Ouch.
Via Weekly Standard:
President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign paid nearly $93k to hold a kick-off event at the Ohio State University in May. And, at the time, photos of the event showed large sections of the arena unoccupied, causing the New York Times to write that the kick-off event “had the feeling of a concert by an aging rock star.”
A new ebook published today by Glenn Thrush explains that the empty seats that marred the expensive kick-off event were not because the Obama campaign did not try to fill them:
“In the week or so leading up to the Obama campaign’s official kickoff rally on May 5 at Ohio State University’s basketball arena in Columbus, Obama’s campaign had put out a maximum effort to fill the Schottenstein Center’s eighteen thousand seats. Trawling for warm bodies wasn’t an exercise Team Obama had experienced much in 2008. That was Hillary’s problem. Filling a venue wasn’t even a major issue in the Democratic famine year of 2010, when an Obama midterm rally held on OSU’s quad drew an unexpectedly large crowd. At the time, excited Obama aides hooked up reporters with local officials who confirmed the total— thirty thousand.