A friend who attended e-mails:
Just getting back from the Obama event at UMD. The crowd was the most impressive part. A police officer estimated the line to get into the building stretched over 2 miles. I waited 1 hour and 20 minutes to get into the basketball stadium, which felt like a concert and looked about 4/5ths full. I bet three out of four of the people headed to the rally were students. I spoke to a middle-aged African American woman who had come from Columbia, Maryland. We were in line together so we had a lot of time to chat. She gave Obama a second look after his win in Iowa and then a combination of his rhetoric and the surrogate attacks by Bill Clinton and Andrew Cuomo around South Carolina pushed her firmly over into the Obama camp.
Obama spoke for about 40 minutes starting at 1 pm (two hours past the posted start time) and gave his standard stump speech with a couple local references to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay and a shout out to the Terps women's basketball team, who are apparently 25-2. From the applause it sounded like many people were hearing this speech for the first time. Coming out of the event, my new friend from Columbia said she was now committed to doing some GOTV canvassing tomorrow.
--Noam Scheiber