The irony here is: the weatherman was right.
We all heard forecasts that rain was expected in Elwood, Illinois as President Obama was set to address citizens at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery.

At one point, word went out that President Obama’s transport aboard Marine One was cancelled in lieu of a motorcade due to the weather.
We were not privy to the decisions made, but ultimately Marine One complimented by a Chinook haling staff and reporters landed in Elmwood.

My producer and I looked at each other under the blue skies and elected to leave our rain coats in the car so we didn’t need to haul them the quarter mile to the live location.

It wasn’t until Marine One landed and the President had already been through a few ceremonial steps that anyone paid any attention to the wall of black clouds massing overhead. There was a brief warning with a trickle of rain and lightening cracking off in the distance. Then the skies opened up. Lots of people headed for the press tent, but the citizens who made the trip to hear the President seemed determined to stick out the weather as long as the commander in chief was still willing to make a go of it.

Finally, we saw that the program had been truncated and the President was headed for the podium ahead of a list of speakers. All the media in the press tent huddled around a television monitor in hopes of hearing the speech, however, little could be understood between the sound of the rain and attendees scrambling for a little dry real estate.

It seems the President called an audible. With rivers pouring off his black umbrella and thunderclaps drowning him out, President Obama urged all the people who came to hear him speak, to move slowly for their cars. It wasn’t safe to be standing outside in a lightning storm. And, he didn’t say this but it seemed obvious that we should collectively have enough sense to come in out of the rain.