Chad Smith

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A Record photographer and I got to the Jacksonville arena at about 8 a.m. on Nov. 3, Election Day eve. We finished our coffee and walked around to the press entrance. Several vendors had set up shop on the street, hawking T-shirts and hats. One young man, standing next to a colleague on a street with little foot traffic yet, held out a pink shirt that read, “The Real Deal.” Inside the arena, the estimated crowd of 9,150 exuded a sense that the man they were there to see was indeed that. But that anticipation stemmed not solely from who was scheduled to take the dais some time later but when: the day before an historic election following an epic campaign that, either way, would result in someone other than a white man being elected president or vice president for the first time.

Those in the crowd and the stump speakers were all smiles, as, I would imagine, were the folks who attended John McCain’s rally in Tampa that same morning. But there was a not-so-quiet confidence about them in Jacksonville; Sen. Bill Nelson, before dancing with his daughter to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” told reporters Barack Obama would carry Florida by 4 percent of the vote.

In 28 minutes Obama churned through the first of his three final speeches on the trail then made his way around the barrier, shaking hands as his campaign theme, Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” played over the screaming crowd. Then the senator and the dignitaries dispersed, as did the largely black audience. Many of the campaign’s state-level staff stuck around as Obama taped an interview with Chris Berman for Monday Night Football. Of course, it was released later — when the campaign plane landed in Charlotte, N.C. — Obama had done all this with the knowledge his grandmother had died in Hawaii that morning. But there was no discernible melancholy in Florida.

The little sense of morose in the building came from a roped-off corner in the bowels of the arena, where campaign trail-weary journalists toiled away. There was a constant tapping coming from the dozens of keyboard clicks firing at once and an NPR reporter occasionally spoke into a microphone, all rehashing Obama’s speech, undoubtedly making note that the senator mistakenly said, “Here in Ohio” – collectively creating the buzz of American journalism at work in a wi-fi world.

About 45 minutes after the speech the Record photographer and I boarded a press-pool bus, on which a press corps photographer quipped he could have given the speech in Obama’s stead if need be he’d heard it so many times. Some of the members of the press were getting restless as the motorcade sat idle, waiting for the candidate, and they got off the bus, smoked cigarettes, checked BlackBerrys and made phone calls – perhaps to their editors, I thought. A staffer got on later and said the OTR – an embargoed, “off-the-record” campaign pit stop, maybe at a local pizza joint or an elementary school – had been called off. The photographers groaned, the OTRs being some of the few opportunities to capture the candidate outside of the sterile environs of arenas and airports. After a few more cigarette puffs and a few more e-mails the motorcade started to roll. Interstate 95 was deserted, like the apocalypse had come while Obama was talking about jobs and Iraq. The bus pulled onto the tarmac, and as soon as it stopped the photographers rushed to the port-side wing and started snapping away. They had no idea how long he’d hang around; luckily for them he stuck around for a good 10 minutes. Then he went up the steps, gave a wave and went aboard the campaign plane. The traveling press lined up at the steps at the rear entrance of the plane, along with dozens of police officers, bound for Charlotte then Manassas, Va., then Election Day, then Tuesday – Inauguration Day.

Despite one’s politics (I happily have no party affiliation, as the ethics of my profession dictate) observing the campaign from afar, through newspapers and “The Daily Show,” for the months upon months it lasted was engrossing. But to see it somewhat up close and in person was another deal, even when Jill Biden, wife of now-Vice President Joe Biden (and probably the least-glamorous headliner either campaign could dispatch to do its bidding, to no fault of her own), stopped in St. Augustine on Oct. 24. The venue, a small Veterans of Foreign Wars post, was much more unglamorous, and the crowd, made up of mostly white seniors, was hardly the throng Obama, her husband or Michelle Obama attracted. None of that seemed to matter. One of the campaigns of one of the most important elections of their lifetimes had stopped in their town. Albeit a small part of a campaign, a part of a campaign nonetheless. And on Tuesday that is probably how one of the specks of a person among the millions of other specks felt as he or she listened to the goings-on from the Lincoln Memorial, across the National Mall and the reflecting pond, far, far from where the 44th president stood at the Capitol, merely a speck of dust on the film of an historical movie; nevertheless, they were on the screen, somewhere. Sort of how I felt holding my notepad and my shitty voice recorder and watching, from below a CNN camera, the next president.

The photographer and me on the runway at the Jacksonville airport, Obama’s campaign plane in the background. Photo by Daron Dean, The St. Augustine Record

Me interviewing Jill Biden in a tool shed behind a VFW hall in St. Augustine. Photo by Peter Willott, The St. Augustine Record