A few months ago, I was driving my 65+ year old mom to the Detroit airport, and I, naturally and deliberately, steered the conversation to politics. Being her age and what not, I was not at all surprised to find out she was a Hillary supporter.
She said she just didn't know enough about Barack Obama to feel comfortable voting for him. I thought to myself that Hillary has been around so long, she is like a worn glove. A stiff, dried and tattered glove in my mind, but a familiar glove.
Flash forward to a week ago. Mom, having spent 3 months in Brazil with my brother had come away from that experience longing for home, and tied to CNN, the only English speaking tv program they had. I was speaking about politics, again, with my brother, and I said I wasn't all that surprised Mom liked Hillary, as an older white female who lost her husband to cancer and was paying for supplemental health care. That was her number one concern and Hillary, rightly or wrongly is perceived as having been a champion for health care for 10 to a dozen years. My brother however said that I better check with mom now, because he didn't think she supported Hillary anymore.
Uh oh, I thought. Living with my conservative brother for three months poisoned her mind! Time for an intervention lest she do something foolish like vote for John "Hundred Year War" McCain!
So I spoke with Mom, and asked her about the switch. Much to my surprise, she said that after watching CNN for 3 months straight, she just didn't trust Hillary. She was clearly undecided and wavering. Imagine my surprise, what with all of us here thinking that CNN was Fox News lite and Obama trashing Hillary shilling bought and paid for media outlet, that a heavy dose of CNN flipped a Hillary gal into the undecided category. Maybe the Bosnia flap carried further than any of us knew!
So I decided to show Mom a website I put together for a class I'm in. (We used a site called Wetpaint.com which offers free and simple website templates with easy widget function for video and music embedding, wiki editing and rss feeds. Way cool! But I digress...) On my site I have the "I want Barack", "Mosh", and of course "Yes We Can" videos. I showed mom the "Yes We Can" video with a little set up.
Now, the first time I saw and heard that video was probably 2-3 months ago. It was shortly after my preferred candidate John Edwards dropped out of the race and I was left with a choice between two good candidates, but no real favorite. I knew and liked Hillary, but I was not a fan. I didn't know Obama, but I liked him too. If anything, I was a little jealous of Obama for his success, to the detriment of Edwards. That video was the beginning of the end for Hillary to me. I wanted to share it with Mom.
After about twenty seconds of the video I could sense that my mom was warming up to the show. It was maybe a little startling for her to see a black man with a funky hat and some old looking army jacket on the screen; and the voice-over singing over speaking can be distracting as well. But she did warm up to it.
Mom is much like me. Emotional, but keen and a good sense of character. I told her after the video about how I felt inspired by the video and Obama's words; how it gave me goosebumps the first time I saw it. The video had the same effect on her. She was almost crying, and told me to look at the hair on her arms standing up, and her own goosebumps!
Well, the visit ended soon after, but I was confident I had made a real difference in her decision come November. At this point, she doesn't trust Hillary, and is inspired by Barack. Any future news and advertising will be tinted by these views and will, typically, reinforce her views.
A few days later, I was still thinking about Mom and the video. What struck me, was not that it was inspiring or a good speech. Any politician can have a good speech written, or talk things up.
No, what was different about that speech was that I believed the speaker.
Here is a man speaking about the greatest country in the world and working to make it better. Simple. Ambitious. But I believe him when he says he will try. I trust him. So he may fail, or he may not accomplish all that he sets out to do. Great tasks require a little luck too, but at least with him I trust him when he says he will try.
Trust. A simple concept that we hold dear in our lives. We surround ourselves with people whom we trust, and we work to build trust in people we love. I believe Obama when he says something, and I believe that he believes in it too. I trust Obama.