Obama delivers campaign speech to mostly empty venue

President Obama’s Pennsylvania stop for gubernatorial hopeful Tom Wolf was a subpar affair in terms of turnout, with only about a quarter of the seats at the venue taken — a sharp contrast to the commander-in-chief’s earlier politicking days of packed stadiums.

The White House pool report said that Mr. Obama’s speech at a basketball arena in Philadelphia was markedly empty — and that was after those prepping the venue partitioned off several hundred seats to make the speaking area smaller and more intimate. Press in attendance even noted that the floor area was dotted with spaces.

And as one tweeted — @NicholasTrainer — the venue was about three-quarters empty: “Looks like @WolfForPA and the President are only going to fill 1/4 of the venue in Philly. ROUGH.” The tweet was posted with a photo that showed a near-empty court, The Blaze said.

The event manager, meanwhile, had promised about 5,500 individuals for the Sunday rally, The Blaze reported.

But Jeffrey Sheridan, Mr. Wolf’s press secretary, said in an emailed statement that the event “was set up for the amount of people who attended” and that Nicholas Trainer, the one who tweeted the photo of all the empty bleacher seats, actually “works for our opponent and his tweets are usually pretty ridiculous.”