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With Tina Turner’s vocals blasting out of the loudspeakers, six thousand North Carolinians filled the atmosphere inside Reynolds Auditorium with sizzling jolts of political electricity. The electric current was transformed into lightning bolts when Michelle Obama stepped onto the platform. She transfixed the audience and delivered a spellbinding speech that kept every eye and ear rapt for the next 68 minutes.
Michelle described her childhood and the sacrifices of her parents that shaped her life with a delivery that was immediate, empassioned and absolutely believable.
Recalling her modest beginnings, Michelle described her early life in Chicago. Her father was a city employee, and her mother was a secretary. Her parents struggled and sacrificed to send both of their gifted children to Princeton.
In Chicago, she went to public schools, where her advisors cautioned her not to apply to Princeton. She graduated cum laude. At Princeton, some of her academic advisors said she should not apply to Harvard Law. She was admitted and graduated Juris Doctor.
Throughout her speech, Michelle related her life to the lives of average Americans. The audience was riveted. She said that times were better for average Americans when she was growing up than they are today when people are under the heavy lash of the depressing Bush-Cheney economic catastrophe. Describing the overburdening bureaucracy that is relentlessly invading the lives of ordinary citizens – from taxation, to insurance, to finance - Michelle used the metaphor of a bar that was constantly shifting position and making the lives of Americans more difficult.
Turning to her husband, Michelle spoke of the parallel sacrifices of his grandparents in Kansas, whom she described as, “carbon copies of my family with one exception: they were white.”
Locked together with the same sets of values, the two high-flying Harvard Law graduates decided to return to the neighborhood on the south side of Chicago to become Community Organizers. They struggled to repay massive college loans that dwarfed their mortgage – a burden that was only lifted when Barack published his two best-selling books.
Never mentioning Hillary Clinton or her husband by name, Michelle reviewed the history of their political campaign in terms that resonated with the audience - a series of shifting bars that the Obamas have not merely crossed or jumped over, but have flown over. Recounting the campaign, she never once referred to the racist attacks launched against her husband.
The audience hung on her every word as she reminded them of the tests they have already conquered:
• the largest mass of financial supporters in world history;
• the largest amount of money ever raised by a presidential primary candidate;
• victory in the Iowa caucuses;
• more victories across the face of America in all sorts of states – red, blue, large, small, urban, rural – than any other campaign;
• a towering lead in the polls;
• a substantial lead in the total number of votes cast and
• a large and growing lead in the number of delegates.
Michelle described her husband as a unique presidential candidate; one who had lived abroad and who enjoyed the benefit of having a multiplicity of traditions and heritages in his immediate ancestry – a rich genealogy and a gifted life that spanned three continents. Elevating and activating the imaginations of the crowd, she implored them to adopt the plea of John Lennon to ‘imagine’ an Obama presidency.
“Imagine what it would be like for America to have a president who understands other cultures.”
“Imagine what it would be like for America to have a president who knows what it is like for the average American family to sacrifice for their children.”
“Imagine what it would be like for America to have a president who understands constitutional law and the workings of the federal, state and local government.”
Thrilling to her message to ‘imagine’ a better future for America, the audience responded to her plea to register voters by the deadline – this Friday the 11th of April.
The audience, the message, the messenger all coalesced in my mind, and I recalled the words of Martin Luther King’s dream. The audience was a mixture of races and ages and walks of life. This was the vision I had shared with classmates in college, activists in every presidential campaign since 1968 – a diverse body of people demanding, dreaming and imagining positive change for America.
This tumultuous throng became a living, vibrant and vital political movement – a pro-democracy movement within America. This is the moment I had been waiting for since the shots rang out in the Ambassador ballroom in June of 1968. We are being lifted on a rising tide of human energy to a new destination that we can only now imagine.
Planetary predicts that Senator Barack Obama will sweep the Democratic presidential primary in North Carolina on the 6th of May.
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American Politics 
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