Hope now to see Obama in person

After spending the night at the Orange County Fair and Events Center to stake his claim to a ticket to see President Barack Obama speak this afternoon, Ryan McNamara walked triumphantly away from the ticket counter Tuesday morning jubilantly talking and laughing with what appeared to be 10 of his closest friends.

It turned out he had never met any of them.

“We came to Obama-rama as strangers and left as family,” McNamara said, referring to the event by the title he came up with the night before, which seemed to catch on.

McNamara had met and made friends with the people around him in line, partying and even joining an impromptu barbecue to pass the hours waiting.

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.

The first two in line were both political science majors from Long Beach — Kandist Mallett and her boyfriend, Casey Black — who spontaneously decided to drive down when they heard the president was coming.

“I actually had a class to go to and I just said, ‘Forget it,’ ” Mallett said.

She wore an Obama T-shirt, which Black commented on when she wore it months ago during the campaign, sparking a conversation that led to their relationship. The pair was swarmed by a dozen video cameras after they purchased their tickets.

Aides walked down the line handing out white sheets of paper guaranteeing tickets to those sufficiently close to the front around the time the tickets were available, dismissing the people too far back to reasonably expect they had a chance of getting in.

Antonio Rentería was the last man in line to be handed a slip of white paper entitling him to a ticket when he finally made it to the front.

Rentería said he was a first-time voter who backed Obama because he thought the Democratic Party had the interests of the middle class in mind, while the Republicans, he felt, catered more to the wealthy.

Immediately behind him stood Melanie Findley, an OCC student living in Costa Mesa, whose jaw dropped when she realized she was the first person in what the White House staff dubbed the “gray area,” where it was possible but not guaranteed that tickets would be available. She was one of many people who had spent the night in the parking lot only to be told that they wouldn’t be seeing the president.

“I thought we were for sure good,” said Devin Ryan, also a frustrated OCC student who had spent the night but was standing a few dozen spots back.

That didn’t discourage some people, though.

Hundreds of spots back, way beyond the gray area and behind a sign that said “No Tickets,” people still waited. Among them the word “hope,” a common mantra during Obama’s campaign, was tossed around liberally to justify why they were waiting after being told it was a virtual impossibility that they would get tickets.

Ken Arnold, a software engineer who ran as a Democrat for Assemblyman Van Tran’s seat in the California legislature and only lost by eight percentage points in a heavily Republican district, showed up to stand in line about 3 a.m., but was too far back to get a white slip.

About half of the Costa Mesa High School cheerleading team got tickets. So did a small group of Estancia High School students. Despite the cold weather overnight, “it was worth it,” said Estancia High School student Jessica Avella.

“He’s right across the street from our school. When is that ever going to happen again?” asked Costa Mesa High School cheerleader Bree Arellano.

For more photos, click here.

ROAD CLOSURES

The following closures will take place from 2 to 6:30 p.m. today for President Obama’s visit to Costa Mesa:

 Fair Drive between Newport Boulevard and Columbia Drive

 Fairview Road between Arlington Drive and Loyola Road

 Detour signs will be in place to help guide traffic.

— Courtesy Costa Mesa Police Department

Reporter ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at [email protected].