Watch out for the traffic around the Grand Hyatt tonight - Senator Barack Obama will be in town for a big fund raiser. As you may know via emails and news coverage, the response to a $100/ticket Obama fund-raiser "aimed at young people" was so overwhelming that the venue had to be changed from the Grand (former Au Bar) to the Grand Hyatt.
There's also a gala for $1,000+ donors, where there will be a more "intimate" atmosphere with the current golden boy of the Democratic party. But his campaign is trying to manage expectations - an adviser told the NY Sun, "If [the Manhattan event] is half the success of the Los Angeles event … that's a home run." And is success measured by a Maureen Dowd column that gets under the skin of rival Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign? At any rate, we can understand the interest in Barack - we've seen Clinton - as well as Giuliani and McCain - in this neck of the woods for a long time now.
Did you get an opportunity to attend tonight's fund-raiser? Are you going? And Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times has an interesting post about Obama's "stealth fund-raising" : It seems that he's having more events than his handlers want the public to know about - and there's also an interesting observation about Obama's photo-op with Bill Clinton earlier this week.
Photograph of Obama at a Chicago union rally last week by Brian Kersey/AP
