Mrs. Bush's White House renovations will be featured in Architectural Digest. I had not realized that the Lincoln Bedroom originally had been Lincoln's office and was turned into a bedroom during the Truman administration. An indication of the change a President Obama would bring to the way business is done in Washington would be if he were to change the Lincoln Bedroom back into an office to use it himself as his upstairs office. This simple redecoration would tell the American people that President Obama has put an end to the practice of selling overnights in the Lincoln Bedroom. This is the kind of change America wants.
President Obama – 24/7 Ready on Ring One
The KEY demographic that no one has yet publicly recognized or is following, and the one that is the driving force behind the diversity of Obama's voters, is the combination of single parents and their voting age, raised by single parent children. It is a demographic that brilliantly cuts across all party, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, income, and education dynamics.
Senator Obama was raised by a single mother. He is the now successful adult child of a single parent. He and his late mother have walked the walk of countless American Moms and Dads who, whether as a result of the loss of their spouses, divorce, or choosing single-parenthood, have raised children on their own. And in 2008 many of these children are now old enough to vote.
Senator Obama's success in life is in stark contrast to decades of statisticians' dire predictions that failure in school and in life was the given outcome for children who are raised by single parents. As Senator Obama calmly answers questions, outlines policies, and gives rousing speeches, he, in effect, says to every single parent and to every child of a single parent across America, "yes we can."
Pollster, pundits, and the Penn-Wolfson-McAuliffe micro-trenders are focused on smaller and smaller categories and subcategories of passé-labeled soccer moms, latte moms, NASCAR dads, Dunkin' Donuts dads, Latinos, urban and rural, and are ignoring the macro-trend staring them in the face--the one macro-trend that includes the wealthiest that connects them with the poorest and the jobless and connects them with the middle class everywhere who are losing their sub-prime homes, and military families too: single parenthood.
All I know is that as a widowed parent, who raised my son alone, when Senator Obama told the amazingly diverse audience in Hartford's XL Center on Feb. 4th that he was raised by a single mom, the place went CRAZY! It may have been one of his biggest applause lines, and I was sitting so close that as he turned, I could see that it took him aback.
Single moms and single dads and their now teenage/young adult voting age children are, I believe, the Senator's secret demographic weapon against Senators Clinton and McCain. It makes the former distinctions of race, gender, class, religion, military, urban/rural fade into the background.
