By: Winston Smith


Ohio put him over the top. Balloons and confetti fell from the ceiling and the band played an arrangement for orchestra of “This Will Be the Last Time,” Cheers, accolades, and noisemakers resonated in wonderful cacophony throughout the massive auditorium. The candidate and his wife, the vice-presidential candidate and her husband, came to the podium hand-in-hand, smiling faces turning from side to side and their arms stretched high above their heads.

Soon all but the candidate took seats at the rear of the stage and the candidate, scanning his audience from right to left, stood at the podium gripping its smooth edges as the roar turned to a murmur, then to complete silence.

“I bet most of you tonight are here thinking I’m here to accept our party’s nomination for President of the United States,” he began, his voice low and deep. The crowd cheered wildly, placards bouncing in the darkened hall like a battalion of blue corks on an angry sea. “Well, I’m not.”

He paused, the crowd became instantly silent, stunned. “No, ladies and gentlemen, I am not here to accept this nomination. My cause is much greater than that. My cause, my fellow Americans, is to help you, your family, your friends and your neighbors, take back America. To take it back from the religious fanatics who have so distorted the meaning of virtue and faith, and values of life and family, To take it back from the fascists who have turned our nation into an arm of international corporate greed. To take it back from the cowards who would send the best young men and women in a generation into a war based on lies and deceit, and fought for the sole purpose of fattening the bottom lines of corporations like Exxon and Halliburton. No, ladies and gentlemen, no my fellow Americans, what you have done here tonight, in nominating me and my running mate for the highest elected offices in the nation, is make a statement. It is a simple statement, and one that requires few words to define and fewer still to comprehend: We want it back.

Yes, my friends, we want it back. We want it fixed, so that it works again for the benefit of the schoolteachers who have been burdened with oversized classes in undersized classrooms. We want it fixed for the journeyman mason that has watched his standard of living drop because impoverished workers seeking a better life cross our borders with impunity in the dead of night. We want it fixed for the elderly couple who have to chose between losing their life to an illness or losing their house to pay for the necessary treatment. We want the one trillion dollars that has been taken from these people, their children, and their grandchildren returned. We want it back.

I have a question for you, folks: How many of you earn less than $100,000 a year? $250,000? $500,000? A million? Yep, my friends, I have to raise my hands on that one- fortune has been kind to me. But you know what I saw up here on this podium? What I saw was what most Americans see: that as the income went up, the hands went down. Yet, of all those hands that were still raised- mine included- do you realize that most have seen their tax bill drop over the last few years, to the point where there is almost no difference at all between the amount of taxes any of us pay? Yet our government has spent nearly one trillion dollars that it didn’t have. Why? Because it returned that trillion dollars to the people who still had their hands up or it spent it on a war that, as we know now, was based upon lies and deceit.

Because of this, because those who still had their hands up got back money that our treasury borrowed from the Chinese, the City of New Orleans was a swamp for nearly a year and nearly 20,000 died. Because of this, 3,500 American men and women have lost their lives and an additional 30,000 have lost limbs, or have been disfigured and maimed. Because of this, nearly 4 million more families are without health insurance than eight years ago, and an additional 3 million have slid from subsistence into mere existence, from living paycheck to paycheck, to living soup line to soup line. While many of those in New Orleans voted for the man who gave them their $300 tax refund check, I wondered as I watched the horror of Katrina unfold along with hundreds of millions worldwide, if that $300 will pay for the house destroyed in the floods caused by the unrepaired levies. I wondered if the $300 refund was worth the lives lost at the Convention Center and Super Dome because of an unprepared government agency run by an incompetent administrator chosen by a President more interested in finishing his 5 week vacation than serving the needs of the nation he was sworn to protect. There are some things, I guess, that we may want back, but can never have.

But we still want back what was taken from us. We want back the jobs sent to somewhere else. We want back the money squandered in a fool’s quest. We want back the dignity our nation has lost. We want back the fortunes that might have been given to our children and grandchildren, but that were given instead to those with fortunes in hand.

So let me tell you what I will do if I am given this task, the task of taking back what has been taken from us. I will not take a vacation until Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants have been brought to justice- or shot like rabid dogs and thrown into a ditch to rot in the hot sun of an Afghani summer; either outcome works for me. I promise that those who make less than $100,000 a year will see their taxes cut, and those earning more than half a million- myself included- will see up to a 70% marginal tax bracket that will ultimately give back what was taken out of the pockets of many and give to the few. Those in between will see no change whatsoever- and that’s my promise. And for those who run corporate America, you are going to have to take care of your employees before you take care of yourself. You can expect to see my office introduce legislation that will force you to treat your employees as valuable assets, not disposable, interchangeable parts in your global machines. If you want to pay yourself $250 million a year, you had better make sure that your lowest paid janitor in Bangladesh is making the equivalent of $100,000, or 95% of your excessive bloated income will be used to make sure my children and grandchildren don’t have to pay back the money our nation borrowed from China and gave to you in the first place.

In the first 60 days of my administration, I will propose legislation to provide medical coverage to every American who needs it. It’ll cost a lot of money, but we all know what happens when you don’t take care of the infrastructure: cities flood and people die. Social infrastructure is no less important than physical infrastructure. I guess what I’m saying is that we’re paying for it now, one way or another.

Finally, on January 20th, at 12:01 in the afternoon, I will seek indictments against anyone and everyone in the current administration, from the president on down, who participated in the deceit that led us into the disaster that has become Iraq. If they are found complicit, they will be punished.

So, my fellow Americans, if this is your goal, your quest, your idea of what our nation is and should become, then I accept your nomination as President of the United States.”

The crowd cheered.

Music to the ears. Can we hope ?!

A female (black) rock star wore a "Barack Obama in 2008" T-shirt on the CBS disaster Rock benefit tonight.

John Edwards has been on the cable news shows today talking about his poverty program and poverty in America. Now they give him attention!

Edwards/Obama in '08! Got my attention!