( – promoted by Clark)
(Crossposted on Daily Kos)
One nice thing about living next door to a swing state is that the political events just keep on coming. Last week I endured most of a McCain-Palin rally in O’Fallon (diaried here–and yes, I’m milking that awful experience for all it is worth). Yesterday, September 6th, I had a much more pleasurable experience, as the Register For Change tour with DNC chairman Howard Dean visited the campus of St. Louis University (SLU) to kick off an all-out voter registration and participation drive on the university campuses of the St. Louis area.
The Register For Change bus arrives at SLU!
The city of St. Louis hosts several universities, including Washington University in St. Louis, University of Missouri-St. Louis, Harris-Stowe University, and Fontbonne University. Student representatives from the largest universities (SLU, Wash.U and UMSL) spoke at the rally before the arrival of Gov. Dean. About 150-200 attended, the vast majority of them students, but with a few folks there old enough to be their parents (and grandparents, in a few cases). Amongst the crowd were students and other volunteers with sign-up sheets to volunteer for the Obama campaign, and I saw a number of people filling out their contact information on the sheets.
Some crowd shots for you. It was immediately apparent that this was a diverse crowd, certainly nothing like the Republican crowd I was in last week!
Yell practice! Fired up, ready to go!
One issue raised by the student leaders from SLU was the need for a polling place on campus to facilitate voting in the general election. Nearby Wash.U. had successfully petitioned to get a polling station, but SLU’s students, to this point, have been unsuccessful.
Even Slytherin House wants change! (inside joke for you Harry Potter fans)
Just a few minutes after the warmup speakers were finished, the Register For Change bus arrived. Gov. Dean stepped off the bus to much appreciative cheering. He went down the front row of the crowd to greet people and shake hands, including my own:
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Howard Dean greets the crowd. He seemed even more happy to see us than we were to see him!
He then took the podium to more cheers, and began his address. The Governor laid out all of the issues at stake in this election, issues that all of us here know very well now, but he did so in his typically plain-spoken and clear style. He got some great digs in at McCain, as you might expect. As for Sarah Palin, he said that she did a good job in the first half of her speech telling the story of who she is–but he then went after her for the second half of the speech.
“Politics is community organizing,” he said, and expanded on the point by giving examples of how organizers of the past brought people together to change the system. Dean tied this together with his old-but-still-good slogan, “You Have the Power” to enact change if we are all willing to work for it. I thought this was the strongest part of his speech, and my words cannot do justice to it; fortunately, bloggers from Show Me Progress were there also, and they plan on posting video of his speech. In any event, this section got one of the loudest yells of approval of any part of his speech.
Dean also spoke about the erosion of rights in our nation, specifically including torture and detention without charges in his explanation that our nation needed to return to the rule of law to regain our moral authority. He also spoke up specifically about guaranteeing rights for all Americans, including–and he spelled it out, not using the common abbreviation–the “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community” to great acclaim, especially from the GLBT students that were present.
Howard Dean speaks. He’s not a soaring rhetoric kind of guy, but he’s still damned good!
The Governor then ended his speech with an appeal to do more than just vote in the election. “Voting just earns you a ‘D’ grade,” he said. He emphasized that Obama won the Iowa caucuses on the strength of the youth vote, and that it was critical that the youth turn out in the general election to vote for Obama. His words to the students apply to us old- and almost-old timers as well: we need to be prepared to give up time with our families and our loved ones, get a little less sleep, to ensure that Barack Obama wins Missouri. Dean said that the Missouri election may come down to 70,000 votes (1.5-2.0%) total, so turnout is critical.
He ended his speech repeating his call for all of us to volunteer, pointing out all the folks with clipboards ready to sign us up. I went right over and did so! While I was doing this, I saw the Governor posing for pictures with many in the crowd; he said he would be glad to pose with any and all, but only if they signed up to volunteer first.
“Strong Democrats, dudes! Chicks really dig strong Democrats!”
Gov. Dean did a stand-up interview with the one television station that turned up (the Fox affiliate, of all stations) then he and the Register for Change bus left the campus.
I went back to my vehicle to find that I owed the City of St. Louis $10.00 for parking at an expired meter. Oh well, it was still worth it to get fired up by the Chairman himself, and I intend to heed his call to do more for the Obama campaign and Democrats in general.
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