I just discovered PubDef today, Antonio French’s St. Louis political blog. It’s a great read, especially if one were, as I was, looking for the latest presidential polling information summarized. It looks as if my man Obama is, as he says sometimes, doing pretty good.

Last Saturday my beloved and I braved the cold and lateness, important things to a geezer like me, and made a trip downtown to see him at 9:00 pm at the Edward Jones Dome, where the line to get in was wrapped around three sides of the stadium as we arrived. We got inside fairly fast, though. And we had the good fortune to pass the time standing in line with a young couple who had driven up from Oklahoma for the event with their two small daughters.

The crowd was large, 22,500 by some estimates, more than the Rams draw these days, a diverse mixture of ethnic, social, and age groups. Before the speeches we got to watch the Harris-Stowe University drumline perform. It was especially gratifying to me to see as many young and very young folks among the spectators as I did–and then on the way home on the train to see even more.

Obama didn’t make his best speech that evening; he was tired and talked too long, I thought. But it was fascinating to hear the talk about the speech amongst the younger folks around us on the train afterwards. They all thought the speech was fine and loved the rhetorical flourishes. The talk reminded me how he was interrupted from time to time during the speech spontaneously, not in a call and response sequence. Once another elderly gent near me hollered, “God bless you, Barack!” from the back of the crowd.

We thought it remarkable that Obama was able to draw such a large crowd with what seemed to us to have been very little advance publicity, and almost no advance coverage in the mainstream media. Apropos of that, Laura McKenna at IID put me on to this video, with which I’ll end this post. It’s long, but you don’t have to watch it all to get the sense. She has it from Crooked Timber, where Eszter’s comments are as interesting as the video itself. Take a look here, if you’re interested. And here’s the video, if you’d like to watch all, or part, of it.