Thank you, thank you, Barack Obama! It has been four years and four months since I stood in my living room crying and shouting at the television set as you gave your keynote address at the 2004 DNC. Every secret hope has been answered - your announcement of your candidacy in January 2007 and your beautiful, brilliant, kind campaign. 2008 has been a blur of love, delight, fear, outrage, hope. In September we all walked through dark shadows and tonight, November 4th, here we are in the waning of the year - incandescent in the sweetness of winter twilight. Tonight is perfect. I know you will be an incredible President of the United States of America. Barack Obama! Michelle Obama! Americans! The world! The future! We will work for this movement in the coming four years just as we have during the recent 21 months.
With great respect and love -
Namaste -
Rebecca MacLeod Andrews
September 6, 2008
Dear Senator Barack Obama,
I believe down to my bones that it will take nothing less than every leader in the Democratic Party taking a commanding, relentless stand against the Republicans and for the people to send you and Joe Biden to the White House. And Senator Hillary Clinton, who earned 18 million votes in key states, who has exemplified strength, courage and grace to this nation, and who at the Democratic National Convention called on her supporters with the words “Did you do this just for me?”, – she is the one who can lead our party’s leaders into full battle.
As an educated, hardworking career woman in the rural northern Central Valley of California, I feel invalidated, fearful and frustrated by what I have seen at the past two Republican National Conventions and for what will happen to my family, neighbors and fellow citizens should the Republicans again take office in January 2009.
A decade ago, I watched the President of the United States and the First Lady stand against a vicious insurgency that sought to delegitimize Bill Clinton’s presidency and take back power for the Republicans. I thank them for fighting during those years because by doing so, they fought for the Constitution, for the soul of this nation, and for ordinary Americans.
Nevertheless, vengeance was swift. The results of the 2000 and 2004 elections, if allowed to be repeated in 2008 will permanently alter this country. We will turn such a sharp corner from the ideas and brilliance that poured from all of the candidates in the Democratic primaries that today’s hopes will be dimmed and scattered for a good long while.
Right now under the Bush administration, my partner and I cannot afford to start a family because his small equine veterinary practice is suffering along with the economic fortunes of this community. It is up to my income to run our household, pay off credit card debt and some day save for future retirement. We do not have a foundation of savings nor the income necessary to raise children to go to university and have proper healthcare. We have a wonderful life, but the clock is ticking and it feels like a sacrifice we should not have to make.
My anxiety only intensifies when I think about the stand taken and the stakes held by Senator McCain and the Republicans in the Iraq War and the global war on terror. I have no faith that McCain will be able to secure our future because of his record with Bush and the embrace he has given to those who control his party. And God forbid that his vice presidential candidate should EVER take the helm if something unthinkable were to happen to McCain, given his age and his four rounds with cancer. We are living in an age with nuclear proliferation, with Putin moving closer to dictatorship, and our isolation has tied our hands with Iran, North Korea, and now the Russian-Georgian conflict. And as you have repeatedly stated, al-Qaeda is still unbroken.
Senator Obama, you and Joe Biden are not just battling McCain-Palin – you are up against an ideologically driven movement with leaders who have been in and out of the White House for decades and with well organized grass roots support and a media base. They believe that nobody outside their numbers deserves to govern and their contempt extends beyond oppositional candidates to any citizen who raises their voice in disagreement. At the RNC last week, offering false promises but zero solutions, they once more drew an arbitrary line in the sand and dared any voting American to cross it. Reason is again off the table.
So why am I so hopeful about 2008?
I find myself reflecting on the power harnessed by the collective and individual genius and leadership of the founding fathers 232 years ago. So many different men, (with their wives building bridges behind the scenes), were able to overthrow an empire, ratify a constitution, and build a nation forged in equality for all and grounded in reason. And all this sprang forth from thirteen tiny colonies at the edge of the world.
Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Revere, Henry, Hancock, Burr – the list of names we recognize two centuries later goes on. With unbreakable unity of purpose, they moved through dramas and disagreement, and won a hard fought Revolution that often divided families and neighbors. Their ambitions clashed in presidential elections and concepts like federalism, but despite that I think of Jefferson and Adams writing to each other for the rest of their lives and dying on the same day.
As I said, I believe down to my bones that it will take nothing less than every leader in the Democratic Party taking a commanding, relentless stand against the Republicans and for the people to send you and Joe Biden to the White House. And Senator Hillary Clinton, who earned 18 million votes in battleground states, who exemplified strength, courage and grace to this nation, and who called on her supporters with “Did you do this just for me?”, – she is the one who can lead our party’s leaders into full battle. I ask you, Senator Obama, to offer Senator Clinton this unique role in your campaign. 2012 will be too late – something will be too broken by then.
No more will presidencies be won by campaigns primarily led by those on the ticket. In fact the Republicans gave up that strategy two elections ago. And nor was it that strategy that carried the day in 1776 – each of those revolutionaries were giants with a single minded, collective purpose.
And so you are such giants, Senators Obama, Biden and Clinton, and so will be that core of individual Democratic leaders that were assembled at the convention if she undertakes this extraordinary call of leadership on behalf of your presidential campaign, – and for me, for my Republican voting partner who won’t vote for McCain, for my aunt with Multiple Sclerosis, for my Jewish aunt, for my African-American cousins, for my uncle with HIV, for my uncle who taught in Los Angeles County schools, for my grandparents who helped get this nation through the Depression and World War II, for my parents who listened to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King and were transformed, and for all of us Americans who are looking to our leaders to seize this moment on our behalf. And we will never forget it.
In gratitude and wholehearted support,
Rebecca M. Andrews
Redding, California
Dear Senator Obama,
I am a Democrat living in the northern reaches of California's conservative backbone - the Central Valley. I have supported you ardently since your keynote address in 2004. My partner is registered as a Republican, voted for Ron Paul (who is still in the race) in the primary, and supports Dennis Kucinich enough to search all over the internet to watch his DNC speech. He used to like McCain. He sees weakness in the Democratic party and Congress and is as yet undecided on which way he'll vote this year. So it is from such a perspective that I write this message to you and your campaign about Senator McCain, the RNC and Hurricane Gustav.
Do not allow Mr. McCain to steal the moral high ground from you on Hurricane Gustav. If this happens, the American people will lose their chance for a great leader even as we emerge from these eight harrowing years under President Bush.
Go to the Gulf Coast. Do it during the GOP convention. Take the spotlight off McCain even as he tried to do it to you throughout the DNC and especially on your night, by tantalizing the press with a potential announcement of his VP choice.
McCain made inroads against you with Georgia and the attack ads all month. His choice of Palin is both heartfelt and the riskiest of political calculations. As a woman voter, I am frankly insulted, but his choice will only work against him in the next eight weeks if the Democratic campaign plays their hand correctly and with no gaffes like "God is on our side" as regarding the timing of the RNC.
But IF McCain succeeds in redeeming his candidacy by means of Gustav with the klieg lights on St. Paul this week, the chips he has made into your candidacy will turn your moment of history into another lost hope for ordinary and extraordinary people on November 4th.
We cannot once more allow the Republicans to co-opt a national disaster as they did with September 11th and with every anniversary of that terrible, woeful day. How many times did I hear during September 2006 my co-workers, family and friends asking "Why is the White House focusing exclusively on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and once more ignoring Katrina during the first anniversary and ongoing aftermath? How can they politicize 9/11 during the darkest days of the Iraq War and continue to ignore their own citizens struggling in the Gulf region?"
In September 2004 at the RNC, McCain plainly and ardently committed to the Bush Administration and the Iraq War. In September 2005, he as the arguable vocal and moral leader of his party in Congress, sat silent as the Bush White House left Americans and the city of New Orleans to drown after the levees broke, while our National Guard was and continues to be occupied in Iraq. And in September 2006, where was McCain as the reform voice for the GOP during the one year anniversaries of Katrina and Rita and our national shame?
Only now in September 2008 at the RNC with Gustav overflowing the levees and with our National Guard still in Iraq does McCain make a national case to the American people on behalf of the American victims in the entire Gulf region. He will offer himself as the lone heroic reformer of a failed party and the lone soldier that will save America. He will try to throw the Bush Administration under a bus, but still keep Bush funders, and he will re-energize Bush's base with Governer Palin's down home social conservatism.
Please, Senator Obama, do not underestimate this strategy nor how many people want to hear this from McCain. Senator Obama, you must passionately and visibly take the high ground for New Orleans and Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, Texas and Florida during this crisis.
You HAVE the sensitivity, capacity and morality to make a stand for change against McCain and the RNC in the Gulf without seeming purely political to the people you have stood by since 2005. The GOP may scream foul, but you will be supported by footage of your speeches and work in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. You will be standing on your own record. Never let the American citizens ever forget that.
Thank you for your candidacy and your fight for us,
Rebecca M. Andrews,
