Crowd loses interest, walks out on Obama at campaign event
President Obama hasn't been on the campaign trail much this election season, and a story out of Maryland on Sunday suggests that's a good thing for Democratic candidates' prospects. When Obama spoke at a campaign event for gubernatorial candidate Anthony Brown, many rally attendees walked out. Whether the walkout was a reflection of Obama's poor approval rating or simply the length of the event is not clear.
The crowd of 8,000 was mostly African-American, and they represent a district in which 90 percent of voters supported Obama in his 2012 reelection bid. Nevertheless, audience members left "by the dozen" as Obama's speech progressed, a move a Reuters reporter on hand characterized as "noticeable and noisy." The president wasn't left totally alone, though; the majority of the audience stayed, though some apparently stuck around to heckle him.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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