I’ve been invited to attend a Tim Walz rally tonight, and I have no idea what to expect. Share your stories and get me pumped up to see our next VP!
Update: Everybody was right, lots of standing and clapping, but what I really didn’t expect was the sense of family I felt with all these strangers around me. We’d bump into each other, and laugh it off, one guy was telling me about how his son was thinking about going to the college that I work at (I was still wearing my shirt from work), and we all just knew that we were working together to make great things happen. I’ll probably skip the next one, but it was a great experience. I’m glad I went, and would recommend going to one if you have a chance, and a candidate you believe in.
In 2008 I saw Michelle Obama speak in the 18th and Vine jazz district in Kansas City.
It was electric. She wore red and looked like a million bucks, and the speech was amazing. At the time we all honestly believed the Obamas would be elected with a historic mandate to make real, lasting change.
I remember it fondly, because the Obamas are the same people who caused me to lose faith in our Federal Government. All we got from the first black president was more war, more expensive health care, and one dead terrorist, and he had the power to do so much more.
But did they really have the power to do more? President alone can’t do a whole lot if Congress is fighting them the whole way.
Yes.
He had a supermajority for almost a year. He could have codified Roe. He could have passed ENDA. Those two actions would have made such a huge difference for women and transgender people now, and I think it’s important to remember that it was a choice by President Obama not to pursue these things.
They had the supermajority for a grand total of 72 days and spent most of that time getting Obamacare passed, though they also passed stimulus spending and a few other things. Pretty decent job, all in all.
Yeah. I feel that. I wouldn’t trade Obama in for anyone else during that time, but I would have liked to have seen more progress instead of just “not letting it get any worse”. I wonder if he or his cabinet were nervous of rocking the boat too much as the first black president, and enraging the conservatives even more. That’s just me pondering and not really based on anything concrete.
My feeling was that President Obama kept compromising. It seemed that he was trying to get people moving together and he went too far into the appeasement side of things with the alt right racist arm. It was also the real power growth cycle for Fox News and early online podcast/streamers. They are fast on the backs of the racist counter swell… And we got the fallout over the last decade now.
I went to a Republican campaign launch, state level candidates were there to put some sound bites on local TV and get the volunteers hyped. The free lunch was pretty good.
I went to a Bernie rally in Feb 2020. It was kind of electric. He was saying common-sense things about stuff that people really want changed about society and people were fired up by the huge crowd of agreement reinforcing how badly they were needed. I really thought he had a great chance before the dems kneecapped his campaign.
Bernie was the first politician that ever made me think “I want to hear more about what THIS guy is saying!” I rarely voted before I had heard of him, but learning more about Bernie slowly got me involved!
I can see Tim Walz being that guy for some people. After Kamala’s done her 8 years, Trump will have long slithered back into the shadows, and the GOP is deciding whether or not they should stick with the loud and crazy strategy, if Walz were to run, I think his common sense regular guy style could win over a lot of the rural Republicans. They aren’t all MAGA fiends, they just don’t pay much attention, and their friends like Trump. But if he can reasonably explain to them in their own language that nobody’s taking their guns, we just didn’t want people geared up like they’re in Call of Duty, we might be able to get them to stop considering us as villains.
My government teacher in high school took our class to a Herman Cain rally. It was… interesting. Towards the end of his campaign, so it was in a BBQ restaurant that had a stage for bands and maybe 50 people were there total. I don’t remember much about it, other than it was hard to hear because we were in a restaurant that was still playing music in the other room. I believe you’ll have a very different experience tonight lol
