No doubt this post is two weeks past its prime, but better late than never, right? On Sunday, October 26th, Yue and I headed downtown to check out Barak Obama’s campaign rally at Civic Center park in the heart of Denver.

By the time we arrived the place was packed. In fact, it turned out that over 100,000 of our closest friends were there, making it Obama’s largest crowd in the United States up to that point. And I think the second largest crowed I’ve ever been in, surpassed only by watching fireworks on the 4th of July from the National Mall in Washington, DC).

Wanting to at least be able to see Obama, we managed to be the last two people allowed into the center of the park (versus around the periphery). Once inside, we squirreled our way about half way to the stage. As you can see in the pictures, that wasn’t all that close, but close enough to catch a glimpse of Obama. The first picture is looking west towards Denver’s City hall. If you’re interested, click the picture to get a bigger version, then find the tree in the center of the stage under the Colorado flag, and look right 3.5 columns to see Obama working the crowd:

And here’s the view looking back east, back towards the Colorado State Capital (supposedly Denver is the only city where the city hall faces the state Capital building, but I’ve never verified if that’s true).

For the most part Obama stuck to his standard stump speech, but what struck me was its optimism and focus on working together. Nice words no doubt, but it was a nice change of pace from typical campaign bashing.

On the way out, there was a table for all the poor souls who lost their keys and cell phones that day:

And a couple pictures of Yue for good measure, that show what a beautiful day it was:

Update: If you can’t see Obama, check out Paul’s post. Paul also points out the snipers that are visible on top of City Hall. And they weren’t the only ones, there were plenty more to the north where Denver’s taller buildings are located.