Chicago waits for its moment in history

By David Usborne in Chicago

Tuesday, 4 November 2008

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Everyone in the Windy City is a political animal tonight and almost everyone was a Barack Obama fan. Not that everyone was certain that Grant Park, where Barack Obama was due on stage at who knew what late hour exactly, was the smartest place to be. Like New York's Times Square on New Years Eve, it beckoned as the spot where hoopla and history would collide.

City officials seemed to be doing everything possible to keep the expected throng at the park to a civilised minimum. With confidence running high among Obama supporters – "Obama wins" badges and T-shirts were already on sale by mid-afternoon – Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley predicted that one million souls would descend on the park, but police officials were crossing their fingers that the number would be much lower.

The gates to the park were opened earlier than previously announced and supporters already jamming the surrounding streets and holding tickets did not just walk into the enclosures around the stage where Mr Obama was to speak, they sprinted. As the night wore on and as the results being relayed from the giant TV screens tilted ever more convincingly towards the Democrat, the crowd became an ocean and the swelling cheers of excitement ricocheted off the cliff-faces of Chicago's skyscrapers to the north.

The stage itself, while not quite on the epic, Roman Empire scale that greeted Mr Obama in Invesco Field in Denver after the convention, nonetheless had the drama that any Caesar would require. Instead of columns, a parade of American flags fluttered behind him while searchlights, in six piercing shafts, shone from behind the staged into the inky sky.

Only the 75,000-odd folk with tickets issued by the campaign were in an area anywhere close to where Mr Obama would be standing, though. Nor was he due to face them, but rather the terraces of scaffolding where, by yesterday morning, scores of photographers and cameramen were setting up. Unusually, two bulletproof barriers had been erected on either side of the podium.

Members of the public without tickets were being directed to another section of the park with views of the proceedings relayed to them via television screens, while roughly 200 top donors and Hollywood celebrities were invited to rub shoulders with Mr Obama and his wife, Michelle, before and after his address in a marquee just behind and to the south of the stage. Two other tents were erected for the same purpose for the candidate's running-mate, Joe Biden, and his most ardent backers, as well as for Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party.

Not that the tents offered anything too fancy. Instead of flowers, large sprays of miniature stars-and-stripes flags decorated each of the 12-place round tables. Catering staff wheeled in cases of beer – Honker's Ale and Goose Island, two local brews – for the guests. If there was to be champagne, it was not in evidence when this reporter snuck under the canvas flaps.

Precisely which bold-face names would be in attendance was a matter of conjecture up until the party's start. Some reports had the Obama headquarters discouraging the likes of Susan Sarandon, Ben Affleck, Jay-Z and Sean "Diddy" Combs from showing up. It was Barack's bash, not anyone else's. But two of his biggest supporters were expected at the site come what may – Oprah Winfrey, who offered him one of his campaign's biggest endorsements, and the actor Samuel L Jackson.

It was Mr Obama, in fact, whom the people of Chicago – and the thousands of tourists who had flooded into the city filling its hotel rooms and restaurants for days for this moment – wanted to see, finally at the end of his quest.

"The journey ends," Mr Obama mused after casting his own vote in an elementary school on Chicago's South Side yesterday morning. Although even the end seemed a bit protracted as he and his wife, Michelle, accompanied by their two daughters, spent an inordinately long time at the voting machine. "I noticed that Michelle took a long time, though. I had to check to see who she was voting for," he said later, adding: "Voting with my daughters was a big deal." For the Obamas, it was a day of moments to savour, privately in the voting booth and, later before a tide of faces in Grant Park.

It wasn't just the button, T-shirt and baseball cap-vendors who were set up at every available street corner close to the park last night but also the holders of the guest tickets to the event who were doing brisk business in Chicago. Those tickets were distributed via email by the Obama campaign on Monday and were non-transferable. However, anyone with a ticket was allowed to bring one guest. And the value of those guest slots was rising faster than gold by the ounce during a stock market meltdown.

According to some accounts, a space among the 65,000 invited was fetching hundreds of dollars on certain web sites and even more than one thousand dollars. One enterprising Democrat was offering two guest passes for $1,000 or best offer on the web site craigslist.com. "No sob stories need apply – we're saving to put three kids through college,' they said in the posting, lest someone accuse them of practising the kind of capitalism more usually associated with Republicans.

And more than just cash was involved. Some ticket holders were willing to offer their guest slots in barter deals for other goods, up to and including old cars.

Sam Cooper offered his extra ticket on Craigslist to anyone willing to hand over the keys to "an old running car for my son". Unorthodox, for sure, but Mr Cooper attempted to explain: "I have a teenage son who'll need a car soon, as long as the car you have is in running condition and is not a complete clunker, we can do business."

Mr Cooper told a wire reporter that while no one had come forward with a clunker for his son, he had received several "offers of sex" in return for the chance to watch Mr Obama by the shores of the lake.