Obama in Minnesota
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After he stood in line for more than three hours, Minneapolis resident Todd Mitchell was one of the first inside the Target Center to hear the views of presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Obama rallied a sold-out audience on February 2 in downtown Minneapolis, three days before the Minnesota caucuses.
Obama is in a tight race with fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“This is the most exciting election,” said Mitchell, a worker in early childhood education for 15 years. “Political stuff never really excited me until now.”
Mitchell said he was inspired when Obama spoke of better education for children, better schools and raising teachers’ salaries. Obama said he was concerned with teachers working two jobs and using personal money to buy school supplies because their schools are underfunded.
The Minnesota crowd of 20,000 waited as Obama arrived two hours behind schedule.
“The people did the wave for about 10 minutes,” Mitchell said, “like we were at a baseball game.”
A band played while supporters held Obama campaign posters. Others brought his books with hopes of an autograph.
“I really like Barack,” said Kathy Mitchell, Todd’s mother. “I really think he speaks the truth and he’s on the same page with the people.”
Kathy Mitchell said she is torn between Obama and Clinton. She began to support Obama after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
“I felt like the Democratic Party was going to groom him for presidency,” Kathy Mitchell said. She was more impressed with the candidate after his speech.
“For Barack to bring all these people together… and no one looking at it as a Black-White thing or a young-old thing, people are looking at it as ‘who is the best person to get us out of the mess we’re in,’ ” she said.
The candidate urged the crowd to invest back in America “if you are ready for change” and called for an energy policy to cap greenhouse gases.
“Automakers need to make a change,” Obama said. He added oil companies make billions of dollars and still raise gas prices. “Even ordinary people can’t afford to go to work,” he said.
Critics say Obama’s campaign of hope and change is idealistic.
“Hope does not block your road,” responded Obama. “I struggled as a youth -- was on welfare; but I had a home, love and hope.”
Obama admitted it will not be easy to eliminate poverty and that change is hard. He reminded the crowd that women won the right to vote, the slaves were freed and other historic events began with hope.
“That’s what hope is,” Obama said. “Imagery, then fighting for it when it did not seem possible.” He said Americans want change they can believe in and change they can earn. He said the willingness of Americans to hear new things requires hope.
“Obama reaffirmed that we can make a change,” Kathy Mitchell said,” that hope is not just a fairy tale.”
The candidate touched on many important topics, including the Iraq war.
“End that war and bring our troops home!” he shouted. Opposed to the Iraq war from the start, Obama said American troops performed magnificently and the veterans are easily forgotten. He felt troops should be respected properly and claimed he will use the U.S. military appropriately if president.
The candidate said he wants to end the mindset that put America in its current situation -- which he called “politics of fear.”
“I will meet with friends and enemies, those who like me and those who don’t,” he said. Obama backed his claim with a quote from John F. Kennedy: We should never negotiate out of fear or fear negotiations.
“Americans realize the biggest gamble would be to have the same old folks doing the same old things over and over again and somehow expecting a different result,” Obama said. “We need a new direction.”
Obama said he was outraged by the broken health care system. With 47 million Americans without health care insurance and many of them children, Obama told a personal story when his mom died of cancer.
“The only thing she was worried about was her health care insurance and how her bills were going to get paid,” Obama said.
“I went though the same thing with my father,” Todd Mitchell said, “so it was a story I could relate to.”
Raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama earned a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University and a master’s at Harvard. He is currently a U.S. senator from Illinois. He is married to Michelle and has two daughters. Obama is the son of a White mother from Kansas and an immigrant father from Kenya.