On August 28, along with 84,000 other people, I was at Invesco Field, a big football stadium in Denver, for the final day of the Democratic National Convention. The stadium echoed with the cheers of the tremendous crowd. The speeches were interspersed with performances by a series of major artists. Lighting, fireworks, and confetti added to the festive mood of the open-air event, which felt like a combination of a speech contest and a rock concert with Hollywood-style staging. The event went on for about six hours, from the warm-up acts to candidate Barack Obama's appearance to deliver his acceptance speech, and it never turned dull.
Standing in line for two hours to get into the stadium, I took the opportunity to chat with some of the people around me. One commented, "Obama moved me, and now I want to play a part in bringing change to America." This was a vocal reminder of the feelings of many Americans frustrated with the state of their country.
Senator Obama delivered his speech exactly 45 years after Martin Luther King delivered his historic "I have a dream" address. Obama himself has avoided using the issue of race, which can be a double-edged sword, in his campaign, but the people in the crowd assembled from around the United States were excited by the first-ever nomination of an African-American presidential candidate by a major political party. The idea of a black president leading America is no longer a mere dream.
The morning after this dramatic finale, Republican candidate John McCain announced his surprise pick for running mate, the young and relatively unknown female governor of Alaska. With this attention-grabbing move, the McCain campaign put a damper on what up to then had been an "Obama week." McCain has faced stinging attacks from the Democrats that he represents "more of the same" after President George W. Bush, who labors under historically low approval ratings, and his choice represented a ploy to change his image and build up some momentum in advance of the following week's Republican convention. It was a major gamble, and in another two months we will see if it pays off.
(Ryota Yoshimura, Washington)
