Penn State Behrend to Host Sen. Barack Obama
All public and student tickets have been exhausted; Attendees encouraged to car pool
In his first campaign visit to northwest Pennsylvania, Sen. Barack Obama will hold a Town Hall-style meeting at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, on Friday, April 18, at 10:30 a.m., in the Junker Center. Young Democrats of America, a Penn State Behrend student organization, is hosting the event. Doors open at 8:30 a.m.
Admission is by ticket only, and all available tickets have now been distributed. Tickets, which were free, were made available on a first-come-first served basis at the Obama ’08 campaign’s Erie County headquarters, starting at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 17. By 9:00 p.m. all tickets had been distributed.
A limited number of student tickets were made available for Penn State Behrend students in the Reed Building, also starting at 5 p.m. on Wednesday. All those tickets have also been distributed.
No one will be admitted without a ticket.
Because parking at Penn State Behrend is limited, those who do have tickets are encouraged to car-pool. For security reasons, please do not bring bags and limit personal belongings.
Obama, the junior U. S. Senator from Illinois, is running against Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Pennsylvania’s presidential primary is Tuesday, April 22; only seven state and two territorial primary elections remain after the commonwealth’s 188 delegates are chosen.
Robert Speel, an associate professor of political science at Penn State Behrend and author of Changing Patterns of Voting in the Northern United States (Penn State Press), notes that a visit to the northwest corner of the state is vital to Obama’s success in Pennsylvania’s primary.
“For a long time, the Obama campaign and national political analysts perceived the Erie area to be similar politically to Pittsburgh, Altoona, and Johnstown, but if you look at the recent political history of our region, it’s not like those cities,” Speel said. “Democrats in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania tend to be somewhat more conservative, but Erie County Democrats have tended to be more liberal in recent elections.
“Erie is a Democratic bastion of the state even while some other counties in the western half of Pennsylvania have trended Republican in recent elections,” he continued. “If things are close next Tuesday, northwest Pennsylvania may be the swing area.”
Speel writes a blog on the 2008 election that can be read at http://wpsu.org/vote08/blog/. His research interests include American voting behavior, campaigns and elections, regional trends and political movements in the United States, ethnic and racial politics, American state and local politics, and Canadian politics.
Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, is a comprehensive residential college offering 33 baccalaureate, six associate, four pre-professional and two graduate degree programs with 22 minors to more than 4,400 students. Focused on providing a student-centered environment, Penn State Behrend is the link that connects its students to a major research and land-grant institution on a campus enriched by more than 110 clubs and organizations, 21 NCAA varsity teams, 19 intramural sports and modern facilities.
Penn State Behrend is named as such due to a donation by Mary Behrend, widow of Ernst Behrend, who founded the Hammermill Paper Co. in Erie in 1898. The Behrend family lived on the 400-acre Glenhill Farm, which is the core of the Penn State Behrend campus today.
For more information, visit www.behrend.psu.edu.