7-10 million Americans live abroad

Nothing like hearing that chanted by 80,000 of your closest friends.

I know, I know, everyone wants to hear about The Speech. So I’ll oblige before I go into more detail about the rest of my Thursday.

First of all, I was nervous because the acoustics, at least where I was sitting with CDA behind the podium on the third level up, weren’t great. All the other speakers had been super echo-y and hard to understand, but I guess it was because the crowd was less attentive than when Barack spoke. Somehow it makes for a lot of background noise when 40,000 people are talking to their neighbors and the other 40,000 are answering.

But that Barack, man, he knows how to handle a crowd. It was fairly easy to catch most of what he said, and I was impressed. In the excitement of the moment, I was absolutely swept away, as was everyone else. We were fired up, ready to go, and if he had asked us to storm the White House and do some defenestrating, like in the good old days, we would have carried Mile High Stadium to Washington D.C. and gone at it using our campaign pins as spears.

There was one thing, though, that bothered me after I had time to decompress and think about the speech. As galvanizing as it was, I don’t think it was the kind of speech that would convince undecided voters to help turn their states blue. However, I don’t know if that was the goal of the speech, or if the goal was more to show the hardcore Democrats at and watching the convention a good time. Actually, I guess that’s good for party unity, which is not an insignificant goal, especially in this election.

But shouldn’t trying to sway undecided voters be the main goal behind everything Barack and Biden do from now on? I mean, we’re only 67 days away from the election. It’s at times like these I wish I had more political acumen. Maybe I just haven’t been around the process long enough, but understanding these kind of ulterior motives and political maneuverings with multiple meanings just does not come naturally to me. I’ll ask Lindsey – she’s always super attuned to details like this and happy to explain, which is great. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery, though?

P.S., I know you’re out there – I wondered what was going on when my daily page hits started to shoot up (and by shoot up I mean break into the double digits), and apparently there was a link to my blog on the main Macaulay site during convention. So don’t forget that the whole point of a blog is that it’s interactive! Take that, you old-fashioned and out-of-touch print publications. It’s time for change. Yes we can!