Blogging Barack, Part 1
Sen. Obama is pacing the stage. The cheers are deafening — he can barely get a word in. “I love you!” yells a woman in the front. “I love you too,” he says, to laughter.
After thanking SFBO, he’s now retracing the steps that led him here. His time as an organizer, in law school, in local politics. After coming back from law school, he says, he was approached to run for a seat in the state senate. “I did what any wise man does,” he says. “I prayed on it, and I talked to my wife.”
The campaign: “Everywhere I went I got the same two questions — where’d you get that funny name, Barack Obama? Except they didn’t always say it right. They’d say ‘Alabama.’ Or ‘Yo mama.’” They’d ask, “Why would you want to go into something dirty and nasty as politics?”
This is his segue into what seems to be the theme of the day: cynicism. “You’ve got a lot of leaders who are long on rhetoric, but short on follow through. So people feel discouraged. They get cynical. … And no one is more cynical about politics than young people.” Young people, he says, have grown up in an era of slash-and-burn, negative politics.
Sen. Obama says he believes that there is a “common thread” in American culture that will allow us to change that trend. He reiterates a favorite Biblical phrase: “I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.” He says: “But I can’t do it alone.”
February 2nd, 2007 at 8:38 pm EST
How can anyone claim that this man doesn’t have what it takes to run this country? Obama is someone who follows through with everything he has said. He doesn’t waffle. He doesn’t rely on rhetoric and pundits to run his show. Voting for Barack Obama is a vote for a hopeful future, regardless of how bleak it has become. There is no other person out there right now, who could have brought hope for our country back to me. The lies, the power, greed, string-pulling secret-society right wing who has bankrupt and corrupted our nation and embarassed their own party have been too much for me to stomach. If we don’t unite as a country behind Barack Obama’s message our children will pay the price a hundredfold.He will be the saviour of our nation. Take heed.