Wolverine commencement had plenty of good/bad surprises

This week there were two big topics that I chose to consider for my column this week. Those subjects were the statewide smoking ban that takes affect this week in local bars and restaurants and President Barack Obama’s visit to the University of Michigan spring commencement.

President Obama won.

I had the rare opportunity to cover the event for our newspapers. Chelsea and Dexter editor Daniel Lai (remember Danny boy?) and myself were commissioned to cover the event for our company. He was the writer and I was the photographer.

Leading up to the day I was pretty excited. I knew this was a big deal and a great opportunity.

I arrived promptly at 5 a.m. to gather my press credentials and start waiting in line for entry to the stadium. At about 6:11 a.m. it started pouring rain on me. Since there was still a massive thunderstorm looming over the Big House, they did not let us in at 6:30 a.m. when they were supposed to because apparently metal detectors don’t work during thunderstorms.

The thunder and rain lasted until a little after 7 a.m. But surprise, surprise! Someone lost the key to the media’s gate!

After another 20 minutes of waiting for someone to find the right key (which they never did, forcing us to enter through the gate next to us), we set our equipment next to the security area and made our way through the security lines. Once through, we stood next to our equipment to the side of the lines and waited for the bomb dog.

This is where security was disappointing. You would assume that when the President of the United States comes to town that people are going to take security pretty seriously. I definitely assumed that. Well, we all know what happens when people assume.

The most disappointing detail was that no one asked me for identification that day. The lady in the media trailer didn’t ask for ID when I told her my name for credentials and the people at the gate didn’t ask to see it either.

Secondly, the security lines that the press went through were so busy that no one was keeping track of which press members had actually been through the detectors and which were dropping off equipment. At one point, a security guard asked the woman next to me if she had been through the line yet. She said yes, and the man took her word for it.

I thought, really? Is that it? He’s just going to take her word for it? There was no way to identify which members of the media had been through the security check and which were standing around.

I was also not convinced by the aptitude of the so-called bomb dog. Frankly, he looked more like a sad, wet puppy looking for treats in his leader’s hand than a well-trained canine sniffing out traces of explosives. He didn’t sniff much, and the things that he did sniff looked more like potential places to urinate on.

Of course, all of these security weaknesses had nothing to do with secret service personnel. The individuals at the entrance were enlisted to help out with the 90,000 or more individuals that had to be ushered inside.

By stark contrast, the secret service man that I met that day was everything I imagined him to be. He was serious and never flinching, like the Buckingham Palace guards. His eyes were on a swivel while he took in every detail around him.

He’s the reason I couldn’t get into the graduate seating area to take pictures from different angles. He’s the one who banished me to the press bleachers for trying to take candid photos of students from within the crowd.

Good for him. He did his job. I felt safer knowing that he was standing next to me.
As for the rest of the day, it was everything I thought it would be. The student speaker was engaging and funny, and President Obama’s keynote address made me reminisce about his campaign.

For me it was a useful way to come full circle. I was a Wolverine student myself when Obama first went on the campaign trail. That was back in the day when Hillary Clinton stood a shot and Obama was “that senator in the primary from Illinois.” So it felt right to be in the Big House when he came to Ann Arbor for graduation.

When I was still a college student, his words moved people. When he gave speeches, I often saved them on YouTube. Now he is our leader, and the very same students that helped to vote him into office heard him speak of change once more.

Those were some lucky Wolverines.