Hold on to your hats kids...

...it's a blog post about Barack Obama!

A short one, because I am somewhat sickly, and I suppose I don't have a lot to say that hasn't already been said. I'd just like to discuss my extremely tiny focus group, a handful of twenty-somethings in Seattle, Washington, the majority of whom have never been particularly interested in politics. Several of those who bothered to vote in the past election voted for Bush, because, well, everyone around them did (they weren't in Seattle at the time.) By and large the political world has always been something happening to them.

That is no longer the case. Almost every single one of them has been following this campaign with alacrity since Iowa, and pulling hard for Obama. Their reasons for doing so are varied and disparate; many of them have a particular pet issue (and yes, some of them are just virulently anti-Clinton.) But the single uniting factor is a feeling that pervaded my apartment over the faint scent of spilled soda and unidentifiable Tupperware contents, as we channel-surfed from network to network, watching the primaries unfold, a sense shared by this scattered handful of young Americans from all over the country:

What we do matters.

That is Obama's great strength - his power to mobilize the disenfranchised, to reach through apathy and willful ignorance with the promise that this time, things can be different. And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the more of the electorate that participates, the more power they have. It's a shame that Obama: He Gives A Shit wouldn't fly as a campaign slogan, because that's really what it boils down to.

It's pretty goddamn cool to be watching history unfold.

-R