Claire Messud of Newsweek spent a week with Barack Obama‘s presidential campaign a few weeks ago. Here’s her take of when Obama made an unscheduled stop at Bell’s Restaurant on Route 66 in Lebanon, Mo.:
When Obama makes a truly unannounced stop at the Bell Restaurant in Lebanon, Mo., a small town in the Ozarks, there is an audible intake of breath at his arrival. The Bell is a diner with cracked orange vinyl seats, speckled Formica floors and fat slices of pie in tight Saran Wrap, visited by frustrated flies, dotted along the counter. Out back, there is a bell-shaped pool, empty now, visible through smeary plate-glass windows. The air inside hangs heavy with tobacco, and many of the patrons are leathered by a lifetime of smoking. They are largely older, white, country people, surprised at their late lunches or early suppers by the grand retinue and the man at its center. A woman of 80 or thereabouts, rail thin, with a shock of flossy hair, dressed as if for church in a puffy white blouse and a long skirt, introduces herself and embraces Obama enthusiastically near the door, while another customer pushes his baseball cap back on his forehead and mutters, “Don’t that beat all.”
Obama makes his way slowly through the restaurant, stopping to chat quietly with all who are interested. He responds to one middle-aged man’s question about oil production and offshore drilling (“What I don’t want to do is say something just because it sounds good politically”), then shakes the hands of four retirees in a booth, saying, “Gentlemen, I’m sorry for all the fuss,” before discussing the state of the economy. Mary Andersen, the young waitress in a crimson smock at the cash register, is all aflutter, busy, like many others in the diner, taking Obama’s photograph with her cell phone: “I think he’s awesome,” she says. “His personality—I’m just—I’m so nervous and overwhelmed.” At her shoulder, Shirley Tucker, 58, of nearby Phillipsburg, confides, “I started liking him the first time I saw him. I can’t believe he’s here. He reminds me of JFK.”
In the back room, in front of a faded woodland diorama, Obama shakes the hand of , a ruddy young construction worker with his front tooth missing. Daniels speaks of being out of work for six months; Obama speaks about stabilizing the economy and creating jobs. “You do that, and I’ll vote for you forever,” says Daniels. After Obama has moved on, a journalist asks Daniels if he will, in fact, vote for the candidate: “Yes, I will,” he says. “Him talking to me helps. I hadn’t made up my mind before now.” There is some sense that the dazzle of Obama’s presence would have sufficed, without even the words.
Next to Daniels stands a young white mother holding her 15-month-old son, Tarrien. A beautiful child with a coffee complexion, a pouting mouth and an alert gaze, he eyes Obama skeptically from the safety of his mother’s arms, looking the candidate up and down, up and down. In watching Tarrien watch Obama, there is emotion in knowing that the small boy may never fathom the historic nature of the moment, in which he has encountered the first presidential candidate in America’s history to look like himself.
The Ozarks are not, traditionally, a Blue spot on the map. And yet there’s a sense, as Obama regains his bus, that the Bell Restaurant may have charted a tiny Blue blip. The patrons of the Bell seem above all struck by the seriousness with which they have been treated—”Him talking to me helps”—by the candidate’s willingness to discuss substantive issues in plain language, by the dignity and calm he retains in a potentially circuslike moment.
The politics and flowery language aside, the author certainly got the details right of that old Mother Road restaurant.
(Hat tip to Roaddog.)