At the end of my junior year of college, I had the privilege of traveling to Philadelphia to attend Hillary Clinton's Pennsylvania Primary rally on April 26, 2016 at the Philadelphia Convention Center. As a Political Science major, the experience was nothing short of the time of my life. I analyzed everything from the size of the convention center to the kind of volunteers and news crews that helped prepare for the event to finally, the camera angles I later saw when I returned home and watched a recording of the televised event.
First and foremost, perhaps the most shocking thing about the event came to me when I arrived at the convention center around 11 a.m. expecting to wait in a line that would go on for miles if I even had a chance at getting in to the event. Much to my surprise, not only did I quickly realize that I had nothing to worry about in regard to being able to attend the event, but I was the
only person there! Seeing as the event wasn't expected to begin for several hours, I perused the stadium. It was exceptionally enormous but it did not have several levels of seating as most stadiums do. In fact, there was no seating apart from five or so volunteers sitting around a small table who were busy making "Love trumps hate" and "I'm with her" signs.
I gradually made my way closer to what appeared to be a podium set atop a rather small makeshift stage on wheels. I wondered if this was left behind by a smaller event featuring a key-note speaker. Without giving it any greater thought, I decided to run out for lunch before circling back to the convention center. Seeing that no one else had yet to arrive, I visited the Liberty Bell and drove around Philly observing their local landmarks.
Finally when I returned, there was a small group of women waiting outside the convention center and many news vehicles lining the streets. I began to wonder when the crowd would begin to form. An hour later, there was barely a hundred people waiting outside. As they opened the doors and we made our way through security and upstairs into the Terrace Ballroom where I had watched the volunteers just a few hours earlier, I did a double-take at the room we were lead into. For it was but a room and no longer a stadium with the way they had partitioned it off. The unpartitioned stadium I had initially viewed that morning could have easily hosted thousands upon thousands of people. The room they brought us to would have been lucky to fit five hundred if one were to be generous. As I looked around, my eyes fell back to that small, pitiful mobile stage and I realized what they intended to do.
They piled us in to this small room just short of the size of a high school gymnasium that they anticipated would be overflowing with Hillary supporters standing shoulder-to-shoulder in order for it to appear as if there were more people attending her rally. Unfortunately, the room was quite spacious for the few hundred that attended so they asked us to step closer as they filled in all of the unoccupied space with barriers that forced us to stand closer like the political cattle we were.
Nearly two hours later, Hillary, Bill, and their representatives made their way onto the small stage as the room erupted in applause on the given queue. A wall of people stood behind Hillary with six to ten rows of supporters standing above them on pillars. Of all the things that fascinated me that evening, coming home to see how this visual reflected on TV was by far the most intriguing. As one can see in CNN's official coverage of her Pennsylvania Primary rally above, the reporter adopted a frame that seemingly enlarged the crowd behind Hillary with her, of course, as the focal point. Now, viewing the image I took while I was at the rally below, you can see exactly how the people were positioned behind Hillary to her right. The same people featured in the frame on the CNN video.
