Some experiences you can only know by “being there.” This was one of them. After waiting in line for a couple of hours we were turned away. The over nine-thousand seats were not nearly enough. It was shivering cold and we were directed with thousands of others to wait in the field down below and that Obama would come out and talk with us.  He did.  There was an energy in the air and the crowd roared as Obama walked out to the make-shift podium, and not to “hail to the Chief” but to Stevie Wonder’s “Signed Sealed and Delivered”.

Obama said he was going to keep his speach short and he kept his word, maybe because it was cold, I don’t know, but it didn’t seem make a difference with the crowd. The papers have it right, he is like a rock star. You could see the people in his limo trying to get him back inside.  It was all impromptu, security had to have been a nightmare. Obama Ignored them, and shook every hand he possibly could.

The last year I was in Eugene, Nixon was president, the Vietnam war was raging, and the Kent State students had just been shot dead. Across from where we waited in line to see Barack, furniture had been pulled from the ROTC building and was set ablaze in the street. Back then we students were surrounded by bus loads of National Guard troops, with long white batons, four foot Plexiglass shields, and gas masks. The government had photographers there taking our pictures, and the flash bulbs were going off like a forth of July celebration. Except it wasn’t a celebration. The gas poured into the crowd, and the batons went swinging.

We talk a lot about the war in Iraq as being the Republican’s war and that Iraq is just another Vietnam.What isn’t mentioned much is that Vietnam was the Democrats war, Richard Nixon got into office by promising to end it. He had a secret plan. It failed. He failed. And forty years later we still bare the “stain” of that failure on our hands.

I hope if Barack is elected president that he gets us out of Iraq sooner, rather than later. I also hope that he is true to his word that “he will be as careful getting us out of Iraq as Bush was reckless getting us in”. The Bush administration failed the American people when they ignored lessons written in blood from the Vietnam War. As in Vietnam, it will be a subsequent President that has to clean up the mess. I pray our new President succeeds where those who have gone before him have failed. The Iraq people never asked to be invaded and we owe it to them and ourselves to leave them as whole as possible.

After his brief talk with us shivering left-overs, Barack went back inside to speak with the thousands of people who were not so quietly waiting. We were hungry, cold, and everyone wanted a beer. (Oregon has the best beer in the world). So we took off for a close by bar. It was packed and not just with people eating. There were two TVs going and Obama filled the screens. People were crowded around them like honey bees. The electricity of the night filled this bar as it had filled Mac Court a short time earlier. There was a line to get in. As that crowd was winding up, we five middle aged guys were winding down. It was time to go.

On the drive home we talked about the things that you experience that are so difficult to put into words. Somebody smart once said that you don’t reason the truth, you smell it, taste it, feel it.  The longer I live the more I think they were right. I bet a lot of people will be voting for Barack Obama. I can just feel it.