Inauguration Parade Participants Play To The Crowd, Senator Kennedy Suffers Seizure

Well, Inauguration Day 2009 seems to have been a smashing success. The inauguration parade participants, including President Obama and his family, soaked in the historic moment, they watched the conclusion of the inaugural parade outside the White House, hours after Obama had addressed his fellow Americans for the first time as president of the United States.

Other inauguration parade participants included re-enactors from a black Civil War regiment, World War II’s surviving Tuskegee Airmen and Freedom Riders from the civil rights movement all marched. They were Obama’s nod to the past among 13,000 inauguration parade participants from all 50 states scheduled to travel down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House.

About 15 minutes into the parade festivities, President Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, stepped out of the limousine with a USA 1 license plate to a huge round of cheers and greeted part of the enthusiastic crowd. A couple of moments later, Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, joined the Obamas on the walk to more loud cheers from hundreds of people who had packed rooftops and balconies to see the inauguration parade participants.

The Obamas walked a few blocks before getting back into the car but emerged again as the limousine neared the parade reviewing stand in front of the White House. Next they will head out to a string of 10 inaugural balls that are expected to last well past midnight.

Senator Ted Kennedy

Earlier in the day, there had been some unexpected drama on Capitol Hill. Senator Ted Kennedy was taken to the hospital after suffering what doctors later said was a seizure brought on by “simple fatigue.” Senator Kennedy went into convulsions during Obama’s celebratory inaugural luncheon, and was taken out on a wheelchair.

West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, 91, also in failing health, reportedly was “emotional” at the time of the collapse and security detail decided to remove him from the room as a precautionary measure. But Senator Byrd spokesman Mark Ferrell said the West Virginia Democrat’s departure was not linked to a medical issue.

Along the 1.7-mile parade route, many of the joyous but frozen onlookers had lined up before dawn to secure a good vantage point of Obama’s motorcade and the following two hours of pageantry. People peered from the windows of nearly every building.

Inaugural Website

Of course, you could also get in on the action from the comfort of your own home or office, thanks to the Internet. Obama’s presidential campaign set a new standard for high-tech, high-touch politics, so it’s no surprise that his inauguration has been cast in the same mold.

Plans are in the works for webcasts of the ceremony as well as some of the inaugural balls around the nation’s capital, but that’s just one way to experience Tuesday’s events from afar: The President’ss Inaugural Website, PIC2009.org, is offering all the tools that helped put Obama in the White House, including a text-messaging channel and an online database that points you to the nearest TV-watching party.

The Inaugural Website looks a whole lot like the Obama team’s other online properties, ranging from MyBarackObama to Change.gov. That’s by design: The same outfit that handled those earlier political Web sites, Blue State Digital, is behind the Inaugural Website as well.

Working with Obama’s operatives, Blue State Digital engineered a platform that collected millions of e-mail addresses, offered a map-based interface to point supporters to events, and kept the Inaugural Website’s users up to date on the campaign’s progress (and needs). The Inaugural Website is built the same way so that users know what to expect, and can easily navigate their way around the site’s features, said Thomas Gensemer, managing partner for Blue State Digital.

The PIC2009 blog is updated daily, of course, not only with snippets of text but with YouTube videos and Flickr slideshows as well. If you need a quicker fix of PIC bits, you can check the inaugural Twitter feed or sign up to have text updates sent to your mobile phone. The Obama campaign’s “house party finder” application has been adapted for the inauguration as well.

Source : http://www.montysmegamarketing.com