Obamania in Wellington
Trip Start
Jun 14, 2008
1
44
93
Trip End
Jun 20, 2009
Wellington,
North Island,
New Zealand
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
We found ourselves in Wellington for the historic event, with our mate Quirkey who you may remember from other such blog tales as gambling and drinking our heads off in Queenstown. Quirkey had kindly arranged with a bar to put us in a room off the main bar with a big screen and couches. Sweet. We rocked in around 12.30pm. They had Al-Jazeera on. Good channel but not sure it would have been my one of choice. What I really wanted to do was flick between all the US ones and laugh at the various biases, but it was still pretty decent...for the time being
No prizes for guessing who Lydia is supporting
. More on that later. Quirkey had devised a drinking game and had rustled up some kiwis from his office to join in. Unfortunately his game was flawed for two reasons. 1) most of them fecked off back to work after their lunch hour was up 2) he forgot to include the swing states, which given the idea was to drink every time your state was mentioned, was a pretty glaring oversight! We all ended up adopting various other states as the day progressed and also started drinking every time someone said a state was "too close to call" which for anyone who watched the coverage through the night will know was pretty often! Still the swiftness and decisiveness of Obama's victory meant we were all still relatively sober (and jubilant) by the time he came on stage to make his acceptance speech. He had just begun, I could feel a lump forming in my throat and yes....you guessed it....the TV channel cuts out.
HURRAH!!!! Cue spluttering, panic, mass pandemonium and much shouting at the barman as he flicked down the channels from 99 to number 1 ONE BY ONE even though everyone was screaming at him that the news channel was on number 1....anyway he finally arrived on NZ's very own TV3. They had "live" written up in the top right hand corner, Obama's face was filling up the screen...I could breathe again
our set up
. We hadn't missed too much of this historic speech, one of the few moments in recent history when hope has won out over cynicism, the rally looks incredible, the result is amazing, Jesse Jackson is crying in the crowd....what do TV3 do? THEY CUT OBAMA'S LIVE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH....let me just repeat that...THEY CUT OBAMA'S LIVE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH to go to a shocking two way with some stupid blonde reporter about the bullet proof glass in front of him and security concerns about him being the first black president. Even then, they could have (slightly, ever so slightly) redeemed themselves by going back to the speech. But oh no, in their wisdom they then decided to run some pre-reced packages about his Kenyan roots and the road to victory. I mean I have made some (very) dodgy calls in my career, but I would like to think that given the choice of running Obama's acceptance speech live (and it fell perfectly for them time wise, all they had to do was extend their news, I mean the writing was on the wall, was this not discussed, was the airing of Home and Away after the news too important to push back a few minutes for this historic occasion???!!) or cutting it, I would make the right decision. So whoever was editor, producer, whatever that night...I say to them...YOU SIR (or mam) ARE AN IDIOT. ARHGHGHGHGHGHGH!!!!!!!Phew. Sorry. Still raging about that. So yes we missed the acceptance speech. We got to watch it later on a laptop at a party one of Quirkey's Kiwi mates brought us to. The Kiwis have their own election in a few days and everyone is expecting the National Party, which are I suppose NZ's answer to FF, to get in after 9 years of Labour. The party was packed with Labourites who were hoping Obama's victory might inspire a change of heart over here. Not looking good though. Coincidentally it was Guy Fawkes night that night as well so we strolled down to the harbuor to watch an impressive fireworks display which seemed like an apt way to end what was truly a momentous day. We will have to make sure we'll be somewhere good for the inauguration.
