This past Saturday, 12,000 of my closest friends and I gathered in Oakland to see (or in some cases, just hear...) Barack Obama speak. It's nice to see Senator Obama giving the public some face time while he swings through our state to do what we know every presidential candidate must: make a withdrawal from the ATM that is California.
After the rally the senator headed off to the Mark Hopkins Hotel in SF for a fundraiser but not before wowing the crowd in Oakland. As one would expect, Obama gave a variation on his stump speech in which he rails against cynicism and offers something different, what he calls the politics of hope. And judging by the crowd's reaction, at least those who were close enough to see the senator, hope is much more than just a buzzword...the optimism in the air was palpable. It felt almost celebratory. As Frank wrote HERE, this phenomenon is real.
Over the flip, my take with video of most of his speech and some photos. I think I can safely say that Saturday will go down as my most memorable St. Patrick's Day ever.
Here's a picture of the folks in the bleachers behind the stage. I know they look relatively calm but don't be fooled...it was merely the calm before the storm.
And now witness the storm:
As you can see, he was greeted like a rock star. Talk about energy. It was incredible.
After some small talk about his family, Senator Obama got into the meat of his speech and immediately framed his candidacy as something larger than himself:
We are here today because the country calls us. We are here today because history beckons us.
He uses the first person plural to especially good effect to communicate, essentially, "we are in this together." He speaks mostly about the domestic challenges we face -- listen to how the crowd reacts when he talks about the economy and who is benefitting most -- but then ends the section strongly with criticism of the war. I think it's interesting who his first target of criticism is:
We are in the midst of a war that should have never been authorized!
Message: unlike my opponents, I never would have authorized it.
It really is a pleasure to listen to Obama's speeches. In this next section, witness how he skillfully segues from the war to a meeting with a wounded veteran and his family to a discussion of how Washington has lost its way and, by extension, why he's running for president:
Politics is not a game. The decisions that are made in Washington are not sport. And the reason that we have not been able to meet the challenges that we face....is because at some level we have been so consumed by cynicism and pettyness in Washington that we no longer recognize what's at stake, we no longer understand what's going on in the lives of that veteran...
This time, the "we" he's referring to seems to be his colleagues in Washington.
In the next section, he continues to rail against cynicism and offers his prescription:
It is time for us to step up and meet these challenges and create the sort of politics that's not based on division, that's not based on hatred, that's not based on fear, but that's based on hope. And that's the sort of politics that we expect to create in this election. If we change our politics, then we will change the nation.
He goes on to address the matter of his experience. Here he brilliantly turns his supposed lack of experience into an asset, not a liability. Watch the whole thing, it's great.
The highlight of this next section for me is when Senator Obama talks at length about healthcare and makes a promise. Listen to the crowd on this one.
We can...make sure that every single American has basic healthcare in fact I want to be held accountable for that!We can have universal healthcare by the end of the next president's first term. By the end of MY FIRST TERM!
He moves on to the topic of energy, during which he gives it up for California. Notice his continued use of "we" with the repeated (to nice effect) refrain: "We know what to do."
We know what to do. We know what to do with energy. And if we set up a system like California has boldly decided it's gonna set up, so we are capping the emission of greenhouse gases, it can actually generate jobs and industry. There's no reason why we can't create entire new sectors of the economy.
As he prepares to wrap up, he brings his speech back around to Iraq and reminds us all where he stood when it counted.
I am proud of the fact that I opposed this war from the start and I stood up in 2002 and said that this is a bad idea, that this will cost us billions of dollars and thousands of lives and we don't have a strategy for getting out.
Again, he runs against his opponents without overtly running against them.
Message: it's about judgment, stupid.
He is perhaps at his best, though, when he talks about the troops and the responsibility we have to them when they come home. As passionate as his speech has been up to now, he reveals new heights of intensity when he says:
Don't stand next to a flag and say you believe in supporting the troops when you forget them when they come home!
Nice.
He opens this final stretch of the speech with a statement that seems to crystallize the very essence of Obama's candidacy:
We can do all of these things. But let me tell you this. I can't do it on my own
He goes on to catalog the history of American progress, from the fight against British tyranny to the fight against slavery, to the fight to allow women to vote, to the fight for civil rights and for workers to unionize. It never happened from the top down, he says, rather the change has always come from the bottom up.
The enormous power of ordinary people...People have had the audacity, the boldness, to believe that something better is right around the bend, that something better is out on the horizon. That is how this country was built.
Which he then brings back, to rousing effect, to what he hopes to accomplish with his candidacy:
And so let me just say this today, Oakland, California, I can't do this on my own. This campaign is a vehicle for you. It is a vehicle for your hopes, it's a vehicle for your dreams. When a million voices join together, they can not be stopped!
Cue rapturous applause.
The thing about Obama and the reason he does seem to transcend party, race, religion, everything, is that he connects on a level that we're not used to Democrats connecting on. Bill Clinton got you in the gut of course, but more recently we're so used to getting laundry lists from candidates, it's so refreshing to have a politician who appeals to something deeper in us and who gets that voting is not about making a rational decision based on facts, it's about making a judgment call based on gut instinct. Obama is running on the idea that we should all vote for someone and something, not just against someone. And he's also reminding us about the stakes of this election: the future of our country. It's optimistic and yes it is audacious. But more than anything else, on some level it's exactly what we need. I think the enormous crowds he gets wherever he goes are a testament to that, Oakland's 12,000 strong not the least among them.
Once the speech was over, he worked the crowd a bit. Here are a few photos.
This past Saturday, 12,000 of my closest friends and I gathered in Oakland to see (or in some cases, just hear...) Barack Obama speak. It's nice to see Senator Obama giving the public some face time while he swings through our state to do what we know every presidential candidate must: make a withdrawal from the ATM that is California.
