One Choice: Obama

This is the text of a speech Bruce Springsteen gave yesterday in Ohio
for Barack Obama and Joe Biden:

“I’m honored to be here with Senator Obama tonight. Once again I thank him for inviting me .. I’ve spent 35 years writing about America and its people what it means to be an America. What’s our duties and responsibilities, what are our reasonable expectations when we live in a free society?  I never saw myself as partisan, but more as an advocate for a set of ideas; economic and social justice America as a positive influence around the world, truth, transparency, and integrity in government, the right of every American to have a job, a living wage, to be educated in a decent school.  And to a life filled with the dignity of work, promise, and the sanctity of home.  These are things that make a life. These are the things that build and define a society.  I think these are the things we think of  on the deepest level when we think about our freedoms.   But today those freedoms have been damaged and curtailed for eight years of a thoughtless , reckless and morally adrift administration.  But we’re at the crossroads tonight.”   
        “I’ve  spent most of my life as a musician, measuring the distance in my music between the American dream and the American reality.  I look around today and for many Americans who are losing their jobs or homes or seeing their retirement funds disappear, don’t have health care, we’ve been abandoned in our inner cities, the distance between that dream and that reality has grown greater and more painful than ever.  And I believe that Senator Obama has taken the measure of that distance in his own life and in his own work.  And I believe that he understands in his heart the cost of that distance in blood and in suffering in the lives of everyday Americans, and I believe as president he’ll work to bring that promise back to life, and into the lives of so many of our fellow Americans who’ve justifiably  lost faith in its meaning.”

“Now in my job, I travel around the world, I occasionally play to big stadiums  or crowds like this just like Senator Obama does.  And I continue to find out wherever I go America remains a repository for people’s hopes, their desires, it remains a house of dreams. and a thousand George Bush’s and a thousand Dick Cheney’s will never be able to tear that house down!   That’s something that only we can do, and we’re not going to let that happen.    This administration will be leaving office, and that’s the good news, but the bad news is that they’re going to be dumping in our laps the national tragedies of Katrina, Iraq and our financial crisis.  Our house of dreams has been abused, it’s been looted, and it’s been left in the terrible state of disrepair.  It needs defending from those who would sell it down the river for power, for influence, for a quick buck.  It needs strong arms, strong hearts, strong minds,  we need someone with Senator Obama’s  understanding. his temperateness, his deliberativeness, his maturity his pragmatism his toughness and his faith.  But most of all it needs us!  It needs you and it needs me and it needs Senator Obama, and he’s gonna need us.  Because all that a nation has that keeps it from coming apart is the social contract between us, between its citizens. And whatever grace God has decided to impart to us, it resides in us, it resides in our connection with one another, in our life, in our homes, and dreams of the man or the woman up the street, across town.  That’s where we make our small claim upon heaven.”

 “ Now in recent years that social contract has been shredded, and we look around today and we can see it shredding before our eyes.  But tonight and today we are at the crossroads. We are at the crossroads.  And it’s been a long, long, long time coming.  I’m honored to be here on this same stage as Senator Obama.  From the beginning, there’s been something in Senator Obama that’s called upon our better angels.  And I suspect it’s because he’s had a life, where he’s had to  so often call upon his better angels.  And we’re going to need all the angels we can  get on the hard road ahead.”

 “So Senator Obama, help us rebuild our house, big enough for the dreams of all our citizens.  It’s how well we accomplish this task that’ll tell us just what it means to be an American in this new century, what the stakes are and what it means to live in a free society.  So I don’t know about you, but I know I want my country back,  I want my  dream back,  I want my America back!  Now is the time to stand for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.  Roll up our sleeves and come on up for ‘the Rising’”…

(sings “The Rising”)