Small city attracts more presidents than just Obama

For a small, suburban town with little more than 100,000 residents like Costa Mesa, it seems like it would be impossible to match the spectacle of wildly popular, newly elected President Barack Obama stopping by for a town hall meeting.

Obama announced he was coming to speak at the fairgrounds Monday morning and by that evening hundreds of people had dropped what they were doing to pitch tents in the parking lot to get tickets.

The president arrived with a cavalcade of five matching helicopters and the premises were secured by countless secret service agents, county sheriff’s officers and local police. His speech drew thunderous roars of applause that shook the exposition hall in which he spoke.

It was unrivaled fanfare that could have only been augmented by, perhaps, firecrackers, a crew of sky divers, a giant, inflatable Statue of Liberty, or a live elephant strolling through the crowd.

Fortunately, when President Ronald Reagan came to the very same Costa Mesa fairgrounds in the middle of his final term in office, he brought all of those things.

Reagan called the landmark occasion on the eve of the 1986 statewide senate election, his “last rally on behalf of his presidency,” according to news reports at the time.

Differing estimates place the crowd at the Pacific Amphitheater – an outdoor theater at the fairgrounds - somewhere between 8,500 and 10,000 people.

The Reagan crowd numbers dwarf those allowed in by the Obama organizers, and no live jungle animals were meandering around, but “the excitement, the electricity between the two events is strikingly the same,” said former Costa Mesa Mayor Peter Buffa, who was running for his first term on the City Council when he came to the event.

Pushing fellow Republican Rep. Ed Zschau over Democratic rival Sen. Alan Cranston in the next day’s senate election and gaining a super-majority in the senate was Reagan’s stated goal for the day, but he ended up mentioning Zschau only a handful of times. He did, however, deliver this memorable line.