Saturday, August 30, 2008

Wishing and Hoping......


I watched the Democratic National Convention, with not quite rapt attention. I've been afraid of getting too hopeful. Kept my head down and listened, cautiously.

Will my heart be broken, again? Will Barack Obama do what the rest of the democrats have not been able to do? Secure the presidency?

I'm not a political junky-- though I enjoy listening to a good debate. I only really researched Obama's platform vs. Hillary's and McCain's when I started working on it with my students. That's when I started thinking seriously about Obama. His platform was almost identical to Hillary's- very sound and almost everything that I believe in. And when it looked like it was all over for Hillary, I thought-- I'm not that unhappy. He's a great candidate-- most of his ideas for fixing the economy, the war, education, etc-- issues that I care about-- are ideas that I agree with and like.

Months ago, a friend sent me a slanderous email about Obama. I immediately smelled a rat and checked the snopes website. Sure enough, it was garbage. I never normally do this,since I rarely really care about those stupid forwards that I get from people, but I emailed my friend and told her how upset I was that she was emailing lies to people. I said that I bet that she was too smart to believe crap like that, but there are other people who believe everything that they read. She was offended and said that she would never send political emails out again because she offended all of her liberal friends.

I am liberal (if you compare me to a right wing republican), but I would hardly call that a "political email"-- it was hatefully worded garbage meant to encourage people to believe lies about Obama.

Thankfully, he now has a website to address the slander: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/fightthesmearshome

I don't mean to belittle the fact that this does not happen on "the other side". There were a lot of hateful rumors planted about McCain when he ran against George Bush in 2004. Thanks to Karl Rove.

And in the past few months, there have been less attacks against Obama. I think that people finally woke up and looked into these rumors and realized that it was trash and insulting their intelligence. I just hope that it stays this way.

I will be wishing and hoping that Obama will make it. Theoretically, he should be able to beat McCain. Obama has the backing of the democratic party, the backing of people who want a change from the past 8 years, a great platform, sound ideas, and a great campaign team.

Wishing for a clean campaign. May the best candidate win! Go Obama!

Hoping that I'll be crying tears of joy this November!

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