McCain and Obama at Saddleback Church

August 16, 2008 Presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barak Obama attended the Saddleback Civil Forum at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, CA. Tickets were unavailable, and press credentials were only being given to established media. We decided to check out what was going on outside the venue, since several groups were planning on protesting the event. We parked far outside the protest area, just in case the police got overzealous and the place turned into a big parking lot. On the walk in we could see the church, which had secret service on the roof surveying the area. Many people had signs, with many different messages. The I Like Burritos guy was friendly and the cops got a kick out of his sign. The protestors were generally separated by corner. The police enforced the separation, and everyone was peaceful and cooperative, though a few times small groups would try to harass the other corners. Many groups there seemed to want to protest, even though their message was irrelevant to the debate going on inside. A bunch of people had anti-abortion signs, yet both presidents are against abortion... Then there was the big group of anti-gay marriage people, even though both presidents think marriage is hetero-only... Then there were the ANSWER group, which are anti-war, which isn't a new message... I'd say about 2/3 of the protesters were there just for the media exposure. There was a strong police presence who kept everyone on the sidewalks and out of the streets. Some of the cops seemed ready to bust skulls. The most offensive person there was this guy on a megaphone. He was spouting racist slurs and condemning pretty much everyone who is not a white born again christian. At one point he got into a megaphone argument with this nice muslim couple who kept their calm and laughed off the bigot's comments. There were many conversations in the crowds, I could only catch portions of them, but they all seemed to boil down to differing world views. Everyone wants what's best for this country and the future, but we all have different ideas on how to get there (and what "there" actually means) Towards the end of the event inside we decided to try to get some photos of the motorcade. We were scanning with the radio and we had picked up the TV producer's frequency. So even though the Secret Service was surely using encrypted radios, and the police were using trunked encrypted radios, we were still able to find out when people were leaving, and which exit they were going out of. So we hustled up to there, then had to wait about 20 minutes. One of the motorcycle cops switched the intersection from "normal" to "all flashing red" so we were pretty sure something was about to happen. First a gang of about 20 motorcycle cops came out, most likely to scout the road ahead and possibly close intersections. Then came the motorcade with about a dozen cars. It all happened pretty quickly, so it was difficult to get a good shot of anything, but it was fun to try. Afterwards the cops came up to us and said "get a good shot?" I'm not sure if he was being sarcastic... After the event we stopped by Commerce to see the Atheist billboard.

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