Four days and counting (Sam Vogel)

Even though it is four degrees outside I am somehow managing to get through each long day! Each new day seems to become more and more interesting.

One of my favorite speakers so far has been Dana Bash, senior congressional correspondent for CNN. I felt she had a very intelligent insight into the media and how it affects political personalities, and especially how it affected the election of Barak Obama into the presidential office. I agreed with most of the ideas she discussed such as the idea that Obama had an advantage over Hillary in the primaries because of his positively portrayed media image. She made it clear that McCain had communication issues, whereas Obama thrived in a communicative setting.

While I agreed with most everything that Dana Bash said, I was sometimes confused at her comments and disagreed with other ones. Towards the beginning of her speech, she made the comment that Obama and McCain are more similar than they seem. Even though I wasn’t a senior correspondent for the campaign, I did not see this. To me, the too candidates were alike in very few ways. She also stated that McCain had a lot of charm. While I don’t deny the possibility of McCain having a charming personality, it seems silly to call him charming when compared to Obama. Again, I was not next to McCain for the entire election and she was, however my views through the media do not seem to think its reasonable to pick McCain as the more charming candidate. Overall, however, I really enjoyed Dana’s presentation and I think her job sounds very interesting and full of fun.

After our site visit to the Canadian Embassy yesterday, we decided to go to the National Archives. As we were crossing the street, local police were preparing for a motorcade. We waited for a while and finally the motorcade began. After many motorcycles and police SUV’s we saw an African American waving hand out of one of the SUV’s. Of course our conviction is that this was Barak Obama!

I hope to brave the even colder weather tomorrow as the temperature gets down to 0 degrees!!!!!