“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” a father tells his son while standing outside the cyclone fences being erected for the inaugural. He was, of course, talking about tickets. And if you know a congressperson, you had a chance of getting the Ticket of the Century.
Most congressional offices were deluged with requests and showered love on constituents and supporters with their allotment of 200 tickets each. Congressman Mike Honda made sure to take care of the usual suspects but reserved ten pair for a drawing and a contest to elicit education reform suggestions.
Zoe Lofgren invited ten San Jose State University students by for their final stop of a Civil Rights tour, which started with a flight to Memphis and wound its way through Alabama, Mississippi and Atlanta, Georgia, then up to Washington, DC in a 15-passenger van.
Lofgren managed to scavenge a few extra tickets from Republican legislators with leftovers and no-shows. And while familiar Silicon Valley faces like assessor Larry Stone, attorney Dick Alexander, supercop Darrell Cortez, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Adobe founders Charles Geschke and John Warnock and ex-Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang made the rounds at the balls and bashes, Lofgren stayed home to cook a family dinner of steak, asparagus and potatoes.
Lofgren thinks President Barack Obama will be even better for Silicon Valley than Bill Clinton was. “Obama’s a techie,” she says, and predicts that he’ll reengineer processes to make government more efficient.
Honda, meanwhile, is staking out the education agenda, warning, in a speech at the Latino State Of The Union luncheon, “We have resegregated,” and adding, “we have to be really careful” about vouchers, transportation and choice initiatives.
I’m proud to be an American! A resident and business owner in this Great City San Jose! Let Change run through this Valley and inspire our future!
Let Change inspire the way people are treated, Let Change shine light in our local politics. Let Change move us upward and into a brigther, stronger future!
God Bless everyone and the United Stated of America…
Go Obama! I hope you get America back on track!
In reading this article, I wonder how many everyday people who aren’t in Office, or some big shot, actually get to meet the President of the United States. It seems like these candidates win elections easily, even though we don’t know them.
I think its worth noting that those 2 million people came to see Obama sworn in and not any particular member of congress, no matter how senior and important in their own or others view. The mandate and mantle for leadership and change rests with the executive branch now, and while the relatively inexperienced former legislator may want to please his former peers in both houses with pet projects, I hope he’s mindful that if we rush to build “questionable” projects, we’ll have about 50 years to look at and laugh about where all the money went in 2009.
But at least there will be something tangible and real (I hope) as opposed to the bank bailout of 2008….I hope we get some money to actually build our high-speed rail quickly out of this (though I hear its slated that only $40 billion will be for transportation projects.)
I’d rather see us really think and talk about what we want to build for the future and take a couple of years to make the right choices rather than throwing money out quickly just to pay people to put shovels in the dirt for a year.
Congratulations to Obama and all who had a chance to attend.
It’s an awesome feeling to be a part of a moment in history…and I hope we’ll all have a chance to be a part of the lasting future history of this country with a new spirit of civic engagement that continues beyond one election every four or eight years….
I just reveived this and I thought I’d share it:
Dear World:
We, the United States of America, your top quality supplier of the ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption in service. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service outage has been located, and the software responsible was replaced November 4.
Early tests of the newly installed program indicate that we are now operating correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional on January 20.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage. We look forward to resuming full service and hope to improve in years to come. We thank you for your patience and understanding.
Sincerely,
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA