What I’m Most Looking Forward to Next Week

Someone just asked me what I’m most looking forward to over the next week. The single thing I’m most looking forward to is Barack Obama’s acceptance speech Thursday night at Mile High Stadium (as a long time Broncos season ticket holder, I just can’t bring myself to using the “I” word!). It will be an historic speech at an historic moment. It will be the first acceptance speech by an Afro-American major party Presidential nominee, and will be exactly 35 years to the day since Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Isn’t that an exciting coincidence?

What I will be most interested to see, and will be watching most closely, is Hillary Clinton’s speech. I am hoping to hear her unequivocal and enthusiastic support for Barack Obama. I came to the conclusion about a week ago that the best way to ensure real unity would be to have her name be put into nomination, and her delegates to have the opportunity to vote for her on a first ballot. I’m glad that’s exactly what the two Senators agreed will happen next week.

I will also be hoping to hear her very clearly imploring her delegates to cast their final vote at the convention for Obama. Just as importantly, I will be looking for her to enthusiastically implore her delegates to commit to working as hard as they possibly can over the next two months to elect Barack Obama as President of the United States. I fully expect she will do this, and when she does, I fully expect her delegates to do as she asks. I expect that they will do this not just because she asks them to, but because she will have persuaded them, if they are not persuaded already, that he truly deserves their vote and their commitment. Ultimately, I hope they feel that they each came to this conclusion freely, and hopefully, enthusiastically.

And if there remains any doubt in any delegate’s mind after Senator Clinton speaks to the convention, I expect that when her delegates hear Senator Obama speak Thursday night, they, along with the 80 thousand people attending the convention that night, and the millions watching from around the country, will be forever transformed and moved to hit the streets and the phones to do the grassroots campaigning that will be necessary to elect Barack Obama in November.

It will be an exciting week, to be sure. But it is really only the beginning to the most exciting and perhaps the most important Presidential campaign most of us have ever seen! I hope you’ll choose to be part of it!