While in Richmond, I had the opportunity to attend an Obama rally, one of two that had been scheduled for his first official day of re-election campaigning (unsurprisingly, the other rally was in Ohio).  It is indeed very ironic that, even though (1) POTUS and I have lived in the same city for five years, (2) I was present at his inauguration, (3) I now work three blocks away from his house, and (4) he spoke at Georgetown twice during my time there, I hadn’t seen him in the flesh until now.  (I feel like there must be a special circle of Hell for people who use hashtags in the subject lines of their blog posts, but I’ll take my chances.)

Four or five hours elapsed between when I began my trek to the site of the rally to when the president actually took the stage; the queue outside was horrendous, naturally.  It was, of course, totally worth it.

Obama was preceded by a myriad of other speakers, most notably Tim Kaine, former governor of Virginia now running for the U.S. Senate (there were a lot of people at the rally with “TK4VA” stickers, which I initially misread as “Tim Kaine 4eva” instead of the more obvious “Tim Kaine for Virginia”) –

– and, most awesomely of all, First Lady Michelle!  I don’t have anything coherent to say, so I shall instead offer up a breathless oh my God I LOVE HER. 

Barack was pretty cool too; also, he is a dreamboat.  The maddening, depressing political climate of the last three and a half years have obscured somewhat his considerable allure as a statesman, politician, and individual, more generally, and, while I’ll always take some technocratic issue with the rhetorical reductionism of the campaign stump speech, it is a fine showcase for Obama’s charisma.

And have some pictures of the Obamas together – they’re just so adorable together.

(Apologies that these photos are of less than ideal quality: I was sitting far-ish away from the podium and working with a camera lens of limited zoom capacity, so these pictures are the result of some serious cropping.  Keeping that in mind, I still think they turned out all right!)