It was a looong, looong hot afternoon, the organizers of the event or the venue, I’m not sure who to blame, couldn’t organize a one car funeral. For a relatively intimate, volunteers and supporters only, advance tickets required event - not on the scale of tens of thousands for a football game - it took absofuckinglutely forever to get out of the hot sun and into the building. We stood in line for HOURS, first in the hot sun, then snaking through a back corridor inside the building, then after getting through the final barrier, security, we stood on the concrete floor of an obviously too-small venue.
The young volunteers were great, though - there was a lady with one of those walkers with a seat on it in front of us in the hot sun, and a young volunteer pulled her and her companion out of line and took them to the VIP entrance. Another volunteer took two older ladies leaning on canes out of line to get them comfortable. The kids did try, and I don’t know whether to blame my alma mater or the local organizers for the truly epic clusterfuckery.
Michelle Obama is really fabulous. Her stump speech is great - she of course hit on all of her “handsome sexy husband’s” accomplishments, and told stories about her dad’s pride in sending his two kids to college, Barack’s grandmother hitting the glass ceiling in her own career, etc. She talked about the common issues facing most Americans - jobs, education, health care of course, the basics, all illustrated with stories from her life and her husband's.
She didn’t say a word about her husband’s opponent, the anecdotes she shared brought it home - the Obamas are real people who had monthly student loan payments bigger than their mortgage payment. Their parents stressed personal responsibility and wanted their children to have better lives than they had, and they want everyone’s kids to have health care and good educations and better futures than their parents have.
(These used to be considered entirely uncontroversial Traditional American Values until Obama was elected and suddenly this is Socialism!!! The GOP hijacked the narrative and suddenly made Traditional American Values all about catering to the Christian Right, Corporations, and the NRA, and of course TAX CUTS.)
The Romneys have been sheltered from normal American life all of their lives, and truly there is no comparison between these two candidates. One of them actually had student loan debt, the other is a vulture capitalist who got rich killing jobs and sending jobs overseas and has many of his own millions stashed in offshore tax havens. One of them, oh, saved the auto industry, the other is on record as saying it should be allowed to go under (until it was saved, when he claimed that saving it was HIS idea). And on and on - I promise I'm not going to start ranting about politics online again.
I did leave feeling fired up - how anyone could look at these smart, good, compassionate and very real people and think, “He didn’t give me everything on my Presidential Wish List in his first term (while dealing with a Congress that took obstructionism to the point of absolute derangement) so I’m not gonna vote for him again! So what if Mitt Romney wins?”
Here's a thought - let's give him a second term AND a Congress full of grownups willing to work for the good of the country!
She is pretty fabulous, and she's brainy, too.
ReplyDelete"Here's a thought - let's give him a second term AND a Congress full of grownups willing to work for the good of the country!"
Ditto that!