OK, today was not the best day so far. In the morning seminars C-SPAN was filming live for about three hours. Steve Skulley took questions from the crowd and viewers nation wide, and did two interviews. The questions from the students were pretty good and generated good responses; the questions from callers, not so much. Not only did they make over-thought statements and look for their one minute on live tv, they either got cut off before asking their question for taking to long or made a completely uneducated statement (one caller stated that they were completely surprised that there was a black president before a female, note the ignorance in their tone). After this we spent a hour or so with the NDN, a democratic lobbyist group with the aim or further developing the democratic party in parts of the country where it does not have the support of the majority within the state/area and account for the changes to party strategy. It provided me with little knowledge and insight into what they do, as the speaker pretty much only stated what accounted for President-elect Obama’s victory in the election, something that has been talked about for the past two days and the past few weeks.
The night ended with the reception at the Chamber of Commerce. This was a major disappointment to me, and an embarrassing one at that. Bob Scheifer, a Sunday morning political talk show host that I have watched for a significant amount of time and a major player in the 2008 presidential debates, spoke at the reception. During the twenty minutes or so that he spoke the Washington Center staff had to ask the crowd to quiet down more than three times and Mr. Scheifer at one point said that he would “wrap it up” in a tone that sounded both irritated and offended. It was embarassing that other students from other schools could not handle or respect a well known journalist. Lets hope tomorrow is better.
