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The last rally.

I got into DC on a 5 hour bus from New York in the mid-afternoon, checked into the hotel, went exploring the city for an hour or two. The aforementioned height restrictions in DC have produced a squat and expansive architecture. The buildings are fully visible in an eyefull, which only increases their effect. Everything is grandiose and reverent, engraved with dioramas of a young republic's turmoil. There's a sense that history is both made and carefully stashed away here. Sometimes it feels like a set for an epic sci-fi movie about an ancient civilisation of the future. Like Rome thrust two millenia forward.

I scurried down the National Mall towards the Washington Monument, turned right and caught sight momentarily of Tuesday's prize, the White House, on my way up to 17th and M. There to meet Jo, an ABC journalist interning for a paper here — by email on the bus we'd planned a way to get out to Manassas, in Virginia, for Barack Obama's final rally before Election Day.

Manassas is 45 minutes out of DC by road. Allen, another election tourist just arrived in DC, had hired a car and was meeting us on the same corner. None of us had met before, but suddenly there were three Australians in a little white automobile with left-hand drive, navigating peak hour DC traffic to get across the Potomac into Arlington a couple miles away, to pick up a fourth. Allen was driving, Jo took the crucial front-passenger role of yelping when Allen drifted out of his lane, and I played navigator with Google Maps in my hand. I missed a turn, and we found ourselves on Route 66 heading east, and it wasn't until nearly an hour later that we made it to Arlington. Tom jumped in, and we joined the traffic out to Manassas.

Did I say Manassas was 45 minutes away from DC? We crawled into that historic township — a major battlefield in the Civil War — two and a half hours out of Arlington, in an endless caravan of political pilgrims. The fairground, the site of the rally, the biggest fairground in Virginia as it proudly proclaimed, was a couple miles from where we parked. We walked and walked, assimilating into the pedestrian parade out of town. Beside the road, a few forlorn Virginians held signs: "Abortion kills children", "No Muslim for President", et cetera. Many rickety tables were laden with Obama badges, tea towels and other paraphernalia sold at extortionate prices. One was selling nothing but a CD, with one song, blasted out at volume and in a continuous loop, with cheesy 80s synths and a hiphop paean to Barack Obama. 10 bucks — Jo bought a copy and if I can get a rip of it up here, I will.

And then we were entering the fairgrounds, 9pm, just as Obama was scheduled to speak. 100,000 people there to see him and to hear him. Jo abandoned us for the luxuries of the press tent, so it was just Tom, Allen and I pushing our way through the throng until, at about a hundred yards from the stage, it was too dense to push any further. The podium was too far away and too brightly lit to appear in my crappy iPhone photos, but it and the early speakers at it were clearly visible. We stood beneath a "Boilermakers for Obama" tethered blimp, in an intermingled, expectant congregration, marginally majority black and clearly majority youth. In our section at least, a number of women wore hijabs. I discovered, really for the first time, what American democracy smells like: pipe smoke and fried chicken. It might vary from state to state though. Disconcertingly, at no stage had we been subjected to any security screening.

Obama was held up at Dulles airport traffic, and while we were spared lengthy speeches from lightweight local figures (although some told long and dreadful jokes), we were subjected to some abominable patriotic and GOTV pop songs for more than an hour. There was no riot, not even a hint of agitation, as the crowd waited. The songs started to repeat. Every time one ended, there was a smattering of applause, hoping, expecting to see Obama stride onto the stage with that smile and that waving salute. Eventually, a song was hushed mid-chorus, and Mark Warner and Tim Kaine kept their time at the podium mercifully short. And then a great roar, tens of thousands of camera flashes, and the smile and the wave.

It was the final outing of the stump speech. I've heard most parts of it many times before, but some parts were new to me, and anyway it didn't matter. The curious thing, for an unabashed fan, was to be among it, to be one of those addressed by his "Hello Virginia!", to watch the magic trick being performed for the last time. For forty minutes he spoke and the crowd erupted whenever he paused, and hushed when he outstretched his hands. Girls clambered onto shoulders around us (and briefly, on one of us, when tall Tom generously obliged).

A few more waves and a few more grins, under the still gaze of two hovering helicopters in the sky, and Obama was on his way to Chicago. I returned to the hotel two and a half hours after the residents of Dixville Notch cast the first votes of Election Day.

Joseph | 7 Nov 2008