(The following story by Emily Cadei appeared at CQpolitics.com on January 16, 2009.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Appealing to the middle class and voters struggling against challenging economic circumstances was a central park of President-elect Barack Obama ’s winning coalition. The Obama team continues to emphasize that theme with a carefully assembled group of passengers joining him and Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on a ceremonial train ride from Philadelphia to the nation’s capital to kick off inauguration weekend.
The guests are drawn heavily from swing states in the Midwest and Mountain West that Obama carried in the election, such as Indiana, Ohio, Nevada and New Mexico. And they represent more than just the geographic diversity of Obama’s political coalition. There is an Army gunner, a lesbian, a single mom, a Mexican immigrant, a Teamsters Union member and a registered Republican, among others.
Notably absent: Anyone from traditional liberal bastions such as California, New York and Massachusetts, nor from other large population centers such as Florida or the president-elect’s home state of Illinois.
Also not represented among the passengers on Saturday’s excursion are the attorneys, investors, technology tycoons and Hollywood celebrities who coughed up $50,000 apiece to help fund the inauguration festivities. As of Thursday, 419 individuals plus the Cherokee Nation Indian tribe had contributed a total of $21 million to the presidential inaugural committee in $50,000 increments, the maximum amount the committee is accepting from individuals and entities.
The inaugural committee says the 18 people it selected are “ordinary Americans” who “represent the vast diversity and different life experiences of the Americans who make up our great country.”
The most familiar figure among the guests on the train may be Lilly Ledbetter, the Goodyear Tire worker from Alabama whose lawsuit against wage discrimination — narrowly thwarted by the Supreme Court in 2007 on the basis of a statutory time limitation — has made her a symbolic figure in the fight over equal pay for women. Ledbetter campaigned for Obama, and her name is attached to a bill passed by the House last week that would make it easier for workers to bring wage discrimination suits.
Others include:
• Jim Girardeau, a small business owner, and his wife Alice are the couple from Kansas City, Mo., who hosted Obama in their living room to watch the first night of the Democratic National Convention held in Denver last August.
• Julianna Sanchez of Albuquerque, N.M., is the single mother profiled in Obama’s 30-minute campaign “informercial” aired in the waning days of the election.
• Patricia Stiles, a breast cancer survivor and registered Republican from Colorado, introduced Biden at a campaign stop in Colorado Springs in October.
• Roy Gross, a truck driver and Teamster from Taylor, Mich., spoke at the Democratic convention after working for the Obama campaign.
In addition to joining the whistle-stop tour — which will make stops in longtime Delaware senator Biden’s hometown of Wilmington and the Maryland metropolis of Baltimore on its way to D.C. — the selected guests and their families are being treated to free flights and tickets to the swearing-in ceremony and an inaugural ball.
The arrival by train will symbolically link Democrat Obama, who will be sworn in Tuesday as the nation’s first African-American president, with Illinois icon Abraham Lincoln, who as the first Republican president steered the Union forces to victory in the Civil War and ended the slavery of blacks in the United States. Lincoln, whose birth bicentennial will be marked on Feb. 12, traveled by rail from Philadelphia to Washington on the last leg of his journey to be sworn in for his first term in 1861.