Hello, President Biden!

President Joe Biden and Jill Biden will be in the Santa Barbara area on Tuesday, a VIP temporary flight restriction (TFR) issued by the FAA indicates. It bans most aircraft from the area between S.B. and Santa Maria that are not in service to either the Secret Service or the Office of the President of the United States. This would follow Biden’s historic appearance at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which kicked off on Monday, as he hands the party torch to Kamala Harris, his vice-president and former California Senator and Attorney General.

Janene Scully, who reports on North County for Noozhawk, broke the story on Sunday evening that the Bidens were coming to town, speculating that they were headed for an 8,000-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley owned by Joe Kiani that Hunter Biden had visited last year. Kiani, whose Orange County-based company Masimo invented a pulse oximeter that uses light to show oxygen saturation in the blood accurately, is a member of Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and also a generous donor to Biden’s campaigns and Democratic PACs.

The President’s airplane is generally a Boeing 747, an aircraft that can barely manage the relatively short runway at Santa Barbara Airport (SBA), although any plane carrying the president is dubbed Air Force One. Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the other hand, has the second longest runway in the Department of Defense; it’s about three times the length a 747 requires.

RollCall.com, which has kept an eye on Capitol Hill since 1955, publishes the president’s schedule and has the Bidens leaving SBA for a Santa Ynez “landing zone” around 5 a.m., while presidential schedule-watcher ThePavlovichToday.com puts them in Santa Ynez at 2 a.m., likely the difference between Eastern and Pacific time.

Local reaction to the President’s imminent arrival ranged from approval — “It shows he has good taste” from Rep. Salud Carbajal in Chicago — to conversation about the main event: Kamala Harris.

“When Biden ran this time, he said he was the transition president,” said Susan Rose, a former county supervisor turned Democratic fundraiser. “The response to Kamala Harris is phenomenal,” Rose recalled from a visit by Harris in 2011. “She was magic. People stood up and cheered her. She’s both passionate and compassionate. The next generation of children and grandchildren, they’re very excited. The idea of having a woman president, it’s about time,” Rose declared. “We’re ready.”

[Update: Aug. 20, 2024] Several sources confirmed that the Biden family arrived at the Kiani Preserve in the Santa Ynez Valley, following a late-night flight from Chicago. It was preceded by Joe Biden’s barn-burner of a speech at the Democratic convention, where prolonged cheers and chants erupted as he praised Harris and excoriated Trump, reminding all of what was at stake. The Bidens flew in to Santa Barbara Airport around 2 a.m. and a motorcade took them to Santa Ynez. The flight restriction is in place through August 26.