That was the strap-line they were putting on the anti Obama advert I saw as I was watching ‘Larry King Live’ on the in-flight TV channel from Memphis to San Francisco, I saw it several times too as I whisked in & out of my hotel rooms …. if you wanna get some idea of what an aggressive political advertising campaign is just check this out, McCain Anti Obama Campaign Ad.

Or why not give this one a go ….. Too Radical, Too Risky!

And it was these aggressive smear campaigns that… to my European eyes & from what I heard in general talk on a day to day basis,  very much proved McCain’s undoing, prompting further ads in defence & defiance of these blatant infamatory below the belt attacks… like this one McCain False Claims. But for me the moment this negative campaining blew up in his face, was this glorious bit of television… hey….you might ‘All be Joe The Plumbers’ out there… (who as I’m sure you’re aware didn’t turn up for McCain’s call to arms…. he has now got an agent & has stopped plumbing to launch a career as a country singer)…. but when you spit into the wind, sometime it’s bound to blow back in your face …. as this wonderful old lady proves to such a degree that McCain has to grab back the mike from her …and damned quick…. & actually jump to Obama’s defence

Well it just gives you some idea of the bare knuckle fighting that was going on… and… on …. and ongoing day in day out. For me it only served to heighten Obama’s stature, the claims were widely accepted as blatant distortion & the subject of much negative press for McCain as, consistently Obama just kept his cool & kept rolling confidently ahead.

It reminded me of why I decided to put the phrase ‘Obama, A Cause for Celebration’ right in the centre of the Feel The Dream website, a site dedicated to celebrating freedom and to dancing to the prolific use of Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech in Club Culture.

The sea change for me was another Larry King Live show, this time one that I had seen weeks earlier in a hotel in Germany. He was interviewing Michelle Obama and centering on the verbal assaults & accusations made against her…. she had after all said that ‘for the first time in her adult life, she was proud to be American’… booo hiss, what about this time Michelle, what about that? The phrase was turned around to make her seem fundamentally un-patriotic.

She didn’t miss a step…. not once retorting or throwing back a corresponding accusation in her defence. All she would say was that that these people were just doing their job, she saw them frequently, talked on good terms with them & that she & Barack felt no reason for animosity, there were too many other much more important things at hand.

That was the moment I decided to rescind on my decision never to have a political bias on the site and realised that if these principles had a chance of coming into power, we would truly have a ‘Cause for Celebration’. For the first time I started to see our all too familier confrontational ‘politics’ moving in another direction, which… on reflection I can only refer to as leadership.

By the time I got home from Germany I got the site hastily modified & started seriously thinking about getting out there to see it all for myself.

Even then, I refrained from publicising the site on this basis, preferring it to stand simply as a marker for a historic time. It is NOT a political lobbyist site and soon it’ll regain it’s proper emphasis on freedom, celebration, dance & music. But should Obama win??? Martin Luther King will have won too, and…. over the weeks his words will have again regained new emphasis & vigour… now with an added flavour…. the tangible reality that his dream has come a massive way forward in its potential for realisation.

There’s more to tell you about what went though my mind on that eight hour flight & the subsequent build to the climactic celebrations. But this post has gone on long enough.

These diaries are a reflection on a week or two which have taken me some time to digest & I’m glad to be writing them now with hindsight… at the time it was all I could do to bang out the odd ‘Twitter’ message, keep my eyes on the road, my hands upon the wheel & my little Facebook family… you guessed it… ‘Obama, A Cause for Celebration’, growing day by day.

I was collecting souveniers of Dia De Los Muertos , Beale St, the home of the blues & the Stax & Sun recording studios in Memphis & sketching out the beginning of a little ‘Road Trip Remix’ that’s still in the can.

And I was on holiday. And I’ve got the skulls to prove it

P@x

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