C2EA/RI & Med Students Chat with Obama at Brown

1. Obama on Brown Campus, Friday Oct Pat and Emily and took off on a relatively spontaneous post-teach effort to get to Senator Obama. Sadly, the line stretched about a kilometer by the time we got there, and that was only for the overflow room! Efforts to slink into the proper room did not pan out, so Pat and I went to Thayer Street to, umm, see the sights for a while. Returning to Pat's car, we saw a couple dozen people bunched up around a shiny car. We went over and saw the Senator! He was trying to leave, and had been mobbed for hours at this point, but I tapped him on the should and said "thank you for your efforts to remove that awful South Africa Health Minister this summer." This *really* caught his attention -- it didn't seem like he had been hearing much from Americans about this on his extensive campaign tours. He swung around and said, "yes Manto is a real knucklehead." We talked about that for a couple seconds, but I forgot to grab his hand, so he jumped in the car before I got anything out about $8 billion over five years for health workers. I was a bit slow on this one unfortunately. LESSONS LEARNED: A. you can get their attention if you say something they _did_ want to talk about but are not hearing from the people, and show you know something about them and their priorities. B. get a handshake and don't let go! C. drinking before birddogging can lead to sloppy outcomes. D. small posse of two forgot to bunch up around target, although might not have been possible in these final seconds anyway -- always worth a try.