Senator and presidential candidate John Kerry came to Appleton tonight. To Lawrence's own Alexander Gymnasium, in fact. There was quite a crowd, and I've been told that some people were turned away.

Kerry showed up a half hour late ("if this were a job interview…" muttered a nearby liberal darkly), two hours after I'd showed up to stand in line. His lateness was doubly irritating, as it forced me to suffer through more warmed-over country from this crappy band they'd hired to psyche us up.





As an emergency crowd photographer for The Lawrentian (not to mention as a student and a blogger) I was glad to have gotten a limited-edition blue ticket from Alan, a volunteer at the event. That gave me access to the viewing area closest to Kerry's platform.





The speech itself was pretty straightforward, emphasizing the message I've been reading about for weeks and months now.

Highlights for me included Kerry's unusually detailed (and thus relatively distortion-free) description of his opposition to a Republican measure which stopped Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for bulk discounts — and the way he paused and said "of course you know this, because you're living it" when talking about middle class woes. That went over well, I think.

I gave Kerry the benefit of the doubt when he referred to "the Vikings" (that's the name of Lawrence's sports teams), but I got the impression that he thought he was at some other school, from the way he kept referring to the "University of Wisconsin."

Generalizations abounded, and the event was a meaningless base-energizing publicity stunt, but I was glad I went. He might be president in a few weeks, and if so he'll never be this easy for me to see again.