I’m absolutely, positively, 100 percent supporting Barack Obama, and I would encourage you to as well. I could make a very strong case that his policies, character, record, intellect, etc. make him a better candidate than Hillary Clinton. But that is for you to find out for yourself, and hopefully not in The Argus. Instead, I just want to say that if you haven’t seen his speeches from recent days, please do yourself the favor of YouTube-ing the one from Jan. 28 at American University (they’re all sweet, but that one was especially sweet). The speech is as exciting as the atmosphere that surrounds it. Something very special is happening in our country.
According to Gallup Polls, Barack Obama was behind Hillary Clinton 44 percent to 24 percent on Jan. 20. Now she is barely ahead, 43 percent to 39 percent. With John Edwards out of the race, my guess is that voters drawn to his message of change from the status quo will flock to the other change candidate, Obama.
Obama announced Thursday that in January he raised $32 million and attracted 170,000 new donors, bringing the total number of donors to 650,000.
Ninety-nine percent of Obama’s campaign contributions have come from individual donors, while only eighty-eight percent of Hillary’s have. The rest is classified as “other.”
In the interest of fairness, I went to a Hillary Clinton event in Hartford a couple days ago. I have nothing against her, and will vote for her if she is the nominee. But there was something eerie about the rally. I somehow managed to snag a seat behind her (I was on the TV!) and sat among union members who had been placed there for the photo op. None of them were enthusiastic about her. “We’re just here ’cause we have to be,” one of them told me.
You know how our parents’ generation gets all excited when they talk about Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, about what could have been if he hadn’t been assassinated? I think we will look back on this moment in the same way. How fitting then, that Edward Kennedy just endorsed Obama.
We in the Democratic Party have been too afraid to stand up for what we believe for a long time. We have been so browbeaten by the depressing state of the world that we have lost sight of our hope. Suddenly, Obama has rekindled it. If we don’t have the courage to nominate him, we don’t deserve to win in November.
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