...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Wednesday, July 28, 2004
      ( 5:56 AM )
 
Obama

If you didn't hear or see Barak Obama's speech last night at the convention, I urge you to find a replay and listen - or better yet, watch. He has the kind of potential that you see very rarely in politics, and despite the forked tongues of the Fox reporters after the speech, I think the general consensus has been: "WOW!"

He gave the perfect speech last night - centering on the theme of the week: unity. But the way Obama talks unity is the way the country wants to hear about it - not sugary sweet platitudes, but the truth:

Yet even as we speek, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal Amercan and a conservative America -- there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and a white America -- there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States [...] but I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

While I disagree with the fact that there isn't a division between black and white America, I think someone like Obama could be the one to set that division on its way out. There is simply no quick fix to hundreds of years of institutionalized racism in this country, but an African American national leader could do what decades of fighting for equity and justice have tried to achieve.

President Obama. I like the sound of it. And I'm not the only one. I've joined the bandwagon, and I'm going to stay on it. There's no doubt he's got his Senate race in the bag. It's shameful for our country that he will be only the 3rd African American senator since Reconstruction, but perhaps Barak Obama is the new Man of the People for a new century. We can only hope.

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