“I’ve never made a speech like this at a political event before. So what am I doing here?” De Niro said. “I’m here because finally one person has inspired me. One person has given me hope. One person has made me believe that we can make a change.”
“Some of you know I now have Secret Service protection,” Obama said.
“Those guys never smile; they are always cool. But I noticed when De
Niro walks in, they’re all like elbowing each other.”
Blogger (and Hillary supporter) Jeff Jarvis dismisses this little ditty –and Obama’s campaign– as "the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time."
What was the title of the "song" (early 70s?) that incorporated bits of speeches by MLK, JFK and Bobby Kennedy? Was it Abraham, Martin and John? Seems like there was another one but I can’t come up with it.
UPDATE: But smays.com reader Dale could. In 1971, DJ Tom Clay combined Jackie DeShannon’s What the World Needs Now with Dion’s Abraham, Marltin and John, and the speeches referenced above. Clay died in 1995 at the age of 66.
Download What the World Needs Now.mp3
I’ve always been a cynic when it comes to politics. I recall saying something derisive along the lines of, "I think it’s precious that you believe it makes a difference who is in office" when someone would praise or knock a politician.
George Bush and Dick Cheney have burned that cynicism right out of me. It does matter. And while I don’t know which candidate –if any– can get us out of the jam Bush and his buddies have put us in, it’s time to stand up and be counted.
I’m voting for Obama. If he wins and makes things worse, you can send me a link to this post and hold me accountable. And I promise not to hide. Funny, but I can’t find a Bush supporter anywhere these days.
This post is just for the record. No need for comments. I urge everyone to pick a candidate and support them.
Picked up a copy of Rolling Stone while roaming around Barnes & Noble this morning to see what Matt Taibbi was up to. In a piece written a few weeks before the Iowa Caucuses, he explains Barack Obama’s appeal (“Obama on the Rise”). An excerpt:
“While Obama glows like the chosen one, taking Kennedy-esque flight on the wings of destiny, next to him Hillary sometimes comes off like an angry drag queen, enraged that some other tramp has been allowed to “Danke Schoen” in her Las Vegas. Obama sees this and isn’t above pointing at her Adam’s apple. “I’m not running for president because I think this is somehow owed to me,” Obama says. And people believe it. … “There’s just something about him,” says one middle-aged gentleman. When I suggest that his comment was vague, he shrugs. “Yeah, but it’s good vague.”
You’ll find the full article at The Smirking Chimp.
Nice profile of my friend Kay at chicagotribune.com:
Candidates and their campaigns take pretty seriously the ubiquitous reporter with the black flip hairstyle and the rectangular glasses.
“She’s the voice of Iowa,” says Tommy Vietor, the local spokesman for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama. “If you want to deliver a message and you’re not talking to Kay, you’re not doing it effectively.”
Kevin Madden, spokesman for Republican Mitt Romney, says he was “star-struck” when he met Henderson last summer at the Ames Straw Poll. Along with other national political junkies who cyclically train their focus on Iowa, he’d been reading her blog religiously for months.
As David Yepsen, the Register’s political veteran, puts it, “Kay’s a double-barreled reporter. She instinctively understands how something will play with average Iowans,” he says.
I just took a look at the latest political video to go viral. The young woman featured in the “I Got a Crush On Obama” video is Amber Lee Ettinger (an actress). The real Obama Girl, the one who came up with the idea of the video, the song and the lyrics is Leah Kauffman, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Temple University in Philadelphia. When I left YouTube, the video had been viewed more than half a million times.
My first thought was, no political campaign could create something like this. My next thought was, if a campaign could create it, they wouldn’t want us to know they had. Much more effective. In this instance, I’ll probably never know. [Thanks, Jackie]
I post frequently about Kay Henderson, the news director of Radio Iowa, our network in…uh, Iowa. Kay is Sheena, Queen of the Political Jungle that is Iowa (pre-election). No better place to follow politics in Iowa than Kay’s blog.
I snatched this photo from The Des Moines Register because it shows Kay in her Secret Service/Stalker mode.
Barack Obama, a U.S. senator and potential 2008 presidential candidate, inked a deal recently to coordinate his Internet video campaign through Brightcove. Obama posted a video Tuesday announcing he’s forming an exploratory committee for the 2008 election. Brightcove will provide ongoing publication of campaign videos, creation of an Obama channel, and a syndication function that will allow bloggers and Web sites to publish campaign clips.
Brightcove looks, on the surface, similar to YouTube. But it’s very different, in that YouTube is designed for consumers to share videos with each other, while Brightcove is designed to allow businesses to publish videos to the Web.
Forget the politics for a moment… think of the implications of millions of people using their blogs to propagate the messages of their favorite candidates. We might live to see a day when it doesn’t take bazillion dollars to run for office.