Digital Journal – If you want the most wanted ticket of 2009, get in line. Tickets for President-elect Barack Obama's inaugural events were selling for as high $40,000 apiece, even though brokers can’t confirm where the tickets are coming from.
The committee handling the main event on Jan. 20 said that none has been sent out yet. The 240,000 tickets to the swearing-in are supposedly sitting in a locked room.
Tickets won't be distributed until one week before the inauguration and must be picked up in person. But that's not stopping websites and scalpers from giving politics observers hope to see Barack Obama officially become president.
So what’s going on? The brokers are selling the promise of tickets, relying on their ability to acquire tickets at a lower price than they charge for them.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) confirmed she was drafting a bill to ban sales of inauguration tickets. Scalping them would be a misdemeanor. Her Senate office received 8,000 ticket requests the first day after the election. Also, Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., had received more than 15,000 ticket requests as of Monday morning.
Feinstein aides will also contact eBay and sites such as Craig's List, requesting these venues to not sell scalped tickets to the inauguration.
The Jan. 20 inauguration is expected to attract more than 1.5 million people to Washington, exceeding the number who watched the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Already, the 95,000 hotel rooms in the city are close to being sold out.
Since brokers are charging up to $40,000 for the tickets, one can't help but wonder if the senators -- who receive free tickets -- will want to earn some extra scratch and scalp the prized possessions. "Inauguration tickets, who's buyin who's sellin? Get yer inauguration tickets here, see Obama take the stage!"
