Michelle, Ma belle

Monday night Michelle Obama showed America and the world what a happy, successful family looks like. She utterly charmed the Democratic National Convention and the television audience, and her autheticity, warmth and genuine goodness totally disarmed the TV pundits who normally pounce on every speech and tear the speaker to shreds. She converted me from a lukewarm supporter to a raving Obama maniac in less than 45 minutes. It was no easy task.

I have been a Hillary Clinton supporter. Maybe it's because I loved Bill Clinton's presidency so much, even with his indescretions. Maybe because Hillary represents so many women who have struggled to break through the glass ceiling. Maybe because I like her policies, or her unflappabled resolve to fight until the last round. Maybe because she looks good in pantsuits. But as much as I admire Hillary and wanted--read: still want--her to be president some day, Michelle Obama and her family have showed me something which the nation needs more desperately than I imagined before tonight. We need to believe in the goodness of people again, like we did during the Kennedy era.

Ted Kennedy's speech earlier was received with even more emotion by the delegates, many of whom remember his brothers. Several newsmen, including MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann, mentioned the 1964 Democratic Convention at Atlantic City, held just nine months after the Kennedy Assassination, when the crowd greeted Robert F. Kennedy with twenty-two minutes of spontaneous, irrepressible applause.

I saw Jack Kennedy in 1960 when he came to my home town of Reading, Pa., and spoke from a specially constructed wooden platform in the city square. I was fourteen years old. The public schools in that heavily Democratic town released all students to go and hear the presidential candidate. Thousands of people of all ages gathered in Penn Square that sunny afternoon. His motorcade was late. Democratic officials filled the waiting time with speeches and introductions of local candidates. Then he arrived, and the raw excitement was elctrifying.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was ful of vigor, a tanned, well-groomed, young-looking man in his early forties. I recall he wore a dark suit and tie, not the typical white shirt without sports coat which today's politicians wear to shown they're one of us. He was a Harvard educated Kennedy; he was NOT one of us. But when spoke about the need to "get America moving again" after eight years of Dwight D. Eisenhower, something in his manner seemed...presidential? After a short stump speech Kennedy got in his motorcade and headed for Allentown, thirty miles away. He was already late for that crowd, which had doubtless gathered and was listening to the same lackluster local politicians stall for time until he arrived.

Four years later in August of 1964 I attended that Democratic National Convention held in Atlantic City, NJ. I wasn't a delegate; I was an 18-year-old soldier on leave after Basic Training, attending the Convention with my recently graduated friends from the Teen-Dems in Reading. I shamelessly capitalized on the fact that I was in uniform, mooching passes from delegates to a political convention and selling a few on the Boardwalk for a nice profit. Now that I reflect on what I was doing, I realize it was probably illegal, but back then I didn't see anything wrong with a little private enterprise. I got passes for the evening events and used them for myself and friends, too. I heard LBJ speak and Hubert Humphrey, too.

But the greatest moment came, as Keith Olbermann said, when we rose to greet Bobby. I was in the upper gallery that night, like one of the soldier-guests who are always invited to observe presidential speeches and political conventions. For twenty-two minutes, everyone cheered and applauded. Several times, Robert Kennedy tried to begin. He was drowned out every time. The chair tried to gavel the crowd to order, but we would have none of it. And every time Bobby tried to speak, the noise grew louder and he backed away from the microphone with that characteristic Kennedy smile. There was such an enormous outpouring of emotion. JFK's death had hit them hard, and here was his brother, the Attorney General of the United States, the next Kennedy in the line of succession. The crowd needed to cheer. They needed to hope. But you know the rest of the story, how four years later another assassin cheated America out of what could have been a restoration of Camelot.

Obama has stopped what some had seen as Hillary's attempt to re-establish another golden era. But this time it was the people who rose up and cheered him across the finish line. Instead of looking backward, people desperately wanted a future they could believe in. A post-racial, post-modern America that remembers its ideals.

Tonight, Teddy Kennedy closed the door and padlocked Camelot forever. Michelle Obama opened another door and showed us a future we can believe in, where all kinds of families work together and love one another and America regains its moral heritage. Raise high your torch, Lady Liberty, then pass it on to a new generation. The applause dies away, but the dream lives again.