“Mr. Obama has been ramping up the energy level every day since announcing his jobs proposal on Thursday, and the event here raised it another notch, appearing as a cross between a campaign rally and — this is North Carolina, after all — a basketball game. The university’s marching band showed up in Reynolds Coliseum, accompanied by a squadron of cheerleaders and baton twirlers, to play Wolfpack fight songs for three hours before Mr. Obama arrived, to a capacity crowd of 9,000 people, including students who had camped out to claim tickets.

In a surreal battle for musical supremacy, the university band then kept interrupting the usual campaign-trail tunes (“I’ll Take You There” by the Staple Singers, “The Rising” by Bruce Springsteen and the twangy “Only in America” by Brooks & Dunn) with outbreaks of drumming, dance moves and “Go State!””

- New York Times article on Obama’s visit today to N.C. State