Political strategist Bradley A. Blakeman, who organized a number of presidential campaign events in his career, says that he simply isn’t buying the Democrats’ argument that the threat of inclement weather chased President Obama’s acceptance speech from a 74,000-seat outdoor stadium to an indoor arena that will accommodate considerably fewer supporters.
“It’s not going to rain. It’s going to be crystal clear,” Blakeman confidently predicted in an interview on Thursday some six hours before President Obama was set to formally accept his party’s nomination for a second term at the slightly more than 20,000-seat Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, which has hosted all of the major DNC speeches.
He believes that the Obama campaign doesn’t want to say publicly that it couldn’t fill the outdoor venue. “He wasn’t going to fill the arena. I’ve been told college students were not taking tickets, that they were trying to give people tickets in bars,” said Blakeman. “Then they demanded that the unions come. . . The unions said ‘we’re not going to come and save the day. We’re not going to come and pour union workers into a place that wasn’t built with union labor.’”
