Digital Analogue

Obama for Senate '04

Barack Obama, after winning the Tuesday primary in a landslide, will now go on to campaign and, with a little help from us, win in November.

He was at Knox today as part of his tour of Illinois. He spoke for about a half hour and then took questions. He's a solid liberal, though as he points out, "is it that liberal to think that you shouldn't have to go bankrupt just because you get sick?" What really struck me, though, was that he never put forth just one single thing that was supposed solve all our problems, or even one problem. "There is no magic bullet," he said, and so for each problem he addressed, he listed three or four reasonable---and most importantly attainable---goals that each formed steps on a path to a solution. His major agenda items seem to be health care (and he's served on a health care committee in the IL Senate), the economy (primarily jobs, but also education), and Iraq. Which is a pretty good set of items to focus on right now. I'm really glad I voted for him, and I'm really glad he won.

Also worth pointing out: more people voted for him than voted for all the Republicans in the Senate primary, put together. There were more people in Dupage County that voted for Obama than voted for Jack Ryan. Now, they weren't head-to-head, of course, but it really shows that he, and our current political situation, really fire up Democrats to get involved. It's certainly not "in the bag", but boy do we ever have a good shot at it.

Now back to figuring out what I'm going to teach my kids about Operating Systems this term.

"True jihad today is not in the hijacking of planes but in the manufacturing of them." --Izzat Majeed