This is not my blog.

Yes, the title of this post is true. I got to shake the hand of a U.S. President. It was mucho coolio.

Friday saw the further campaigning of the Clinton family across the state as 42nd U.S. President Bill Clinton visited four spots through rural West Virginia. One of those stops was at Saint Albans at McKinley Middle School (of course, we won't talk about the fact that William McKinley was one of those 4 assassinated Presidents relegated to history... that would be sort of creepy ... oh, and it was at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo in 1901). But I digress...

Bill Clinton was coming to town and my girlfriend wanted to attend along with one of her teacher friends. She asked me the best way to see the President and I said that we should all volunteer to work the event. She said that she had read my post about working Hillary's event the previous day and didn't think that she could do that but that she'd be glad to hold a sign and wave at people. However, when we got there the folks from the Charleston Clinton HQ were short staffed so she and her friend ended up working the same line duty that I had worked the previous day. In fact, the Charleston office was responsible for working all 4 of the events that Bill was stopping at in the region so all of the folks who had helped the prior day were spread out leaving only two full-time guys to work this event. Since I had worked on the line the prior day it now became my duty to sort of run, as much as it needed running, and I had fun doing it making sure to keep telling Kay and her friend they were doing a great job as I had been told the previous day when I was being managed in that duty. :-)

I ended up seeing some people who I knew in the line as I went through making sure that everyone had an admission ticket ... that we were handing out ... they required people to write down their name and address for demographic purposes or some such thing. We also had to go through and tell people that the Secret Service had told us that no signs could come into the gymnasium where we were holding the event. Most everyone was very nice about it and struck up conversations with me and with the other people who were working the line as I checked in on them. It felt really good to be helping out as opposed to just being one of the people standing in the line and hoping that it wouldn't rain before they opened the doors.


When the doors did open, Sasha, one of the full-time Clinton campaign workers who had just come in with the President, posted me at the door to collect the admission tickets that I had been handing out for the last hour or so. People filed in as I kept asking them not to push and to come single file through the security point ... which consisted of a cop and a bomb sniffing dog (of which the dog didn't look that interested). The line stretched on forever and I wondered if everyone would fit but we had room to spare when they all got inside. After a while another one of the full time campaign workers had me go collect the other volunteers so that they could come to a little reserved section for the volunteers and be seated. Because Kay was going to hold my seat I worked a while longer until everyone was inside.

Next we waited for an hour or so while Bill, as we would later found out, shopped for some local Blenko glass on the way over from Wayne County (glass lady has the scoop here). Still, he gave a hell of a speech and worked the crowd really well. It seemed like he spoke for nearly an hour which was about twice as long as Hillary had spoken the day before. He had a lot of neat stuff to talk about that I'm not going to repeat here. One of the funniest things that he said was that he has learned a lot of rules of politics and that one of them is that anytime that someone says "nothing personal" they're about to hand it to you. Very true. At one point he took off his suit jacket and the crowd started to cheer to which he said that he was stopping at the jacket.


After the talk he filtered down into an area that was barricaded off from the audience and started talking with people in the crowd and shaking hands. I went down just to get a closer picture of him as he moved along with a group of some stern looking Secret Service agents. As he got closer to me I got the idea that it would be cool to shake his hand and managed to get mine out there and after a few minutes the deed was done. It was a cool moment. It reminded me of a story that my dad told me a lot while growing up about how he missed his chance to see JFK when he visited my sleepy little home town during his campaign for President. Dad missed it because he didn't believe his sister when she came to tell him that he had just pulled into town on a bus. My grandmother got to shake his hand at that visit and dad has kicked himself to this day for missing his chance to meet the man if even briefly. My grandmother idolized him from that point on till her last days.

In any event, I don't mean to suggest that Bill Clinton is John F. Kennedy ... but it was still cool to shake his hand and to see him speak in person. I'm looking forward to the campaign for the general election because, whoever gets the nomination, I plan to support them the Democratic candidate to the fullest. I never thought that I'd be one of those people who would get involved in a campaign but it has been a lot of fun the last couple of times that I've done anything. I understand that Obama will be speaking tomorrow morning in Charleston. I would love to go see it but I'm up late after finishing a couple of late night hearings at the hospital so I don't think that I'll be getting up any earlier than I have to. I'll catch him next time ... maybe. :-)

Labels: politics, stories, wv