Democratic supporters are complaining and calling Barack Obama campaign conditions to hear Obama's speech at the convention "elitist" and saying it equals "blackmail".
Rocky Mountain News is
reporting that Obama tickets come with a catch this year. The catch is that people that wanted to hear Obama's speech on the last night of the convention, which will be given at the Invesco Field at Mile High in Colorado, must "volunteer" to spend at least 6 hours working for the campaign.
This has some people angered with one man saying he was told he would need to do 12 hours of phone work or canvassing in order to obtain the two tickets he wanted to the event.
When asked if he would be willing to do the work he replied, "hell no" and said those types of conditions were "blackmail".
A working mother from Centennial by the name of Heather Kreider, expressed her anger and frustration to the Rocky Mountain News, saying that
"Democrats need to act like Democrats" and going further to explain her anger by stating,
"Democrats work for a living, and they have to work and take care of their families. And they say these are open to those in the community, so they shouldn't ask people to drop everything in their lives for this."
Kreider claims these conditions are elitist and not fair and says the Democrats need to practice what they preach.
Still, Kreider got a message telling her that she had to do six hours of volunteer work by Friday if she wanted a chance at a ticket. Kreider said she will not do the work.
"Absolutely not," she said. "Now it's pure principal. I was a Hillary Clinton supporter, and this is literally my first touch with the Obama campaign. And it's just disappointing."
To make matters worse, it is reported that the telephone recording also makes it clear that satisfying the work requirement still does not guarantee someone to be eligible for a ticket.
A spokesman for the Obama campaign, Matt Chandler, claims that there is a box to check on the applications asking if someone would be willing to volunteer and he asserts that only people that checked that option were asked to volunteer.
Kreider maintains that she did not hit the volunteer option on the application.
Chandler also insists that people can still obtain tickets by becoming
credentialed saying the majority of people that are credentialed will not have to do any volunteer work.
That also is in dispute with a
previous reports that stated "Nearly 60,000 members of the public could receive the “community credentials” that carry the price of activism between the convention and the November election", according to
The Denver Post.
