Reply #4: This is a silly line of attack.

[TayTay]

Gov Patrick ran a classic outsider campaign for Governor in 2006 in Massachusetts. He was and is an incredibly gifted public speaker who had to ask people to take a leap of faith in him in order to get their votes. That is a classic outsider campaign. Bill Clinton did this in 1992. He was an unknown Southern Governor who lacked national recognition and who had to persuade people to go along with him, despite his lack of national credentials. Back then, he "still believed in a place called Hope." Now hope is 'just words" and somehow diminished because other voices have said similar things. I beg to disagree.

This is a silly fight and shows a sort of desperation on the part of the HRC campaign. Hope, as an issue, goes back to the very founding of this American Republic. It was hope that lead farmers and tradesmen to believe they could wage a wage with the greatest power on earth in 1775 and win. It was hope that said to women that they would one day get the right to own property in their own names and be able to vote. It was hope that sent young and old alike into the civil rights movement to believe that discrimination, cruelty and subjugation could be overturned. We are a nation founded on hope, it is in our blood, it infuses our founding documents, gives spirit to our proclamation of a bill of rights for all our citizens. Hope is what you have left when everyone and everything says that it can't be done and people do it anyway.

To claim that hope and the belief in "just words" is somehow unique to Deval Patrick or Barack Obama degrades our American tradition. Hope is the American birthright. Claiming that it belongs to one person or can be bottled up as the property of one campaign is wrong. Hope is what drives this country, hope is what we have been missing under the Bush Administration and what we want to restore to this nation. Shame on those who think of hope as a commodity that can be traded away or locked up simply because it has been used before. Of course it has been used before in America. Hope and a faith in one another is what built this country. It doesn't belong to one person, it belongs to all of us.

I worked for Deval Patrick as a town co-chair in MA on his Governor's campaign. Yeah, he ran on hope and yeah, he hasn't enacted everything he set out to do into law yet. He has a ways to go. But I will tell you this, I cried on the day he was inaugurated Governor. I cried when he put his hand on the http://www.mass.gov/Agov3/docs/html//inaug_bible_pr.html">Amistad Bible, the book given to John Quincy Adams by the prisoners that Adams had defended and freed from bondage, I cried because what was happening in front of me was hope fulfilled. It was sweet and warm and I don't regret one single second I spent on that campaign nor do I regret a candidate who promised me hope. Heck, I see greatness in another candidate who is promising me hope. And I'm there, cuz I know that things begin, not end, with hope.

Yeah, sometimes they are "just words." Maybe others have said similar things, including the Dem candidate for President in 1992, but those "just words" echo the mighty words that have always moved this nation. I want to hear them again, I want to feel I am a part of something greater than myself, I want to believe. I want that hope, over and over and over again. Hope comes first, then belief, then action. That is how things get done. That is how we will change this nation.