As he was walking back to his car, dark circles under his eyes, he turned toward the line of people, still thousands long, and shouted Obama-rama one last time. The exhausted crowd responded with a roar of cheers.
Like many others in the crowd, McNamara is a college student getting ready to make his way into the job market in the middle of the recession, and he said he hopes that Obama will help turn around the economy.
The deluge of people who descended on the fairgrounds Monday night — some local, some from other counties around the state — waited until 10 a.m. Tuesday morning when tickets went on sale.
Obama’s town hall meeting, which is scheduled to start at 4 p.m. today, will be his first in Orange County since being elected president.
The people near the front of the line had almost uniformly dropped what they were doing Monday and drove to the fairgrounds when they heard Obama was coming to town. Farther back were people who had waited until the end of the work day to show up. Some people who came around 10 or 11 p.m. Monday night were turned away.
The final amount of people who will be allowed into the event will not be released, White House officials said, but it is widely speculated that between 1,000 and 2,000 people will attend.
Several thousand people stood in the line that wrapped around a long fence from the main entrance of the fairgrounds to the equestrian center and then snaked around in a handful of curves.
At the front, guards let in five people at a time to pick up two tickets each and write down personal information.
A wave, like one might see at a World Series baseball game, erupted just before 10 a.m. when the gates opened to allow the first people in.
