Obama's Fired Up and Ready to Go

POSTED BY Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith, 27 September 2007

Barack Obama's fired up and ready to go, and so are the thousands of supporters that joined him tonight in New York's Washington Square Park.  As students, suits, and mothers with strollers spilled out of the NYU-area park, Obama led them in a passionate soliloquy of his plan for the future, and it's all about being fired up.

In what's become his latest stump speech, he told the audience of his fortuitous trip to Greenwood, South Carolina.  That's a small town about an hour and a half from anywhere, he explained, and he travelled there one morning when he was sleepy.  It was rainy.  And he'd just been panned by the Times.  Hard day for anyone, but when he got to good ole' Greenwood, there were no masses waiting to rally like in the heart of New York.  Instead, there were 20 people in a room, all quiet, until a little old woman said from behind him, "fired up!"  And the room echoed in response.  She continued, "ready to go!" And again, the small audience echoed her chant.  The Obama people were a little confused - especially when this went on for five minutes.  But apparently this is a chant for which the little old lady - a councilwoman, it turns out - is known, and by the end of it, "guess what," said Obama.  "I was fired up!" 

And it fired up the audience indeed.  Obama led the masses in a call-and-repeat "fired up!" and "ready to go!" until the emotion in the park was at a palpable high.  "One voice can change the room," he told them like a minister to his flock.  "And if one voice can change a room, one voice can change a city.  And if one voice can change a city, one voice can change a state.  And if one voice can change a state, one voice can change a country.  And if one voice can change the country, one voice can change the world." 

"Fired up!" he asked.  "Ready to go!"

And for Obama, that's going on a plan of hope.   And a plan for health care, ending capitol punishment, decreasing dependence on Middle Eastern oil, going green, increasing pay for teachers, making higher ed affordable, and getting out of Iraq.  In fact, he promised it all right away. As for giving everyone the chance to have health care like the senators do?  "I'm not going to wait ten years," he told the cheering audience.  "I'm not going to wait 20 years.  I'm going to do it by the end of my first year as president."

Noting his New York rival, he also tackled his previous statements on diplomacy with foreign governments with whom relations have been stalled.   "We don't just talk to our friends," he said.  "We have talk to our enemies."  While Clinton would not promise to meet with the world's "rogue leaders," Obama stood firm on his stance to do so, without question.  Reiterating that statement Thursday night, he told the crowd, "I believe what JFK said.  Which is we should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never fear to negotiate.  We shouldn't refuse to talk to our enemies." -- and then the zinger -- "That looks arrogant."

But he also made sweeping changes that call for a little pragmatism.  To deafening applause, he swore to close Gitmo.  "We are not a nation that sends prisoners off in the dead of night to be tortured in another country," he railed.  And he continued.  To attack AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.  To fix the problem in Darfur. 

"I don't accept that the American dream is a thing of the past," he said.  "I think the American dream is a thing of the future."  But when he promises to give us health care in a year - something that would have to be pushed through a frequently unreliable and always contentious Senate - and fix all that ails us and the world at large, one has to ask: are we electing an American Reality, or just another American Dream?