Michelle Obama Speaks Out for Change at Music Hall

On Friday February 15, 2008 at 6:15 pm Michelle Obama spoke out for the Campaign for Change at Cincinnati Music Hall, a five minute walk and ten minute wait from my apartment. Hillary Clinton was interviewed by the press at a Skyline Chili across town. The elderly doorman said, "There are too damn many. Capacity is 1,300". The assembled shouted "Ohio for Obama" and "Vote for Obama" and "Ready to Go Fire it Up". The President of the Hamilton County Commissioners promised to vote for Barack Obama and was honored to introduce Michelle Obama. She said, we can do it, but it will take all of us. A year ago today my husband stood on the capitol steps of Sprinfield, Illinois to say he was running for President of the United States.

Polls and pundits said he wouldn't win. The first test was that he couldn't raise enough money. We raised millions. They they told us there was no wasy we coold win without a political organization. Perople say they never saw such an inspriing political campaig. Then Iowa was the true test. Barack won Iowa by a solid margin. Then it was national polls in which Barack was trailing by several digits. After New Hampshire the gap narrowed. In the South Carolina he won all but two counties. He went on to Super Tuesday to win Utah, Nebraska, Missouri, Louisiana, then Washinton and Main. He won in every constituency. It was't expected. When was the last candidate of any race or gender to win everywhere?

This campaign is surpassing its limited expectations. People must feel like they are working together and for the first time in my life I feel like I am not alone. In America when you get to the bar and raise the bar you find the bar has moved. We need to get Barack over the bar so he can get everyone over the bar. Life is getting harder. Regular folks are struggling. You are more easily divided. The main part of my story is the American story of my father. Our children are being tested to death. College is becoming more of a dream. Barack says the core of our problem is the empathy deficit. We must judge our greatness by the weakest among us, not the strongest. Sacrifice and compromise are needed because we are at war.

The first litmus test is character. Imagine a President who grew up poor and who realizes the importance of international development because his family lives in Kenya. You do what you say. There is nothing more. Who is smarter than the first African American to edit the Harvard Law Review? Barack is not just talk, as Illinois State Senator he helped to abolish the death penalty. As US Senator Barack said that the war was wrong. Understand the value of helping him. Barack is one of the most beautiful candidates we will see in our lifetime. To make change the leader must work beyond party line. Please help convince the people to vote for Barack, pass out fliers or volunteer for one of the two local offices.

Senator Barack Obama is the author two books, Dreams from My Father and the Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American in 2006. A junior Senator from Illinois and a lawyer, a law professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic and above all a student of history and human nature. Senator Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution can America repair a political process that is broken and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.

At its most elemental level, we understand our liverty in a negative sense. As a general rule we believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicous of those - whether Big Brother or nosy neighbors - who want to meddle in our business. But we understand our liberty in a more positive sense as well, in the idea of opportunity and teh subsidiary values that help realize opportunity - all those homespun virtues that Benjamin Franklin first popularized in Poor Richard's Almanack and that have continued to inspire our allegience through successive generations. The values of self-reliance and self-improvement and risk taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance and hard work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility. The values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will - a confidence that by pluck, sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the circumstances of our birth. But these values also express a broader confidence that so long as individual men and women are free to pursue their interests, society as a whole will prosper. Our system of self-government and our free-market economy depend on the majority of individual Americans adhering to these values. The legitimacy of our government and our economy depend on the degree to which these values are rewarded, which is why the values of equal opportunity and nondiscrimination complement rather than impinge upon liberty.

There are limits to power. Sometimes on the law can fully vindicate our values, particularly when the rights and opportunities of the powerless in our society are at stake. Certainly this has been true in our efforts to end racial discrimination,; as important as moral exhortation was in changing hearts and minds of white Americans during the civil rights era, what ultimately broke the back of Jim Crow and ushered in a new era of race relations where the Court cases culminating in Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As these laws were being debated, there were those who argued that government should not interject itself into civil society, that no law could force white people to associate with blacks. Upon hearing these arguments Dr. King replied, "It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also."

Democrats complained loudly when Republicans used control of the Judiciary Committee to block sixty-one of Clinton's appointments to appellate and district courts, and for teh brief time that they held the majority, the Democrats tried the same tactics on George W. Bush's nominees. But when the Democrats lost their Senate majority in 2002 they had only one arrow left in their quiver, a strategy that could summed upon in one wor, the battle cry around which the Democratic faithful now rallied, fillibuster. The Constitution makes no mention of the fillibuster, it is a Senate rule, one that dates back to the very first Congress. The basic idea is simple. Because all Senate business is conducted by unanimous consent, any senator can bring proceedings to a half by exercising his right to unliminited debate and refusing to move on to the next order of business. In other words, he can talk for as long as he wants. The only way to break a filibuster is for three-fifths of the Senate to invoke something called cloture- that is, cessation of debate. Effectively this means that every action pending before hte Senate- every bill, resolution, or nomination needs the support of six senators rather than a simple majority. A series of complex rules have evolved allowing both filibusters and cloture votes to proceed without fanfare. Just the threat of a filibuster will often get the majority leader's attention and a cloture vote will then be organized without anybody having to spend their evenings sleeping in armchairs and cots.

The sins of politics are derivative of the need to win, but also the need not to lose. There was a time, before campaign finance laws and snooping reporters, when money shaped politics through outright bribery, when a politician could treat his campaign fund as his personal bank account and accept fany junkets, when big honoraria from those who sought influence were commonplace, and the shape of legislation went to the highest bidder. As for most politicians, money isn't about getting rich. In the Senate, at least, most members are already rich. It's about maintaining status an dpower, its abou tscaring off challengers and fighting of the fear. Money can't guarantee victory, it can't buy passion, charisma, or the ability to tell a story. But without money and the television ads that consume all the money, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose. While in the state legislature, I never needed to spend more than $100,000 on a race. The US Senate is much more expensive. Cover the state for a week runs around $250,000. Figuring four week s of TV and all the overhead and staff for a statewide campaign the budget for the primary would be around $5 million. Assuming a victory in the primary the general election wouled cost $10 to $15 million. He has so far raised nearly $100 million for his campaign for President.

There is no denying that globalizaiton has greatly increased economic instability for millions of ordinary Americans. To stay competitive and keep investors happy in the global marketplace, US based companies have automated, downsized, outsourced and offshored. They've held the line on wage increases and replaced defined benefit health and retirement plance with 401(k) and Health Savings Accounts that shift more cost and risk onto workers. The result has been the emergence of what some call a "winner take all" economy. Over the past decade, we've seen strong economic growth but anemic job growth, big leaps in productivity but flatlining wages, hefty corporate profits, but a shrinking share of those profits going to workers.

It takes a trip oversees to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services-electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions and household appliances - that are still unattainable for most of the world. America may have been blessed with some of the planet's best real estate, but clearly it's not just our natural resources that account for our economic success. Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and the efficient allocation of resources. The ONE Campaign had 60,000 signatures on a petition to remind the candidates that we expect the next president to visit Africa and keep the poverty-fighting promises we've heard on the campaign trail.

It should come as no surprise, that we have the tendency to take our free-market system as a given, to assume that it flows naturally from the laws of supply and demand and Adam Smith's invisible hand. Its not much of a leap to assume that any government intrusion int othe magical workings of the markets- whether through taxation, regulation, lawsuits, tariffs, labor protection, or spending on entitlements-necessarily undermines private enterprise and inhibits sustainable economic growth. The bankruptcy of communism and socialism as alternative means of economic organization has only reinforced this assumption. In our standard economic textbooks and in our modern political debates, laissez-faire is the default rule, anyone who would challenge it swims against the prevailing tide.

As Ronald Reagan's election made clear, the people want the government to change. In his rhetoric, Reagan tendend to exaggerate the degree to which the welfare state had grown ove rthe previous twenty-five years. At its peak, the federal budget as a toal share of the US economy remained far below the comparable figures in Western Europe, even when you factored in teh enormous US defense budget. Still, the conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction becasue Reagan's central insight, that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureacratic.

If were serious about building twenty-first century school system, we're going to have to take the teaching profession seriously. This means changing the certification process to allow a chemistry major who wants to teach to avoid expensive additional course work. It also means paying teachers what they're worth. There's no reason why an experienced, highly qualified and effective teacher shouldn't earn $100,000 annually, at the peak of his or her career. There's just one catch. In exchange for more money, teachers need to become more accountable for their performance. Out investment in education can't end with an improved elementary and secondary school system.

In a knowledge based economy where eight of the nine fastest growing occupations this decade require scientific or technological skills, most workers are going to need some form of higher education to fill the jobs of the future. Just as our government instituted free and mandatory public high schools at the dawn of the twentieth century to provide workers the skills needed for the industrial age, our government has to help today's workforce adjust to twenty-first century realities. Americans certainly don't need to be convinced of the value of higher education- the percentage of young adults getting bachelor's degrees has risen steadily each decade, from around 16 percent in 1980 to almost 33 percent today. Where Americans need help is in managing the rising cost of college. Over the last five years, the average tuition and fees at four-year public colleges adjusted for inflation have risen 40 percent.

Works Cited

Obama, Barack. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. Crown Publishes. New York. 2006

Obama, Michelle. Campaign for Change Speech at Cincinnati Music Hall. February 15, 2008

ONE Vote '08. Air Force One. February 15, 2008

Move On. Volunteer for Obama. February 15, 2008