A damn fine speech

WARNING: I generally avoid politics in public forums and even at parties where I don't know the guests well. Stop reading now if you don't want a glimpse of my political feelings.

If you read on, you've been warned.

Yesterday, Barack Obama delivered an amazing speech in Philadelphia. Even if you saw it, I encourage you to read it, which you can do here. As a writer, someone who loves words, I am incredibly impressed. In this address, Obama confronted multiple serious issues, he refused to back down from facing the problems and conflicts some see in his relationship with his former pastor, and he treated us like adults. At the end, he even managed to be genuinely inspirational.

I consider Lincoln's writings to be the best of all I've read of the works of American presidents--a reading I must hasten to add is nowhere near complete. Lincoln was simply a superb writer.

Obama, who from the few reports I've seen did the first and final drafts of this speech, is positively Lincolnesque in this work.

On a more personal note, when the father who gave me my last name--not my birth father, but still the man I knew as my father--died when I was ten years old, I went to work mowing lawns so I could help out my family. It took me five hours to mow, rake, and edge a lawn. My clients paid me $2.50. Minimum wage at the time was $1.60 per hour. I've worked ever since. I've been broke, not anywhere near as poor as many but certainly not well off, and now I live well, better than I had any right ever to expect. America gave me the chance to create this better life.

I teared up at the end of Obama's speech, because I want my America to be one in which hard work gets you ahead; in which none of the stupid, superficial stuff--the color of your skin or the way you worship or the gender of your sexual partners--affects your chances; in which we strive together to lift up all of us; in which we use the might and the greatness of this most powerful of nations to confront the huge, frightening problems facing us--and overcome them.

God, how much I want that country.

I don't believe Obama--or any single candidate--can deliver it. I believe we can be that country only if the vast majority of us decide we want to be it and are willing to work long and hard to create it.

I am, though, coming to believe, against all my cynicism about political candidates, against the wisdom of my experience of repeated disappointment at the behavior of our country's leaders, that maybe, just maybe, Obama genuinely shares my desire and can inspire others to do the same. Wouldn't that be wonderful?