Obama-Biden visit attracts merchants, visitors

Local vendors make profit from selling to the crowd

September 03, 2008
By Greta Myers
Staff Writer

It was a good day for street hustling in the Capitol City.

Chris Oliver’s guitar case was open and ready for business. Oliver, of Springfield, and fellow musicians, Denise Mounts of Lafayette Ind., on fiddle and Mindy Baumgarner of Glenarm, on banjo, situated themselves on the lawn of the Horace Mann building at the corner of 7th and Adams. They played old-time standards to the supporters of the candidate whose catch word is change, Barack Obama.

Oliver comes downtown on Saturdays to play to the more subdued patrons of the Farmers’ Market. He was happy with the larger, moving audience that passed in front of him as it snaked around the downtown area, dropping Washingtons and Lincolns into his traveling tip jar.
“This crowd is really receptive,” Oliver said.

Street vendor and college student Darren Dibiscegile of Tampa, Fla. has followed the Obama campaign through 26 states and seemed at ease selling to the massive crowd.

“We are at a circus and we are the carnies,” Dibiscegile said as he leaned forward on a table stacked with t-shirts, hats and buttons plastered with the likeness of Obama. “I love it. It’s paying my bills,” he said.

The Obama name was also translating into dollars for women and children in western Guatemala. Dr. Gil Mobley, a Springfield, Mo. physician has been doing philanthropic work in the Central American country since 2005. At Mobley’s suggestion, the Guatemalan bead workers make necklaces, pins and key chains bearing “Obama” and the campaign’s rainbow logo that Mobley then sells at Obama events.

Obama’s name is occasionally misspelled on the trinkets because the village craftsters are unfamiliar with the presidential candidate but, “100% of the sales go back to the workers,” said Mobley.

All through the east of the Old State Capitol area, vendors’ goods offered takes on Obama as varied as ice cream flavors. T-shirts sold at the event were particularly loaded with cultural references.

On one shirt, a fist with “hope, action and unity” written on the knuckles was “Barack Power” and was reminiscent of the “Black Power” motif on the ‘60s.

The ghost of JFK’s “Ask not..” declaration materialized in a t-shirt with the banner, “I’m asking for you to believe” that arced over pictures of Obama and Kennedy, placed shoulder to shoulder.

Obama’s pop icon status was played up in a “Barack for the Future” shirt which duplicated the unmistakable font used for the movie, “Back to the Future.”

Obama’s pop-culture-friendliness also came across in the “Superbama” button. The button pictured Obama, with his hands on his hips and shoulders squared, before a backdrop of the cartoon Superman.

Tavion Whitaker-Lyons, 13, of Springfield, wore the Superbama button during the event. After hopscotching through a sentence that included, “gas prices”, “the economy” and “Iraq”, the eighth-grader was simple and articulate as he described the button’s appeal, “He’s basically like a hero.”