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Inauguration tickets will be hard to find
Date published: 11/16/2008
BY EMILY BATTLE AND KELLY HANNON
Phone calls are flooding congressional offices these days asking for tickets. Hotel rooms as far south as Richmond have already been booked for Jan. 19 and 20. Washington is preparing for a crowd of 1.5 million to arrive for Barack Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration as America's first black president. Tickets to the swearing-in ceremony won't be distributed by members of Congress until January, but here is some early information to help those who want to go and to show how our region will be affected by this historic event. UNPRECEDENTED DEMAND FOR TICKETS The volume of requests for tickets to the inauguration has been so heavy in Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb's office that Webb is asking that Virginia be given special consideration. "As you determine how tickets will be allotted to congressional offices for the Inaugural Swearing-In ceremony, I ask that you consider Virginia's proximity to the nation's capital and the large number of federal employees who reside within the Commonwealth," Webb wrote Thursday to Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. Webb spokeswoman Jessica Smith said the office has received more than 26,000 calls from people who want tickets. Members of Congress will find out tomorrow how many tickets they have to distribute, but Smith said last week that it was expected to be about 500 or fewer. Montross Republican Rep. Rob Wittman's office had received 2,000 to 3,000 requests for tickets via its Web site by Wednesday, according to spokesman Steve Stampley. Stampley said the office is referring constituents to Wittman's Web site at wittman.house.gov, where they can fill out an electronic request. But the office expects to have only a few hundred tickets to distribute, so most of the people who fill out requests won't get tickets. Stampley said the office would use a lottery to choose who gets them. DON'T BE FOOLED Tickets to the swearing-in ceremony in front of the U.S. Capitol are free of charge, and they are distributed by members of the Senate and House of Representatives. Those offices won't actually receive the tickets until January, and they must be picked up in person.
If the inaugural parade was being held in my driveway I
wouldn't even go to the window and look out. I cannot wait for
January of 2012 to get here.
This would be a great slogan for the Obama era.
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