"As a son of Kansas and of Kenya, raised by a single mother, and loving grandparents, mostly in Hawaii, and who then, after study in New York and then further study in Massachusetts, chose to ignore a beckoning Wall Street and decided that the main streets of this country, and even the gritty mean streets of southside Chicago, were the place for me to be. And when I had done community organizing, and seen the magnitude of the problems, I turned, as so many Americans have turned, to govenment, to politics, and I entered the fray, and here I am, right here, with you...today.
Yes, my story may seem improbable, but it is no more improbable, if you think about it, than any of us gathered here together, or than any of those who are not here with us tonight, but whose lives will be affected by what we do and say here. In fact, is my life any more 'improbable' than the story of America itself -- it was ours before we were the land's, as Robert Frost once said, and then he described it, and because we are in Denver, in the heart of the great West, I think it's a phrase to remember, 'vaguely realizing westward, ' in the improbable tale of this improbable land."
"The angels of our better nature" -- it's quite a phrase, isn't it? Lincoln of course. A great president, but also a great man. He's one of my very few heroes, one of my lodestars. And I suppose he is for so many of us. He abides with us still. Would that those who claim to be the Party of Lincoln remembered what Lincoln was about. Magnanimity, in the Second Inaugural. "With malice toward none, with charity toward all." Isn't that really what a political campaign in our America, the land we all love, should be about? Isn't that what this campaign, whatever issues it focusses on, should also be about? Haven't we tried so far to be about, to appeal to, the "angels of our better nature"? For wouldn't Lincoln tell us it is only thus that we may come together to solve the problems that assail us, and that some, in the other party, persist in treating in a self-defeating partisan fashion, when political battles, struggles over visions of the future, become instead the ocassion for slanderous falsehoods, faked biographies, and for some, swift-boating remains the indoor sport of choice."
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That took about two minutes. Now you do your two minutes, and we should have at least a good deal of his speech written in no time. But please hurry, because it is now almost nine, and I gather he's about to come on, and he needs that speech ready for delivery.
Doesn't he?
