A strange day in a strange place

The scene made no sense: A remote Florida field. A former orange grove now converted into a giant solar energy farm. Solar panels shifting with the sun like thousands of sails catching sunbeams.

Equally out of place were the serious men wearing serious suits and serious sunglasses standing in every nook and cranny, high and low. No smiles, just scanning the crowd, the countryside, the skies and me.

A hundred media folks adjusted cameras with giant lenses and more TV cameras than anyone could need shot images of the same thing. And there I was, standing in the middle of it.

We were waiting for the most powerful man in the world to arrive and extol the benefits of solar energy production. He wouldn't need to do much convincing about the power of the sun as overdressed journalists and staff from climes a thousand miles north of Arcadia withered in the heat.

It's unknown how this location was chosen. A thousand other locations around the perimeter of the solar power farm would have worked just fine. It probably had to do with the perfect angle on those solar panels. Or maybe it worked well for landing a helicopter with President Barack Obama, and then serving as a staging area for a presidential motorcade from nowhere to nowhere. It didn't matter.

Here came the motorcade. Then nothing. Was he in there? Was he approving drone strikes on a distant Afghanistan village? Minutes vanished as we waited. Finally, there he was.

I've had the good fortune to see a couple of presidents, several senators and members of Congress, and what's most remarkable about them in person is how unremarkable they seem. They look younger, older, skinnier, fatter or whatever than you expect, but they also seem more human. You realize looking at these men and women that they are just like us, maybe with a few more or less brain cells and possibly a different point of view, but people just the same.

Looking at Obama I couldn't help but think of the folks who scream that he's everything evil. When you see and hear him, you realize he's not. Neither was Bush, Clinton, Reagan and on and on. They aren't evil people - just people - given an amazing job with incredible pressure. We put them on the highest pedestal and some of us try to knock them off. It's absurd but it's how we play the game.

He arrived at the podium, looking younger and thinner than I expected. His booming voice sliced through the heavy air. He spoke of important and expensive improvements to our country's electrical grid, and the need for more solar plants like the one outside of Arcadia.

I kept thinking that this speech wasn't one of the soaring oratorical masterpieces made on the campaign trail. I didn't hold it against him because, hey, you can only be inspiring every so often. Now wasn't the time.

As he talked I observed my fellow journalists covering the event. The media looked like it was covering a city council meeting. Reporters hardly wrote down the sound bytes speech writers had worked so hard to conjure. They wanted to know how much a solar initiative would cost; why solar power when so many other things need fixed; what's going on in Afghanistan; what about the health care bill; and the First Family's dog; and the ... never mind.

As the president concluded his speech, and "Hail to the Chief" blared over the speakers, I still couldn't shake the absurdity of the scene. The amount of work it took for that brief appearance left me wondering if it was worth it. From my selfish standpoint it was worth every second, but was it worth it for a busy president?

How many thousands of dollars were spent by organizers, taxpayers and news agencies? And that says nothing about the work required of the serious men in serious suits to stand in the sun in their dark suits and serious sunglasses scanning the crowd, the countryside, the skies and me.

I guess that's just a day in the life of the most powerful man in the world - and a regular guy soaking it all in.