Michele Obama at Winston-Salem State
Submitted by Mac Whatley on Mon, 04/14/2008 - 7:00pm
It has taken me almost a week to make the time to post about Michele Obama’s speech at Winston-Salem. I have new appreciation for the time and effort it takes to update a blog regularly! (And I apologize in advance for the photos being so big; I tried to get them to come through smaller, but I'm new at all this...)
When the Obama people called to offer me a special guest ticket to the speech, I took it without too much worry over seeming partial (Clintonistas: I’ll go see Bill anytime, too!) The last time I participated in the traveling show that is a national campaign was when I volunteered in the Carter press office as a college student at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. And things have changed a lot since then.
A lot of that involves how campaigns cultivate new voters. There were numerous places at the Gaines Center to register to vote, if you weren’t already. And if you were, there were lots of opportunities to help get those new voters OUT to vote. One was the “Faith Captain Table,” where religious leaders could organize their church. Another was “Barack Your Block,” a catchy name for grassroots organizing your neighborhood, street by street and block by block, to make sure the voters get in the booth. And the one that appealed most to me was “Barack The Early Vote,” described to the crowd by Merritt, the WSSU campus Obama chief. Their plan to for WSSU students to meet at noon on campus April 17th; then they will march en masse downtown to the local Board of Elections, where everyone will vote on the first day of early voting. That sounded like a really impressive thing: hundreds of students marching to vote early ought to galvanize a high turn-out. We’ll see.
The WSSU chancellor and a local organizer named Jackie Baldwin introduced Michele Obama, who then talked without notes for an hour and fifteen minutes, keeping the crowd mesmerized the whole time. She’s obviously practiced and comfortable in front of a crowd, and is a VERY effective speaker. In fact, she’s the best “surrogate” speaking for a candidate I’ve ever heard.
The MSM reported parts of the speech here and here, and here,
but they omitted most of the local flavor and charm of her talk. It was conversational and real, and invited audience response and involvement. Some things she said were so good I couldn’t help but start taking notes. Every Democratic candidate ought to be taking notes, because she is preaching the Democratic gospel. Here are some snippets:
"People tell me, ‘your view of the world is bleak.’ I say, I speak from my experience.
"The bar is set at a certain level and you work towards that bar, and you surpass that bar, and then you look around and that bar has moved. That moving and shifting bar is the experience of the regular people in our nation. Life has gotten hard for regular folks and they’re always struggling to catch that moving bar. That makes them feel isolated, and susceptible to cynicism. When you’re isolated and struggling and cynical, then fear is the only thing that feels familiar, the only thing that’s comfortable. Fear is like a veil of impossibility that hangs over our heads and suffocates us, and we pass that on to the next generation. Most Americans don’t want the whole pie- they just want a chance to sit back and enjoy their piece."
"I don’t want people to look at me and see ‘the next first lady.’ I want them to see the product of a public school education. I’m the product of a working class background. My father was a Chicago fireman, and my mother stayed home because she could back then. Those blue collar jobs like my father had are drying up. People don’t mind a high bar. They just want to know it will stand still. They want to know if they get sick they won’t go bankrupt. They want to know their children can get a decent education.
"All these young people are here today because of somebody’s sacrifice. My parents sent two children to Princeton on a single city worker’s salary. That’s not possible now. You can’t afford to stay home with the kids if that’s what you want. Single parents work double and triple shifts and still they can’t keep up, and because they’re not succeeding they feel bad about themselves, feel like they’re failing. I NEED my 70-year-old mother; when I’m out on the campaign trail, SHE’S at home with my girls. You may have good child care, but there’s no substitute for Grandma."
“Children are being tested to death. There is so much more to mentoring a child than their performance on a standardized test… When Barack Obama gets in the White House, he’ll be the first President who’s still paying off his student loans. Barack’s a lawyer; I’m a lawyer; everybody I know’s a lawyer, because that’s the only way we have to pay off our student loans!” (big applause)
“I’m not trying to be negative; I’m just telling you what I see. Barack Obama says we’re suffering from a deficit of empathy. We’ve lost sight of the fact that we ARE our brothers and sister’s keepers. In order for all of us to succeed we have to compromise and sacrifice for each other. Our divisions are holding us back. When power is confronted with real change, people will say anything to stop it. You can cut your opponents into little pieces, but to WIN you’ve got to work together. When you’re given the gift of advocacy, you don’t sell it to the highest bidder. 'To whom much is given, much is expected.' We need a fundamental change in leadership, one that will bring us all together."
Michele Obama’s speech was about five days before the “bitter small towns” controversy erupted, but I think what she was saying last Tuesday is all the response we need.
Working the Crowd:
Dan Besse
Hampton Dellinger
Jay Ovittore
Frank Eaton!
What a beautiful speech
...and dad gum those are some good looking North Carolina gentlemen.
***************************
Vote Democratic, the ass you save may be your own.
Look at Hampton trying to muscle in on Rep. Womble!
Forget it, buddy; State Representative Larry Womble was the Assistant Principal at my middle school.
Awesome Post
...and great pictures too! Kudos.
We'll see if the students of Winston-Salem State can match the enthusiasm of students at Prairie View A&M:
----
There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of the comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. - Robert F. Kennedy
----
There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of the comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. - Robert F. Kennedy
Didn't those students walk to vote
because the polling place was located so far from campus? I think the story was it was done so to discourage voting.
Robin Hayes lied. Nobody died, but thousands of folks lost their jobs.
***************************
Vote Democratic, the ass you save may be your own.
WSSU is less than a mile from the B.O.Elections in Winston-Salem
And I'm looking at the Forsyth County Board of Elections out my office window.
If anybody would like to buy ad space in my window, it's for rent at a premium (Eureka! I've finally found a way to make a dime off this primary!).
Great write up! I was smiling as I was reading it and no kidding
The Colbert Report is on in the background, and Colbert and John Legend were singing a duet of the Star Spangled Banner while I was reading the "Democratic gospel" pieces you quoted. Talk about synchronicity!
And you even got a picture of the elusive Frank Eaton.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. --Gandhi
Pointing at Naked Emperors
The elusive, yet omnipresent
and most excellent, Frank Eaton. Hey, Frank, is that a video camera in your hand? :)
I watched Mrs. Obama's full speech at NC State [h/t gregflynn] on the WRAL website and it really is the Democratic party gospel. She rocks.
"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." - Harry Truman
"They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum Then they charged the people a dollar 'n a half just to see 'em. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."
I am continually amazed at the Obama campaign
and how organized they are in North Carolina. Tonight their Randolph County coordinator (a nice young woman from Maryland) had her organizational meeting in Asheboro, and 30 people showed up (including several of us party officers who were curious to see what was happening). She was backed up by the campaign's Piedmont GOTV honcho (a 20-something veteran of 5 previous state votes, including the Iowa and Texas caucuses), and they worked the crowd to set up early voting rallys, Barack picnics, voter canvassing, van rides, and everything anyone could think of to get the Obama voters out to the polls.
The Clinton campaign's first appearance in the county will be Thursday night at our monthly Democratic Women meeting. Maybe they will come on like gangbusters, too-- but so far, the Obama people are pulling out all the stops to get Randolph's 22,000 Democrats and 16,000 Unaffiliateds out to vote for Barack. If we have more than 35% of them turn out to vote (I think our high in a primary has been 32% or less), I will consider it a miracle directly inspired by the Obama campaign.
Listening to those young people do some enthusiastic political grassroots organizing made me wish we enjoyed the national spotlight more often. It would make the Democratic party in North Carolina stronger in the long (and the short) run.