By Bud Kennedy
bud@star-telegram.com
MESQUITE -- President Barack Obama came to Mesquite.
But all some guests saw was a mess.
About 200 VIPs, Eastfield College students and staffers with tickets were turned away from Obama's speech Tuesday.
First, they were barred from the already jammed college gym.
Then, they were sent to watch a video feed in the student center. But nobody there knew the channel.
After 20 minutes of
General Hospital and
Anderson, the wanderers were herded again, this time into a classroom to watch the webcast on a projector.
Tom Blackwell of Dallas, a Democratic convention delegate and a member of the national platform committee, fumed.
"We will have things to say about the future of this campaign after the way this was handled," he said, blaming both the White House and the college.
"I want to see a competently run office, not this. The way we were treated is a total surprise. Here were all the people who spent hours organizing this event locally, and we're suddenly told nobody else gets in."
Staff members for state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, and state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, were among those with tickets turned away after waiting hours in the noontime sun, along with employees who had worked all night cleaning the campus and trimming the lawns.
Some students displayed tickets and said they had arrived as much as four hours early.
Instead, they all wound up in the 1960s-style college atrium, "The Pit," where guests grew restless as students followed the speech on Twitter.
Nobody could even find the television remote control.
Finally, a campus police officer emerged with a remote but couldn't find the feed.
By the time a staff member gave directions to an upstairs classroom, Obama was wrapping up.
Apparently, the Eastfield Harvesters' 1,800-seat gym was chosen because it's in the district of budget hawk U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Dallas. Obama has been going to Republican districts seeking support for an ambitious federal jobs package.
In Room C-295 across the driveway, the guests' complaints finally turned to cheers.
Many leaped to their feet when Obama told Republicans, "Give me a break!"
By the end, the crowd was drowning him out with the chant, "Four more years!"
But maybe not four more hours.
Bud Kennedy's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Twitter @budkennedy 817-390-7538
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