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February 23, 2006 · Bethel College's Wiekamp Center
The visit: On February 23, 2006, President George W. Bush spoke at Bethel College's Wiekamp Center in Mishawaka — the first visit of a sitting President of the United States to the city, ninety-eight years after the vice president's evening of 1908. The occasion was a fundraiser for Representative Chris Chocola, with more than five hundred contributors in the room and more than a thousand students watching on a live feed in the Everest-Rohrer Chapel/Fine Arts Center. As an event it is the modern form of 1908: the national visitation shrunk from the whole town in the street to a ticketed room and a simulcast — documented at exactly that size, as Culture prints the pair.
The file of visits, with the search shown: Mishawaka's documented encounters with the national stage are few enough to print whole, and this entry completes the file the record gives. Between Fairbanks in 1908 and Bush in 2006, the commissioned history's national-notice account — which presents the two visits as the city's file, ninety-eight years apart — carries no other sitting president's or vice president's stop in Mishawaka, and directed searching of the press record reached for this build found none: the region's other presidential traffic belongs to its neighbors and is boundary-printed as theirs — the campaign and official stops at South Bend and at Notre Dame, President Johnson's damage survey of 1965, the Elkhart visits — and none of it is imported here. The negative stands at the strength of the record reached: two visitations in a century, both documented whole, one in each of this record's first two bands.
Sources:
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History, as carried in the Culture section of this history — the visit of February 23, 2006 whole: the Wiekamp Center, the Chocola fundraiser, the five hundred contributors, the thousand students on the live feed, and its standing as the first visit of a sitting president to Mishawaka.
- Culture section of this history — the city's file of national notice, the two visits and the 1983 Good Morning America shot.