I am not one of the 27.

Way back in April 2008, we had the bright idea to get in ahead of time to try and get Inauguration tickets for January 2009. We were that confident. Before the NC primary, before the general election. So I contacted our Congressman, Mel Watt of the 12th District of North Carolina, and asked for two tickets. We were informed via phone call that official distribution notices would not occur until after the election.

OK. We'll wait.

So the day after the election on Wednesday November 5th, another note was sent to Rep. Watt. We were told they know of our request and we were already "on the possible ticket list".

Fingers crossed.

We just received an email stating that tickets are slim. So slim in fact that a total of 27 tickets are distributed in Guilford County, our residence.

Mel Watt's 12th District is one of the most racially gerrymandered districts in the nation. Seriously. I mean, look at it:

A sliver of darker skin tones all along the I-85 corridor. Charlotte to Winston-Salem? Rep. Watt needs TWO local offices? One in Charlotte and one in Greensboro? Unreal.

Anyway, the email reads thusly:

On November 12, I was informed that each member of the U.S. House of Representatives would receive 196 tickets that we could distribute to the January 20, 2009 inauguration of President-Elect Barack Obama. When we stopped taking requests for tickets at 5:00 p.m. on November 14 we had received requests from over 5,000 people for more than 15,000 tickets. This, of course, made it an impossible task to satisfy all the requests.

Here’s what we decided to do:

· We decided to allocate no more than 2 tickets to any person who had made a request;

· We decided to allocate 70 of the tickets to elected officials and community, organizational and religious leaders from throughout the 12th District who had made requests; and

· We decided to allocate the balance of the tickets (126) between the 12th District counties based on the relative populations of the counties in the District and conducted a separate lottery drawing for constituents who had made requests from each county. This resulted in the following division of tickets:

Mecklenburg – 44 tickets

Guilford – 27 tickets

Forsyth – 26 tickets

Davidson – 15 tickets

Rowan – 12 tickets, and

Cabarrus – 2 tickets

We are in the process of contacting each individual who was selected to receive tickets based on the above process to confirm that they still plan to attend the inauguration and wish to use the tickets. Some may have changed their mind or may not wish to use the tickets because of the two ticket limit or for other reasons. Tickets not claimed will be distributed based on the county lotteries we have already conducted.

Sigh....granted the inauguration does not technically require a ticket, but to be guaranteed a spot among 240,000 ticketholders when approximately 4,000,000 people will go anyway would have been nice. I still have the January week off work, will still go to DC, and will still stand among the unwashed masses and watch history be made.

At Thanksgiving, ticket in hand or not, I'm just thankful to have a visionary forward-thinking president-elect to help us get through these trying times.