Democratic Party) would have done with a presidential candidate with dance lessons in his closet.


Ryan also spoke, but I don't have much to say about him. He came across as the nerdy policy wonk that he is, which I think is a good thing. I want people in office who know how to sit in an office and work out real problems as they sit and think and analyze.


But for me, the most interesting part of the evening happened after the rally was over. As the crowd dispersed and people began heading back to their cars, some police officers stopped us and created a thruway for the candidates and their security detail to pass through with their armored vehicles. This annoyed a number of people in the audience, since it kept them waiting for some extra twenty minutes before they could move freely back to their cars. The police officers were insistent, however, since it was the policy and practice of the armored vehicles to zip through the open pathway created in the crowd without stopping or slowing down, since to stop or slow down would represent a potential security risk for the candidates and their detail. Any person found in the open path would promptly be run over, and so it was of the utmost importance to keep the pathway free of people.


One young man didn't much care for the officers' instructions and loudly proclaimed that the rhetoric of freedom that he had just heard at the rally somehow stood in contrast to the officers' restrictive regulations. After a few moments' hesitation, he finally made a run for it, crossing the forbidden zone of the open pathway, and ran off before the police officers had even realized what had happened. One offficer, however, finally realized what had happened and chased the suspect down, and the next time I saw that guy he was in handcuffs.


The handcuffs probably didn't feel much like freedom, and neither does the criminal record that this young man now has attached to his name, I imagine. It probably wouldn't have felt very freeing if his violation of an officer's order had led to him or someone else being injured, maimed, or killed after being run over by a train of armored SUV's. The freedom that thinks only of itself, and only of its immediate wants, is no freedom at all. Such freedom is mere license, or licentiousness, which are words and concepts deceptively close to freedom and yet are only counterfeit versions of it (much like libertinism). Sometimes people are no more enslaved than at the moment they utter the words "Now I am free."