Happy Birthday, Barack!

As many of you already know, today is Barack's 47th birthday. You can share your birthday wishes in the comments below . . . 

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Road Blog: Day in Pictures, Michigan

August 4th 2008 was another working birthday for Barack Obama.

Barack returned to the Great Lakes State today, where well over a thousand Michiganders snapped up tickets from a local coffee shop and crowded into the Lansing Center for the unveiling of his new energy policy.

Michigan is emblematic of the challenges the American economy has faced in the last eight years: the decrease of industrial jobs, the accompanying loss of healthcare and pension benefits and rising prices on everything from fuel to food.

But Michigan, with its booming biotech corridor and budding green industries, also symbolizes a path for economic growth. Before the speech, Barack was introduced by Michelle Crumm, the co-founder and CBO of Adaptive Materials, a company that has doubled in size every year for the past eight years due to the increasing demand for alternative energy solutions.

Later on the plane, Barack was presented with a special birthday gift by the flight attendants: a model of the OFA campaign plane.

Not exactly the sort of present that would take one's mind off the job, but it was, after all, a working birthday.

Enjoy the day in pictures.

Arun Chaudhary
August 4th, 2008
En route to Youngstown, OH

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"A Champion Of The Environment"

Barack Obama has proven himself as the candidate committed to the environment. Barack proposed a new comprehensive energy plan today, designed to address the current energy crisis and plan for the future. The plan includes components such as reducing carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050; ensuring that 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025; putting more hybrid cars on the road; and helping create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.

Barack said:

I want you all to think for a minute about the next four years, and even the next ten years.  We can continue down the path we've been traveling. … Or we can choose another future.  We can decide that we will face the realities of the 21st century by building a 21st century economy.  In just a few years, we can watch cars that run on a plug-in battery come off the same assembly lines that once produced the first Ford and the first Chrysler.  We can see shuttered factories open their doors to manufacturers that sell wind turbines and solar panels that will power our homes and our businesses.  We can watch as millions of new jobs with good pay and good benefits are created for American workers, and we can take pride as the technologies, and discoveries, and industries of the future flourish in the United States of America.  We can lead the world, secure our nation, and meet our moral obligations to future generations.

You can read Barack’s energy plan here.

Environmentalists have responded enthusiastically to Barack’s environmental policy. Here are a few of their stories:

George in Olympia, WA says:

I support Barack Obama because of his clarity of focus and vision for fighting global warming and climate change.  We need a genuine sense of urgency and a serious commitment to deal with this planetary emergency and he's got it.

Cameron in Evanston, IL says:

On a sunny Saturday morning in 1998, Barack Obama walked up to our 31st Street beach cleanup with his wife Michelle and pushing their daughter in a stroller. Surrounded by dozens of volunteers, we held a press conference to talk about why Lake Michigan and its beaches were in jeopardy and why people were giving their valuable time to do something about these problems.

That was nine years ago today. This year I've vowed to support Obama. Barack Obama is the same guy running for president that he was when I first met him pushing his daughter in a stroller. And, the second reason: if 50% of success in life is "showing up," he did just that because he cared then and cares now about the fate of the waters that give all of us life.

Jed in Binghampton, NY says:

The future brings climate change -- taking effect more and more each day. We need to change how we see the world. It is indeed time for change, no more talking about change. The time is now to bring change. Barack Obama will bring that change.

Adam in Bethesda, MD says:

Barack Obama is the one candidate who will take the most positive steps in favor of environmental protection, conservation, and natural resources preservation.  Barack has provided a comprehensive energy plan to reduce fossil fuels and increase U.S. reliance on renewable resources.

Our National Parks, our rivers, and our planet need a President who will make sure that lobbyists will not control our government and who will stand up to ensure that we have clean air, clean water, and a healthy natural environment.  Barack Obama's 11 years as an elected official on the state and national levels have proven him to be a champion of the environment; and thus, he has my support.

Join Environmentalists for Obama to get more involved in bringing Barack's vision of a cleaner Earth to your community. 

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The buzz from local blogs: Happy Birthday,
Barack!

Rich at Michigan Liberal has coverage from Barack's speech on energy in Michigan today:

In a speech that laid out his proposals for curing our country's addiction to oil, Barack Obama...hit all the rights notes in this struggling state of ours: jobs, jobs, jobs, cars made in Michigan, jobs, and growing companies in the alternative energy sector.

mooncat at Left In Alabama likes Barack's commitment to the space program:

...I'm pleased that Obama realizes that it's important to spend on research and development. Money invested in R&D comes back to you several fold in new technologies, new products and new markets. Innovation is never a bad investment. I don't believe any president since Johnson has supported NASA funding at a level that would realistically get the job done.

Lots of folks -- Matt, Juliana, Dave, Melissa, Grace, From the Left, Jennifer, Kathleen and others -- wish Barack a happy 47th birthday! (And Desmoinesdem has the rundown of every Obama birthday celebration in the Hawkeye State!)

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Video: "New Energy for America" Speech in
Lansing, MI

This morning in Michigan, Senator Obama announced a comprehensive New Energy for America plan designed to address the current energy crisis and move America towards an energy economy based on renewable resources and new technologies. In his speech, he identified our addiction to foreign oil as "central" to all of the major challenges facing us today, and called for the end of "the age of oil" in our time. 

Here's the video of the full speech:

video details and more

Read the full New Energy for America plan.

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Volunteers Recruit Hundreds of New Supporters at
Lollapalooza

Chicago Obama volunteers spent the weekend out in the sun at Lollapalooza music festival in Grant Park, registering new voters and helping recruit new volunteers to the campaign. Despite the heat, volunteers found the Lolla crowd was eager to get involved. The volunteers passed out flyers and stickers to an enthusiastic crowd who couldn’t seem to get enough Obama gear.

The Obama troop signed up hundreds of new volunteers from across the U.S. who are excited to help out Obama in their home communities.

Volunteer Emily from Chicago said:

It was a great day. I was amazed at the level of energy and excitement from both the volunteers, and even more so from the people passing by. I was really excited to register a few people who will be voting for the first time – and will be voting for Barack Obama. There was even one guy I spoke to who then started recruiting other people for me because he was so excited to volunteer.

Volunteers were excited to discuss Obama with the young audience and directed many concert-goers to register to vote at the Rock the Vote booth next to the Obama tent. Rock the Vote volunteers said they registered over 600 new voters at Lollapalooza.  

Naveen is a campaign staffer who helped organize volunteers for the event. She said:

The Obama booth was extremely popular at Lollapalooza!  Not only did people contribute to the campaign by purchasing lots of merchandise, but 1500 of them signed up to volunteer!  To give back to the volunteers, we raffled off sold-out Shepard Fairey posters to those who signed up to help every hour.  We also registered many people to vote.  It was awesome to be out in the field and to hear people's stories of support for Senator Obama. Overall the event was a huge success, and we're glad we were there!

Even if you missed the concert, you can still sign up to volunteer. Find out how you can get more involved.

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Post-Denver: Altering the Political Landscape

Photo: Registering New Voters

Millions of
New Voters
Are the Goal

By Steven Rosenfeld
AlterNet

August 4, 2008 - Barack Obama's presidential campaign is seeking to register "millions" of new voters immediately after the Democratic Convention, according to top campaign officials who say the effort is one facet of a "capacity-building" effort this summer that includes extensively training thousands of campaign workers as community organizers.

The voter registration effort is part of a broader strategy to not just elect Obama, but also to alter the political landscape by shifting power from Washington to the grassroots, the officials say, to cultivate a base for significant political reforms. The campaign sees its training and voter registration efforts as the cornerstone of building a new progressive movement like the rise of conservatism during Ronald Reagan's presidency.


"We need everybody in this party to get behind this effort to turn out thousands and thousands of volunteers in every single state in the country, to hit the streets and go register millions of new people that weekend alone," said Steve Hildebrand, Obama's deputy campaign manager, speaking at the recent Netroots Nation conference. "It's not about whether or not we will get Barack Obama elected. It is about whether or not we will have a progressive majority in this country for decades to come."

Last week, the campaign and the Democratic National Committee announced it would commit $20 million to "engaging and mobilizing" Hispanic voters in an effort that will include "voter mobilization, voter registration, online organizing, community outreach and paid advertising" and "also include Camp Obama trainings around the country."

"We expect our demographic to turn out at 80 percent," said Jason Green, the campaign's national voter registration director. "We are all about cultivating leadership."

The plan to train thousands of new community organizers and register millions of new voters is not business as usual for Democratic presidential campaigns, which for years have been run as top-down operations with little input from the grassroots. Instead, the campaign is seeking to blend the best aspects of community organizing, which stresses relationship building, with established, nuts-and-bolts voter outreach tactics to win.

A handful of experts who have worked in these dimensions of campaigns said the Obama plan realized a longtime hope of community groups to have a real role in presidential campaigns. However, those same people -- who did not want to be named -- questioned whether the Obama campaign had "the experience to do it right." Some state Democratic Party officials agreed. As one voter outreach expert put it, before listing many things that his group took years to master, "I want to believe."

Neither Hildebrand nor the other campaign officials who divulged their grassroots strategy at the Netroots conference replied to requests for follow-up interviews. However, as the deputy campaign manager concluded his talk, he said there were very good reasons why the campaign's strategy could work in 2008: the public wants real change; its candidate is charismatic; the campaign has the money -- and the volunteers -- to make it work.

"If we don't use this opportunity, if we don't do this right, shame on us," Hildebrand said, "because we will never have it as good as we have it right now."

The Obama campaign also has a track record of winning in 2008's primaries using this same strategy, which it is now institutionalizing for November's election.

Exhibit A: South Carolina

"They said the way you used to win down here is you pay off the ministers, you pay off the state senators and the state reps, and you have some chicken dinners," said Jeremy Bird, the campaign's South Carolina field director during the primary, recounting the thinking he found among local Democrats when setting up shop in March 2007. "That didn't jibe with our candidate's message, or his bio, or anything that he said since he started to run for president or started running for the state senate."

Bird, who joined Hildebrand and others at the forum for bloggers and independent media, exemplified the Obama campaign's new ethos.

Bird began by telling his story -- which echoed the campaign's narrative. He grew up in Missouri in a fundamentalist Southern Baptist family and got involved in community organizing after graduate school in Boston. In 2004, he worked for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and then for the Democratic National Committee, and after the election for organized labor. After reading one of Obama's books and relating to his work as a voting rights activist after law school, Bird joined the campaign. He arrived in South Carolina in March 2007 with little more than some videos and his acumen as a community organizer.

Instead of courting the local political establishment, Bird said he sought out community leaders and held "thousands of one-on-one meetings," where he would show a video and then listen to their concerns. The meetings typically lasted 45 minutes or more -- a long time for a top staffer of a national political campaign to spend with anyone. The most responsive leaders were then asked to host local gatherings, Bird said, where they introduced the candidate and campaign to their community.

"We asked them to support us and bring their social networks and hold house meetings," he said. "In those meetings, we were testing our first contact's leadership, and then we asked people to be team leaders."

Bird said he divided the state into neighborhoods and created teams for every five to 10 precincts. He said he rejected "the old precinct captain model" in which one person would be in charge of a candidate's operation, because Obama did not have enough supporters in every precinct. Bird then asked the teams how they could be helped by the statewide campaign. By the 2008 state primary day, Bird said Obama had 283 neighborhood teams and more than 10,000 volunteers working across South Carolina.

Obama won South Carolina's January Democratic primary with 55 percent of the vote -- a stunning margin. Hillary Clinton had 27 percent, and John Edwards had 18 percent.

"I was a skeptic of Jeremy and his crew in South Carolina, and whether he could build enough capacity to get us across the finish line," Hildebrand said, explaining that he has worked on campaigns for 22 years but never put as much trust and responsibility in the hands of local organizers. "I quickly lost that skepticism, and I saw the numbers that they were creating."

"It wasn't about identifying voters," Hildebrand said. "It was about building capacity to have the resources to do our persuasion and to turn out the vote. I give Jeremy and his team a tremendous amount of credit for building this field model and implementing this in a way that a state like South Carolina has never seen before. ... Every state is a field state if you know how to organize the field."

After the primaries, Bird said the national campaign interviewed 200 field organizers from all the states to assess and fortify the process for the rest of the campaign.

"The top lesson was, training and empowering people made the biggest difference," he said. "This wasn't just making phone calls and (telling volunteers that) you are going to make a lot of them. It's 'We are going to train you in a quality way from the second you come into our office ... in how to become a real leader.'"

The Training

Green, a recent Yale Law School graduate -- whose father was a minister "who preached a message of change" -- is now Obama's national voter registration director. He worked in Nevada during the primary and caucus season. Green said the campaign knew it would not succeed unless it cultivated real ties with supporters.

"If our organizers who are paid in our states made phone calls all day, we would not get it done," he said, explaining why the campaign turned to tactics used by local organizers. "We do it by building relationships. We rely on telling people's stories to create more connections. We listen more than we talk. In organizing, it is important to take the time to hear what people have to say, about the campaign, about politics generally."

The campaign says it does not ignore the nuts-and-bolt tactics of any contest -- voter contact, recruiting volunteers, boosting visibility, expanding the electorate -- and benchmarks to reach those goals. But what it also does -- and this has been noticed with some degree of bewilderment by the national press and more experienced Democratic Party workers -- is put an extraordinary emphasis on training its staff to tell their own stories, and to listen to others, especially the very people they are seeking to reach.

Numerous press accounts describe Obama training sessions where volunteers tell their personal stories, as if it were a political Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Experienced party activists who have attended these sessions have complained they were frustrated that the campaign did not give them more tools to be effective. But top Obama staffers like Hildebrand said empowering people at the grassroots level has created a more committed campaign, with tangible results in the primary states.

"They believe this is real. They don't believe it is a game. They believe they can get it done," he said. "This was a welcomed opportunity for so many of us to get involved in -- when you have a candidate that really believed in building this from the ground up."

Bird said the primary season had several important lessons. Foremost was the value of training. That was followed by "working close to the ground," or opening many local campaign offices, he said. Next was focusing on volunteer leadership and developing teams "because when you have people who are out there in teams, you see they come together in a way that precinct captains, on his or her own, aren't able to do."

"The fourth thing was to integrate the technology to support this," he said. "The fact that when you sign up on our e-mail list, you are automatically on our voter file, and we can follow up with you and know when you signed up and what you are interested in. ... On Election Day in South Carolina, we had an unprecedented number of cell phone numbers, people that had opted in, that we were able to text and remind people to vote. And they were able to text back in (when they voted)."

Bird said the campaign rejected a long-standing political campaign assumption that saw meeting strict goals and developing grassroots relationships as opposing values, because the community-building component was ephemeral while the benchmarks like meeting voter registration targets were concrete. Both of these approaches were needed, he said, so volunteers would take ownership over meeting the campaign's goals.

What is clear is that Obama's approach has attracted some very committed workers.

"I was looking for a place where there was an effort to get change from the top down and the bottom up at the same time," said Joy Cushman, who volunteered in South Carolina, where she went to house parties, held one-to-one meetings with local leaders, and met Bird. She, too, was on the Netroots Nation panel.

At first glance, Cushman is an unlikely an Obama supporter. She grew up in rural Maine and became involved in politics through her church, where she advocated for conservative issues such as school prayer. She then went on to work on affordable housing and other issues affecting low-income communities in Massachusetts. That brought her to the Obama campaign -- after she realized that grassroots power and new political leadership were both necessary to change the status quo.

"I saw that Jeremy recognized, and the organizers recognized, that the awakening it takes for people to take on the responsibility for really being citizens is not something that happens at a mass level," she said. "It is something that happens one living room at a time, one kitchen table at a time, and this campaign was investing in that effort."

Obama's Organizing School

It was striking to see Cushman and Bird -- who grew up in socially conservative homes -- as examples of the campaign's best and brightest organizers. Indeed, many of the campaign's local organizing tactics have long been used by the religious right.

"I am a child of the conservative movement," Cushman said. "The brilliance of the church was we were organizing on abortion and prayer in schools, and it wasn't just focused on Washington, it was focused on our local community. They realized for everyday people to be involved, the issues need to connect with our values, and we need to have a very local way, and a meaningful way, to get involved at the local level that isn't just forwarding e-mails to our Congress people in Washington."

Obama's deputy campaign manager agreed. "Why does Barack Obama at times admire Ronald Reagan?" Hildebrand asked. "Because he built a movement -- not because of his policies. Don't ever criticize him for that. It is because Ronald Reagan built a movement. That's what we will do. That's what we are doing."

In April, Caroline Kennedy e-mailed Obama supporters, saying the campaign would train a new generation of grassroots leaders this summer. A "fellows" program would take 30 hours a week for six weeks. Thirty-six hundred applicants were accepted, said Cushman, who was asked to help develop the program. The training started in June.

"Over three days in early June, we trained them how to be authentic leaders themselves and share their story," Cushman said. "We train them how to build relationships, how to do one-on-one conversations with people, how to lead house meetings, how to do voter registration, because we have a 50-state voter registration project."

First, the fellows were given voter registration goals, Cushman said. Her team in Georgia -- where she was assigned -- registered 1,200 new voters. The next goal was holding house meetings. Two weeks later, on June 28, the campaign held more than 4,000 such sessions across the country, she said, to "do what used to be truly American, which is sit and talk about what do we want for ourselves, our country, and what is our responsibility."

"The fellows aren't just college students looking for something to do over the summer," Cushman said. "They are teachers and airline pilots and firefighters and people who have decided that they are willing to take the risk and make sacrifices to change the country."

Cushman said people she meets often say the last time Democrats saw anything like the campaign's grassroots effort was during the civil rights movement a half-century ago. And it is a page from that very era -- an unprecedented national voter registration drive immediately following the Democratic Convention -- that the campaign hopes will be the key to victory in November and an ensuing groundswell for political reform.

Millions of New Voters

Green, the campaign's national voter registration director, said the campaign knows an estimated 60 million Americans are eligible to vote but are not registered. States such as Nevada, where George W. Bush beat John Kerry by 21,500 votes in 2004, has 390,000 eligible but unregistered voters. The task, Green said, is to reach out to potential voters in conventional and unconventional ways. That means finding them anywhere in their communities, such as at bus stops, shopping centers, social service organizations, senior centers, naturalization ceremonies, campuses and concerts, as well as house parties.

"We know that our targeted group is very transient," he said, referring to the fact that lower-income people, students and young people move often, which complicates the voter registration process in states that require specific forms of documentation to register.

"The night Barack accepts the nomination, we will have house parties," Green said. "We will ask those people to register voters on the next few days."

"We saw through the 2008 primaries that we had voter registration opportunities that never existed to us in this party," Hildebrand said. "We learned through experience ... that our efforts on the ground to register voters was really, really important."

Those listening to the Obama campaign officials speak at Netroots Nation included state Democratic Party officials and others who work in voter registration organizations. One high-ranking state party official was more than skeptical that the campaign would be able to find millions of new voters on Labor Day Weekend, which follows the Democratic Convention, and subsequently turn out these new voters come Election Day. Another party official from the same large state feared that the Obama campaign, despite its talk about the importance of grassroots, would siphon volunteers who were badly needed for down-ballot state legislature and municipal races. Those officials said early reviews of Obama's training and outreach efforts were frustrating, with predictable errors on voter registration forms and a reluctance to ask more seasoned campaigners for advice -- despite all the talk of listening to local leaders.

Another voter registration expert predicted that mistakes on the voter registration forms -- an inevitable part of any voter drive -- would be used by the Republican Party to accuse the Obama campaign of voter registration fraud, just as the GOP has repeatedly attacked voter registration efforts by groups like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) in recent years. It was one thing for a nonprofit group to make these kinds of mistakes, the expert said, but more politically volatile when a presidential campaign errs.

"They have the infrastructure to reach a million voters," said a voter registration researcher. "But do they have the infrastructure to reach a million disenfranchised voters who would not register otherwise?"

Efforts to contact these Obama campaign officials after the Netroots Nation conference to discuss these points were unsuccessful. The campaign aides at the conference did not discuss "quality control" issues, which established voter registration groups say are critical.

But Hildebrand said the planned voter registration drive was intended not just to benefit the Obama campaign, but to help elect Democrats at every level, especially in state legislatures where the majority would redraw congressional district boundaries in 2009. And since Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, his campaign and the national party's operations have been merging, as evidenced by the DNC's announcement last week that it would spend $20 million to engage Hispanic voters.

Hildebrand said the training of community organizers and the voter registration effort was necessary not just to elect Obama, but to deliver on an agenda of political change.

"We can't be so single-minded that this is about Barack Obama, because it is not," he said. "It is about the American people and the principles that are important to us. Whether or not we will get health care passed; whether or not we will stop the war in Iraq; whether or not we are going to build an education system that we can be more proud of. There are a lot of things that we as progressives hold fundamentally dear, and if this is about a game, we are not being all that successful -- and neither is our opposition. But if it is about a movement that can fundamentally change the way we do business in this country at every single level, then we will be successful."

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/93718/

http://progressivesforobama.blogspot.com

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Video and iPaper: New Energy for America Plan

Barack Obama announced his New Energy for America plan this morning in Lansing, Michigan.

The main points of the plan as listed on the barackobama.com blog are:

• Providing short?term relief to American families facing pain at the pump
• Helping create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.
• Within 10 years, saving more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined.
• Putting 1 million Plug?In Hybrid cars ? cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon ? on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America.
• Ensuring 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025.
• Implementing an economy?wide cap?and?trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.

Barack also said that in 10 years following his plan the U.S. would "eliminate the need for oil from the Middle East and Venezuela."



Here's video of the entire speech.


video details and more




And you can read the entire energy plan below:


video details and more

Barack Obama's New Energy Plan For America - Upload a Document to Scribd Read this document on Scribd: Barack Obama's New Energy Plan For America



video details and more


Barack on the road from Michigan to Ohio.

Paul Kekai Manansala is a freelance author and blogger from Sacramento, California.

 

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Voices for Change: Channa in Fort Worth, Texas

When Channa, 27, a teacher in Fort Worth, Texas, donated to the Obama campaign, she made sure we knew what a big step this was for her. “I’m the most frugal person you will ever meet. The fact that I would consider donating to a campaign – you better know I must be inspired,” she said.

Paying back her college loans and living on a teaching salary, Channa doesn’t have a lot of extra money. But she found enough to donate not once – but multiple times.

I’ve never donated to anything before, and this is the first election I’ve ever been involved in. Obama came to town in the spring, and I decided to go to the rally. I’ve never seen anything like it! There were people from every culture you could ever imagine. This is the one event I’ve ever seen in this country that brought so many different people together.

Channa currently teaches high school chemistry, but she is hoping to go back to school in the next few years to be a doctor. Because of her students and her own studies, Channa says education is one of the most important issues for her in this election.

When we go into classrooms, we are teaching for tests – not helping the kids prepare for college and careers. We need to be educating the next generation. As a teacher, I feel responsible. I want to make sure the kids are prepared for the SAT and to go to college.

Channa says:

My kids are very concerned that they won’t be able to afford college. One of the things Obama wants to do is create more scholarships and funds for education but require that kids give back and volunteer. I think that’s awesome because people seem to appreciate things more when they have to earn them.

Her own educational costs are also on her mind. “I’m paying for college out of my own pockets, and teaching is one of those professions where if you are trying to do it on your own, you need a second job.” Student loans only add to the burden.

As she struggles under her teaching salary, Channa is also concerned about the economy.

With all the recessions and foreclosures, it makes it really hard for young people like me who are looking to buy a home in the future.

But Channa has hope that an Obama administration can bring much needed change and make the American dream more affordable and possible to young Americans just starting out.

Even with her self-described frugality, Channa felt inspired to give what she could to the Obama for America campaign. Join Channa and be a part of the movement.

Voices for Change is a series featuring profiles of Barack Obama's grassroots supporters from across the nation. The people who make up this movement come from all walks of life, but they share a common goal: to help bring about fundamental change in Washington.

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Open Thread

Barack will be in Lansing, Michigan, tomorrow morning for an important speech on energy policy. Josh Penn is in Michigan, where tickets for Monday's event did not last long . . . 

I am at the Gone Wired Cafe in Lansing, Michigan, where tickets for Senator Obama's speech on energy have been given away all morning. It has been quite a sight to see, people lined up for five blocks waiting to get tickets. I talked to some people who had been camping out since before midnight last night to make sure that they were able to see the Senator speak. One thing I kept hearing from people was how nice a community it was in the line. People were making friends with the people next to them, getting each other food when they were hungry and drinks when they were thirsty. 

Polls open in 92 days . . .

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