A black man is about to become a major party presidential nominee. Sweet Jesus.
Amanda: I better cry.
Jesse: Eight is Enough! Barack’s the boss!
Jesse: John McCain thinks that you (yes, you) are a whiny baby that is still in the middle class if you earn about 100 times what you do now.
Amanda: Clever. The narrative is going to be that McCain is the out-of-touch elitist who knows nothing about Americans. Turn that shit around.
Jesse: Obama’s defending government as the force behind the inherent promise of America. Which is exactly right.
Amanda: I can’t even imagine what McCain will say that could beat this. He’ll have to engage in some distractions. Woo! Rebuild energy, rebuild this country, a new WPA.
Jesse: The GOP convention will be relentlessly negative. And Obama just went after equal pay for equal work!
Auguste: Obama’s giving a speech?
Amanda: Every sentence uttered about the war should mention the debt.
Auguste: He’s really hitting his stride.
Jesse: There are a whole series of issues that Obama just laid out which touch on the far more complex underbelly of simple, polarizing fights. And he just said that we can agree on them, whatever our other differences. Shorter Obama: Democrats are right.
Amanda: What I really liked about that was he framed the disagreements as minor wedges, and blatantly claimed to represent the moral majority, the real one. And you know, I think he’s right about where he’s standing.
Auguste: “[Republicans] make a big election about small things” is a good line. It simplifies something that we’ve always tried to explain complicatedly in the past.
Jesse: As I watch the set and the confetti fly, what the fuck were the Republicans mocking the past two days?
Auguste: ABC pundit chuckled dismissively when mentioning the McCain campaign’s point-by-point rebuttal to Obama’s speech, as if to say “Good luck with that, John.”
Jesse: Look, you know me. I have no funny things to say. This is the first time I’ll go in to vote for President excited and eager to see the person I’m voting for elected, and truly hopeful that they’ll be a great leader rather than not an awful one. What got me more than the soaring rhetoric and the very personal elements of the speech were that Obama gets what it is he’s running for - the President of the United States of America, not a Republican whipping boy. And he wants to do it because he has things he wants to do to make this nation a better place.
Full text of the speech.
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...and it’s about time. It doesn’t fix the mistakes of the past, or the problems we’re all still living with, but goddamit, it’s a good step in the right direction…