Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

"Obama's Inclusion"

Andrew Sullivan:
A reader writes:

This morning I saw an excerpt from Obama's concession speech in Indiana where he said the following:

"Or this time, we can build on the movement we've started in this campaign – a movement that's united Democrats, Independents, and Republicans; a movement of young and old, rich and poor; white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, gay and straight."

I have two comments about this:

First, I cannot recall a politician ever speaking after a loss, proclaiming that he wants to bring together gays and straights. That is amazing. Can you imagine Hillary ever saying anything like that to a national audience, especially after a defeat?

Second, the "gay and straight" portion is not included in the text of the speech on Obama's website. This means either 1) the campaign removed those words from the edited transcript or 2) (more likely) Obama's inclusion of "gay and straight" was impromptu. It wasn't included by the speech writers, but he included it at the spur of the moment. If this is true, how amazing it is that there is a politician who is willing to stand up for us gay Americans who have been ignored for so long. I hope Obama knows how much those three small words that he included in his speech mean to us.

I noticed it too. Unimaginable coming from a Clinton. And it will, of course, be regarded by the Steyn-Hewitt types as more evidence that Obama is an extreme communist terrorist. But it will be regarded by the next generation as more evidence that Obama is the candidate of the future. He is. Quite how far into the future is what we are finding out.

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