Kathleen Sebelius said it best – it was a beautiful day, and God, well, she obviously loves Democrats!  Somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand people turned out to see the next president at the Liberty Memorial.

The Show Me Progress bloggers were just about the first press people through the gate, and snagged a prime spot – corner of a front table, close to the riser so we could get some good pictures, and settled in to wait for the speechifyin’ to start.  When it starts with Emanuel Cleaver, you need to buckle up.  That is one man I would not want to follow to the podium, because the man throws down, there is just no other way to put it.

And Ike Skelton, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was next up – he doesn’t have Congressman Cleaver’s delivery style, but what he has to say is, to a word, brilliant and ought to be listened to and heeded.

I was grateful for the risers because the crowd in front of the press was excitable and waved those signs and whooped and hollered and let their spirit and enthusiasm  show.  Glad to see the excitement for our candidate, tho!

The next president of the United States.  He spoke to the crowd for just a little under an hour, and had to stop several times while the crowd erupted, chanting his name.  I don’t get excited about this stuff – and I was blown away.  It was the largest rally the city has ever seen, and I was pleased to be a part of it.    

Obama took the fight to McSame on Monday, kicking off a two-week campaign tour of battleground states, and he came out swinging, attacking the economic policies of John Walker McBush, and making the economy the central theme of this leg of the general election campaign.

In his most pointed and sustained attack on Mr. McCain’s economic agenda, Mr. Obama said that a McCain presidency would be a continuation of President Bush’s faltering economic policies. And he highlighted his own proposals to aid economically beleaguered Americans: tax cuts for middle-income families and retirees, a $50 billion economic stimulus package, expansion of unemployment benefits, and relief for homeowners facing foreclosure.

The speech was made at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, the heart of red country, a state that hasn’t gone to the Democrat since fellow southerner Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Obama is ceding nothing, instead he is going into the heart of the fever swamp and throwing down the gauntlet. He went to North Carolina with a message not of limiting government, but of effective government. He drew sharp contrasts between himself and the republican nominee, especially on issues of economics, where by McCain’s own admission he is ignorant as dirt.

Obama spoke of hard working people, hard pressed to buy food and gasoline, and he laid the blame where it belongs, at the feet of aWol bu$h and his rubberstamp cornies in the congress, chief among them McCain, who, when he has bothered to cast votes in the Senate over the last year has voted the way bu$h wanted him to 100% of the time. He highlighted More-of-the-Same’s insistence that tax breaks for corporations are what will get us out of trouble, because as we all know, applying the same thinking that got you into trouble always gets you out!

“We did not arrive at the doorstep of our current economic crisis by some accident of history. This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle that was beyond our power to avoid. It was the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long,” Obama told a crowd of about 900 people. “We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead, we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. And now John McCain wants to give us another. Well, we’ve been there once. We’re not going back.”

Congress dealt up a dissing of the squatter that currently occupies the oval as well, announcing that they would work with Barack Obama to craft solutions to palliate America’s ills, bypassing the current president and moving on to the next one. Illustrating this fact, the House Democrats said they intended to force a separate vote this week – possibly Thursday – on extending unemployment benefits for those whose aid is running out. The extension is opposed by bu$h and many congressional republicans, and bu$h has threatened a veto. The Democrats are drooling over the political hay they could make out of a veto, and are all but daring him to do it.

When I opened my New York Times this morning and saw the headline that Obama is taking the offensive, and challenging McCain in traditional republican areas, I did the happy dance!  Barack Obama is openly embracing the 50 State Strategy and spurning the cynical DLC model of falling back on traditional liberal enclaves and writing us off out here in the middle.

It’s a glorious day!  It is a day that this red-state riffraff has been waiting for with bated breath  since the day John Kerry punked us in October 2004 and sealed our fate to suffer four years of Blunt-force trauma at the hands of a couple of juvenile brats posing as a governor and his lobbyist brother.

Some of us have been pissed off at Rahm Emanuel and the DLC limousine liberals ever since.

Dr. Dean  resonates with us because he listens to our concerns and treats Missouri like our eleven electoral votes matter – because in 2000, they sure as hell did.  In 2000, aWol took this swing state by a mere 80,000 votes, and if he hadn’t, our votes would have swung the electoral equation to Gore, even without Florida, and spared the entire world the abortion of government that has been the bu$h administration.

So yeah, we matter, god-damnit.   Not only that, we have traditional Democratic roots that predate the founding of the state!  Yes!  There were Democrats in Missouri before there was a Missouri!  The Missouri Democratic Party is the oldest continually-operating political party west of the Mississippi River, and the wingnuts only seized the state lege in 2000 (thanks to term limits, which have been a monumental disaster for the state).

Given the past eight years, and the indignities this president and the party he poisoned have heaped upon this nation – all of us, not just blue-state Americans –  are pissed off and ready to put up a fight. I want a champion, someone who will throw down the gauntlet and challenge the conventional wisdom.  Someone who will take the fight to them in every state and keep them on the defensive.  While they are still scrambling to explain the latest lobby-gate revelation (Lindsey Graham didn’t even try this morning, he just mouthed platitudes) Obama is hiring the mastermind behind Hillary Clinton’s Ohio win and setting up the chessboard to take the state, and with it McCain’s queen.

Oh, my, yes.  Reading todays paper brought a long-overdue thousand-watt smile to my face.

Mr. Obama has moved in recent days to transform his primary organization into a general election machine, hiring staff members, sending organizers into important states and preparing a television advertisement campaign to present his views and his biography to millions of Americans who followed the primaries from a distance.

In one telling example, he is moving to hire Aaron Pickrell, the chief political strategist of Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio – who helped steer Mrs. Clinton to victory in that state’s primary – to run his effort against Mr. McCain there. In another, aides said, he has tapped Dan Carroll, an opposition researcher who gained fame digging up information on opponents’ records for Bill Clinton in 1992, to help gather information about Mr. McCain. That is the latest evidence that, for all the talk on both sides about a new kind of politics, the general election campaign is likely to be bloody.

Mr. Obama’s campaign is considering hiring Patti Solis Doyle, a longtime associate of Mrs. Clinton who was her campaign manager until a shake-up in February, the first of what Mr. Obama’s aides said would be a number of hires from the Clinton campaign.

[Click here to go to the NYT interactive map]

I don’t pretend to be an expert or anything, but I do have a working knowledge of Missouri history, and how that history dovetails with the politics of the state.

For instance, I know that no Democrat has won the White House without carrying Missouri since the 1850s.  In fact, this state has only gone to the loser once in the last century – when our grandparents voted for Stevenson over the sitting President Eisenhower in 1956.   Not exactly a traditional republican stronghold, are we?

In fact, I think if the New York Times had done a bit more research they would have made Missouri a battleground state leaning red instead of reliably republican on that map.   Look at the primary results from the Secretary of States office:

If you do the math, you see that of over 1.4 million ballots cast in Missouri on Super Tuesday, 58.27% were Democratic ballots.  McCain and Obama both won the state, but the numbers paint a bleak landscape for the McCain camp.  McCain won 33% of the republican vote, with a raw vote tally of 194,053.  Both Democratic frontrunners garnered more than double the votes McCain was able to muster.

Then there is the latest Rasmussen Missouri poll, which shows Obama a one-point favorite (43% to 42%,  with 15% choosing “other” (9%)or “not sure” (6%).  You can look at the poll here, and see just how out of step McCain is with the concerns of Missouri voters.  

And worse for him still are the 31.5% of republicans in this state who voted for Mike Huckabee.  With over 185,000 republican ballots cast for Huckabee, that is a lot of republicans that might opt to sit on their hands this November and skip the presidential race.  Remember, 80,000 votes in 2000 made the difference.  With the mobilization Obama has mustered, it won’t take too many aggrieved Missouri conservatives opting to vote for Bob Barr, skip the race at the top of the ticket and only vote in the state and local races, or simply go fishing on election day to have an impact which color the photoshop wizards use to color Missouri on the map the night of November 4.

This is one red-state Democrat that is fired up and ready to go, and has been since January 1995, when the Contract on America was executed, and I have been absolutely spoilin’ for a bare-knuckled brawl since the supremes selected in December 2000.

This is the political season I have been waiting for my entire life.  It is high time the Democrats came out swingin’ – and hot-damn if we don’t have someone this season with a hell of a reach.

All right Democrats. It is time to get our collective act together and put the past behind us. It isn’t about anyones hurt feelings. I voted for Hillary in the primary and one of the checks I wrote this primary season was to her campaign. But I can read the tea leaves, and Obama is going to be the nominee.

So take the long weekend to lick your wounds, and when Tuesday rolls around, start with mending fences. It is time to get over yourself. It isn’t about you, or me, or even the candidates. It is about electing a Democrat and saving the Supreme Court.

Looked at through that lens, Obama is perfectly suited for the job, because he was a Constitutional Law professor. That is hugely important with a Supreme Court that has a liberal wing that is as chronologically advanced as our liberal justices are. Especially with Roberts as Chief. Ugh…

McClatchy has an article on the importance of Missouri this fall. Obama carried the state – narrowly – on Super Tuesday – because of St. Louis and Kansas City. In the outstate areas, Hillary is the overwhelming choice. At the State Democratic Convention I saw Hillbillies for Hillary t-shirts, and my father in law, who has voted in the primary for the guy who eventually won the White House since 1980 is a huge Hillary Clinton supporter. I have been telling everyone since September, when we went to the country for bow season, that she is the outstate favorite.

Obama – and the state and national party apparatus – have challenges in this bellwether state – but they can be overcome with grassroots organization, and most importantly – presence.   When Missouri voters in outstate areas are asked about Obama and the response ranges from

“I feel like I just don’t know him yet.”

 to  

“I can’t vote Republican.   I’ll either vote for Obama or not vote. If it were today, I would not vote. There’s still six months . … He’s gonna’ have to convince me. I haven’t seen it yet.”

Our mission is clearly defined.  Convince voters.   I spoke to my father in law before the state convention and asked him if there was anything he wanted me to impart to the leaders of the party.  He said I should tell them to make their presence known, that no one was going to vote for them if they didn’t bother to ask.

So here is how Obama wins in Missouri, and helps deliver the Missouri Sixth congressional seat to Kay Barnes, the Democrat opposing the odious Sam “96%” Graves,    (as in he votes the way aWol wants him to 96% 0f the time), and takes a congressional enemy  off the chessboard.

It’s politics 101.    What Howard Dean did for the nation with the brilliant 50 State Strategy, the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party (national and state need to get their act together and combine resources for this) need to do in Missouri.   Call it a 114 County Strategy.

Get someone on the ground in every county – it can be as simple as a dedicated cell phone and someone willing to answer and return calls, and store yard signs, bumper stickers, lapel pins and campaign literature in their garage or basement and pass it out when people ask for it, and put an add in every county paper every single week.

If Obama campaigns hard in Kansas City, St. Louis, and the Sixth Congressional District…He wins.  KC and StL are reliably Democratic.  The Sixth is vulnerable and due to flip.  The Sixth is also huge in area – the population isn’t dense, but the people aren’t either.  They know that republican policies have damaged them economically and sent their kids to fight and die in a senseless conflict that should never have been undertaken.   A couple of stops in St. Joseph would pull supporters for both Kay Barnes and Representative Nancy Boyda of the KS 02 and fill the stadium at Missouri Western.    Do the same thing in Hannibal and bolster democratic turnout among rural voters in three states.   What’s not to love about this plan?

Now the Democratic Party needs to get their act together and start plotting strategy.  Ask any veteran and they will tell you – It is always – always – a bad idea to cede the hill country in any fight.