Don't Gel Too Soon

SPEECH OF A LIFETIME-- Oh - and that Sarah person

At last.   Our whole day had been built around this.  Obama accepts the nomination with the highest TV ratings of any acceptance speech in modern US history, according to the Hollywood Reporter:

Barack Obama's historic acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination Thursday night was seen by 38.4 million viewers -- 57% more than watched John Kerry four years ago -- and was the most-watched convention speech ever.

Thursday night's viewership set a new record for national convention coverage, according to Nielsen Media Research. Naturally, it's also the largest number since the convention began, up 42% from Hillary Clinton's speech on Day 2.

Obama's speech was seen by more U.S. viewers than the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony (34.2 million).

It was a remarkable speech in a spectacular setting.  You either watched it or you didn't - watch it here.  It's actually worth more than one viewing for not only the substance but also the environment and symbolism.  Watch it -- it's pretty amazing.   

 

Here's a transcript, too.

I waited until today to write this because I felt so much emotion last night that I thought I should let it all sink in.   I've seen so many acceptance speeches, and my sense of Obama's role is so deep that I didn't think I had much new to offer.  It doesn't seem to be wearing off though -- not that I'm alone.  MSNBC super-conservative and often inflamatory and somewhat cruel Joe Scarborough was still rhapsodizing when I woke up.  I think any aware American, anyone who's lived through a substantial portion of our modern racial history, anyone with any desire for a better, more just country -- any of us -- could not have watched what happened last night and remained dispassionate.  Tweets all night, and not just from those in the arena kept saying "Tears everywhere"  "Tearing up" "Didn't think I'd cry but..."  I was fine until the family walked out to the center of the stadium holding hands.  Then I just disolved.

Beyond the moving historic moment, and the incredible tableau of two decent committed families who have made public service a life-time commitment, who are the kinds of people who seem to manifest what Americans used to think of as "real American" character, the substance was also inspiring, at least for me.  You can read blogger comments on the wonderful CSPAN Hub -- assembled by a team that includes that very smart woman you keep seeing on CSPAN, Leslie Bradshaw.  This post of hers will give you an idea of what it took to run the Hub operation - so valuable to so many bloggers.

 

MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY

I was about to be a senior in high school that summer, with my family on vacation in Provincetown, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod.   All I really wanted to do was find Edna St. Vincent Millay's summer hangout and the theater used by Eugene O'Neill  and the Provincetown Players.  Those were gone; instead, I tripped over a future that quickly ended my quest for the past.

Walking by a restaurant, we passed a TV sitting on the sidewalk, on a milk crate so everyone could watch.  On the air: the March on Washington and the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King.  I was transfixed.  Living in a little town outside Pittsburgh, I hadn't really paid much attention.  Until that moment.  It was August 28, 1963, and it launched the next phase of my life.  As I watched, I knew that I belonged there - where there was purpose - in the middle of history.  It was a profound thing to listen to this man, to see the sea of people around him, watch the individual interviews, hear the music.  When people wonder how we became a generation of activists, I know that this was one of the moments that drove us forward, if we weren't there already.

How beautiful then that EXACTLY 45 years later, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of his party to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.  I heard Rep. John Lewis, so badly beaten in the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tell an interviewer that he wasn't sure he could make it through his own speech -- that if anyone had told him that 45 years after that Selma march he'd watch an African-American man accept the presidential nomination, he would have told them they were crazy.  Obama adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett, describing what it would mean to her parents in an interview with our own Erin Kotckei Vest, struggled to contain her own tears.  This is important.

1968-2008 FORTY YEARS SINCE THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO AND I WAS THERE

I wonder if you can imagine what it felt like to be 22 years old, totally idealistic and what they call "a true believer" and to see policemen behave like that.  To see Chicago Mayor Richard Daley call the first Jewish Senator, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, a "kike" (you had to read his lips - there was no audio but it was pretty clear) and to see your friends, and colleagues, and some-time beloveds with black eyes and bleeding scalps.  To be dragged by a Secret Service agent from your place next to Senator McCarthy by the collar of your dress as he addressed the demonstrators, battered, bruised and angry. To see everything you'd worked for and believed in decimated in the class, generational and political warfare.

PARIS HILTON ON THE OBAMA COMMERCIAL - AND IT ISN'T GROSS

OK so you've probably seen this but just in case I'm posting it here (probably like half the web.)  I've (embarrassingly) never heard this woman speak before. I thought she'd sound horrible but she's not half bad.   And the ad?  Pretty funny, huh?

OVER ALREADY: BLOGHER '08

This photo was taken at the closing plenary of BlogHer08 and I've barely covered the event at all.  There are so many moments I'd love to tell you about: readings by bloggers whose words hold incredible power; one by one they reveal intimate moments of sadness and joy, anger and hilarity.  The words, drawn from their posts, are the clearest evidence of the power of this institution, not yet five years old and already a gigantic force for good in the lives of the women who have come here.  So many more.

We're all on our way home now;  to Austin and Sacramento and Virginia and Manhattan and Minneapois, energized for another year, ready to write and comment and commit ourselves to that which we create.  From these two days we've learned about traffic and writing, activism and art, gender and age tribalism, friendship, sisterhood and the joys of San Francisco.  What we gain here informs the rest of our year: makes us wiser and funnier and more determined.  And really, whatever I would have written had it not been for Sabbath obligations and general exhaustion boils down to that.  So thanks Elisa and Jory and Lisa (and Jill and Mary Margaret and Kristen and Asha and Erin and Sarah and Devra and Jill and Kari and Beth and Tekla and Catherine and the other Catherine and Morra and Nicole and Liz and Kelly and Jen and Julie ) and all the other beautiful bloggers who, when we're all together, raise the roof of whatever building we happen to be in, and also - every one of our spirits and our hearts.

THEY WILL CAMPAIGN AGAINST US UNTIL WE'RE ALL DEAD - AND MAYBE AFTER

From the day Richard Nixon was nominated in 1968 until Tuesday afternoon, forty years later, when John McCain began running this "Love" commercial, Republicans have been running against us.  All of us who share a history of opposing the Vietnam war and working to elect an anti-war president.  Against everything we ever were, believed, dreamed, voted for, marched against, volunteered to change, spoke about, created, sang, wrote, painted, sculpted or said to one another on the subway or the campus or anyplace else from preschool parent nights to Seders to the line at the supermarket.

How is it possible that what we tried to do is still the last best hope to elect a Republican?  They used it against John Kerry.  They used it against Max Cleland.  They did it every time (well, almost) they were losing policy battles in the Clinton years.  They called CSPAN and said unspeakable things.   And now they are using the history of people my side of sixty to run against a man who was, if my math is right, seven years old during this notorious "summer of love" which - I might add, had nothing to do with those of us working to end the war.  In fact, there were two strands of rebellion in those years.  The Summer of Love/ Woodstock folks and the political, anti-war activists.   

At the 1967 National Student Association Convention in Maryland, I saw a room full of students boo Timothy Leary off the stage, literally.  We didn't want to "turn on, tune in, drop out" we wanted to organize against the war.   The anti-war movement was not a party.  I know that's not a bulletin but it is so hard to see all of us reduced to a single mistaken stereotype.  Those who chose to find a personal solution weren't nuts; communes and home-made bread were a lot more immediate gratification than march after march, teach-in after teach-in, speech after speech.  "If you're goin' to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair."  Tempting, romantic - and not us.

Even more painful is the fact that the cultural and political divide is still so intense that research (I assume) told the McCain guys that this commercial would work.  That our patriotic, committed efforts to change our country's path, and the cultural alienation that drove others toward the streets of San Francisco, combine to become a stronger motivator than all the desperate issues we face today, this side of those 40 years.  Perhaps even worse, these Bush years have dismantled so many of the successes we did have, so that in addition to facing, yet again, this smear against the activism of 1968 (and I repeat, that was forty years ago -- longer than most of the bloggers I know have been alive) there's the awareness of what we did that has been undone.

I need to say here that I grew up on the shores of the Monongehela River in Pittsburgh and my classmates were kids who mostly went into the steel mills or the Army after high school.  I knew plenty of supporters of the war. I went to prom and hung out at the Dairy Queen with them.  But it never occurred to me to demonize them, to hold against them their definition of patriotism. I'm not writing off or looking down upon those who did support the war; I'm saying that this cynical, craven abuse of the devotion of people on both sides to the future of their country is reprehensible and precisely the kind of behavior that has broken the hearts of so many Americans, on those both sides of the political spectrum, who just want their candidates to lead us in hope for what our country can be, not defame others whose dreams aren't quite the same as theirs.

SHUT UP AND SING: CATCHING UP WITH THE DIXIE CHICKS AND WORRYING ABOUT THE ELECTION

Have you seen  this movie?  I sat in bed watching it early Sunday morning on cable and was just blown away.  It's one of the saddest, scariest, most moving American documentaries I've seen in a long time.  That's no surprise, since it was directed by  Barbara Kopple, who made Harlan County USA - the landmark documentary about coal mine union battles in Kentucky.

What happened to the Dixie Chicks is infuriating: performing in London just before the start of the Iraq war, lead singer Natalie Maines (married, by the way, to HEROES star Adrian Pasdar,) told the crowd "Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas."  The scene is included in this preview.

As I watched the film, seeing the rage and cruelty that emerged in the response to this one sentence,  my first thought was, "Oh my God, what does this mean for Barack Obama?"  The people who went after the Dixie chicks were nowhere near a sense of respect for the First Amendment - and sounded like they would be particularly vulnerable to "elitist" or racist accusations against a candidate.  If you remember the exit polls in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania you'll recall that many respondents just about acknowledged that they would not vote for Senator Obama simply because of his race.  Am I unfair to wonder if many of those people are the same ones booing and even threatening Maines' life?  Still "out there" in larger numbers than we wish?  Look at these figures:

In Pennsylvania exit polls on primary day, 14% of voters said that race one one of several important factors. Fifty-five percent of those were Clinton voters and 45% Obama voters. When asked race was “important” 19% said yes – 59% of them Clinton voters; when asked if race was a factor in their decision, 12% said yes. In this group, 76% were white Clinton voters.

In West Virginia, when asked race was “important” to their decision, 22% said yes –82% of them Clinton voters; when asked if race was a factor in their decision, 21% said yes. In this group, 84% were white Clinton voters.

Finally, Ohio. There, when asked race was “important” to their decision, 20% said yes--  59% of them Clinton voters; when asked if race was a factor in their decision, 14% said yes. In this group, 59% were Clinton voters. (the racial breakdown was not available here.)   

Please understand - I don't know if I'm right.  I'm not alleging racial bias in all those who rose up to burn Dixie Chicks CDs and threaten country stations with boycotts if they "ever played one of their songs again"  - but I do suspect they could be more vulnerable to campaigns run in an uglier vein - just as they responded to this one.  It's worrying me.

BRUCE IN A LOVELY MOMENT -- FOR TIM

I've written twice now about Tim Russert, feeling a real loss, and decided I was finished, but this afternoon my son sent this to me with the message "Crushingly moving."   As usual, he was right. So if you missed it, here it is.

SO LONG TIM. ALL THE NICE THINGS WE'VE BEEN SAYING ABOUT YOU WERE TRUE - AND IT'S NOT FAIR - NOT AT ALL

I worked at NBC News, at the TODAY SHOW for nine years, and for much of that time, I was lucky enough to work with Tim Russert.  The picture on the left was one of the few I could find that showed that great, mischievous expression that meant we were going to have fun so even if it's not a DC kind of photo, it's the one I like best.

I first met Tim when he still worked with Mario Cuomo., on the Democratic Convention floor in 1984 when Cuomo electrified the crowd and I chased Tim, whom I'd never met, half way out to the parking lot to get a promise that the Governor would be on the show the next day.  He was psyched, hyped and way too busy but he was also adorable and very sweet as we worked to get  things organized.

So when he came to NBC and went to work on getting the Vatican to let us come and do a week of shows in Rome, including time with the Pope, I watched Tim play it out.  He worked with Cardinal Kroll in Philadelphia and with one of his colleagues who worked in the Vatican and somehow we got our on-the-air mass with Pope John Paul II and a Philadelphia Catholic school boys choir sang on the TODAY SHOW.  Who but Tim would have made that happen?

There's not much I can say that hasn't been said; I couldn't write sooner because my kids were visiting for the weekend and I wasn't being very bloggy.  But as the news broke, my younger son called from the airport. He was really sad.  I'd forgotten how lovely Tim was to Dan, who was around 6 when they met.  Treated him like a cool guy, gave him an NBC baseball cap that I think he still has, teased him guy to guy.  When I went over to deliver our bassinet after Luke arrived Dan came along and this new daddy still had time for a bit of a conversation with a six year old. AND to show us a tape of Willard Scott announcing Luke's birth on the show. 

All week people have been talking about Tim's love of politics.  That was true; and he mined every subtle message and decision for meaning and impact. But he had another quality that was even more valuable in a journalist: a contagious enthusiasm for living that made each story part of a grand adventure.  He brought everyone in his orbit along with him -- sharing energy and laughter, competition that was fierce but never mean and a real belief in both the fun and the importance of journalism in a democracy.

I moved to LA and we mostly lost touch - although he did send a Meet the Press baseball cap in response to a note I sent him.  It made me feel remembered - as it was meant to.  It was the kind of gesture that's been in the stories people have been telling all week -- it's just that this one's mine.  And since I'm not one of the rock stars who have been telling these stories all week, just someone he worked with, I'm hoping it will demonstrate the genuine niceness of this guy.  Really.

There's a wake tomorrow and I'm going to try to go.  I'm betting that there will be a mob scene there but I'd just like to show respect for a moment or two.   I've seen so many of us writing about this very sad thing; I'll say a bit of a goodbye for all of us.

BLOGGING BOOMERS BLOG CARNIVAL - JUNE 2: VACATIONS, GAS PRICES, MOMS AND HEALTH

Blogging Boomers are back at I Remember JFK this week.  You can read about everything from saving gas by figuring out the "walkability" of your next apartment, to child-free vacations to prostate cancer.  All it smart, unique and useful.  Stop on by.