|
||||||||||||
|
|
Obama chats with voters at local pancake house
A sudden brush with political history is not on the menu at the Copper Dome in Saint Paul. And yet Thursday's breakfast special was a surprise visit from Senator Barack Obama. "Hello, how are you?" "What's your name?" "What do you do?" If he asked it once, he asked it 20 times. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee moved from booth to booth, table to table throughout the cafe for 40 minutes asking questions and chatting with diners. Those conversations covered issues ranging from the so-called "cap and trade" system for greenhouse gas emissions to whether the Twins will catch Obama's White Sox in the American League Central race. "If you think that just because I'm here in Minnesota that I'm going to throw my White Sox under the bus," he laughed, "Although I will say in that last series the Twins gave us a little spanking." One of the first persons he encountered was a woman who works as a nurse educator. "We need to give you guys a raise," he said, noting that the nationwide nursing shortage is due in part to the fact those who teach nursing students are paid less than graduating nurses. At one point he asked a preschooler what she's hoping to get for her upcoming birthday. He got a chuckle when she answered "lipstick." He spotted another little girl who is missing two teeth up front. "My daughter's 7 and she's missing the same teeth," Obama told the girl. Later the girl's father told KARE 11 Obama seemed like a very personable guy. "The chance to meet the president of the United States is something that's a chance of a lifetime," Evan Ziegler told KARE. Obama's not actually the President, but to Ziegler it's only a matter of time. "I think Barack's going to win," Ziegler remarked, "I think he's got what the country needs at this time so we're excited about that possibility." The most serious exchange Obama had with a cafe customer involved the issue of skilled workers who come to the US with H-1B visas, under a program designed to fill shortages in technical fields using immigrants. "We see a lot of H-1B people coming in from India," said the man, who said he works in computers at a major technology company in the Twin Cities. "That's a concern of mine because I've seen some of my friends being laid off." Obama wondered aloud whether it's an issue of age discrimation to cut costs. "I sounds like qualified people are being ushered out the door, even though this program exists because of the lack of qualified people." Most of the customers seemed genuinely surprised to see Obama drop in as they were eating their pancakes and eggs. Even the news media were kept in the dark about the precise location of the candidate's morning stop until the last minute. For security reasons the Obama campaign asked photographers assemble in downtown Minneapolis, and then hauled them to the restaurant at the corner of Randolph and Hamline Avenues in Saint Paul. News of Obama's appearance traveled throughout the neighborhood, prompting Sarah Burke to head to the Copper Dome in hopes of catching a glimpse. Before she knew it she was inside the restaurant and Obama was holding her 7-month-old baby Weston. "Are you voting? Are you voting, too?" Obama asked the baby. The prospect of Obama interacting with average Minnesotans for the camera prompted the McCain campaign to send regional spokesperson Tom Steward to the cafe. "Look it, every day Barack Obama looks more and more like your typical politician," Steward told reporters on the sidewalk outside the Copper Dome. He wanted to make sure all the television images didn't obscure what brought Obama to the Twin Cities, a huge fundraiser the night before at the downtown Minneapolis Hilton Hotel. Donors at that private fundraiser, some 350 of them, gave at least $1,000 to see Obama speak and $28,500 to have dinner with him. "Today he met briefly with ordinary people," Steward said, "But by and large he was here to meet with people who helped him raise million and millions of dollars." None of that seemed to matter to Gayle Christenden, who was genuinely ecstatic about meeting Obama in the cafe and getting him to autograph her menu. "Anybody that can speak as well as he does is intelligent and we need that in our country," Christensen told KARE. "I believe in America and I know we need change." The Copper Dome's guest star never had a chance to sit down and eat, but as he headed out the door Obama grabbed a short stack of pancakes that he'd ordered earlier to go.
|
 MORE HEADLINES |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
