Thoughts Upon Watching Obama Announce For President

The Saturday morning that Barack Obama announced his intentions to run for President of the United States I sat down to watch the speech in my living room and forced my teenage daughter to watch it with me. I forced her because as a teenager a political speech was probably the last thing she would have wanted to do except perhaps wash the dishes. But I made her watch not because I was committed to Obama’s candidacy and wanted her to be as well, because I am not – but because I felt there was going to be history made that day in Illinois. That this was going to be one of those moments in life when people in my peer group and younger than me would say, “where were you when he announced, did you see it, and what did you think?” And I did not want her to miss one of those moments, so I forced her to watch and listen.