Do you remember where you were when Barack Obama walked onto the stage to give the Democratic Keynote address? I do. I was sitting at my sewing machine because I had the convention on as background noise and I just stopped. I looked up and there was this handsome, tall black man on my screen. I hit the remote control to turn the volume up louder. I knew I wanted to hear what he had to say. I wondered to myself, who is he? How did he get there? But my thoughts were pushed away, because he began to speak. His voice was clear and as he spoke something came over me. That was July 27, 2004 and well life for me and politics has not been the same since.
How exactly did Barack Obama become the keynote speaker for the Kerry campaign? What person had the incredible insight to provide the stage to a young Barack Obama?
"I knew about him in the Illinois senate primary. I knew about what he had done on the war before the war," says Kerry's top strategist, Bob Shrum, who learned about Obama from his friend Laurence Tribe, the Harvard professor for whom Obama had served as a research assistant during his years in law school. Jack Corrigan, who managed Kerry's convention operations and closely follows Illinois politics, told me that he had contemplated hiring Obama to work on voter outreach months before the convention. "I thought, 'This guy's going to lose in a month,'" Corrigan recalled, referring to the grim odds Obama faced in February 2004. "We should go after him." TNR
Mary Beth Cahill was John Kerry's campaign and she was intrigued by an aticle she read about Barack Obama.
They were eagerly looking for "something that would be high impact and would be written about a lot and reported on," as Cahill puts it. And as she was helping compile a shortlist of possible keynoters, she recalled a photo spread about Obama she saw in Time magazine earlier that year, leading her to consult friends from Harvard who had taught him, members of the Illinois delegation to the convention, and others who knew him--including Tribe. "Throughout the 1990s, I was saying the most impressive all-around student I had was Barack," Tribe now reflects. "What I wasn't sure of was how charismatic a speaker he would be."
It seems that the Kerry campaign thought that Barack Obama might be able to excite young African American professional for the party. They wanted a speaker that would bring excitement and cause media buzz and heighten interest. When Mary Beth Cahill approached John Kerry with the idea of Barack Obama as keynote speaker he agreed. It seems that John and Barack had developed a friendship. Robert Gibbs was then and is now Barack Obama's Communications Director was central to the successful arrival of Barack to the convention stage.
The Obama campaign actively lobbied for the slot as well. According to his Senate campaign manager, Jim Cauley, the team had prepared an eight-minute audition video containing Obama's primary victory speech (complete with a crowd chanting, "Yes we can"), as well as campaign ads and still photos over a song from When We Were Kings, the Mohammed Ali biopic. Cauley believes that it was Robert Gibbs, a former Kerry staffer who joined Obama's senate campaigln in April 2004 and is now communications director for his presidential campaign, who provided a direct link between the two teams. "Robert knew all of the personalities fairly well," Cauley told me, saying that the video was intended to send the message that "he's a good speaker, he can do this." TNR
If you would like to read more about the fascinating ascent of Barack Obama and The Speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston or Barack's Big Night from TNR.
Let's all thank Mary Beth Cahill even though John Kerry also deserves much credit for listening to that insightful woman. If you would like to read a 2004 keynote transcript.
A belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief — I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper — that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one. Excerpt Barack Obama 2004 Keynote
So what do you remember about Barack Obama's introduction to the nation on that hot July night that changed my life, made me cry and hope for a better day that the country Barack described could be the country I would live in.
Tonight:We offer our Congratulations to this years 2008 Democratic Keynote Speaker former Virginia Governor Mark R. Warner. May you rock the house and the nation!