Check out the last half of the article which mainly quotes Obama.

Commentary: Dave McNeely

Democrats’ new superstar Obama in Austin

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Friday, August 6, 2004

The Democrats’ hottest new star, Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama, said his come-from-nowhere, under-funded campaign has surprised the experts because his message of inclusion has attracted more voters across more demographic lines than anyone predicted.

It wasn’t too long ago that people called him “Alabama” or “Yo Mama,” Obama joked.

But when he won the Democratic primary last spring by 30 percentage points, “this got the pundits all confused,” Obama said. “The experts are always selling the voters short.”

Speaking to more than 300 enthusiastic attendees standing shoulder-to-shoulder at a sweltering fund-raiser for his campaign at the home of former Land Commissioner Garry Mauro in West Austin, Obama said he thinks he was picked by the John Kerry campaign as the keynote speaker at the recent Democratic National Convention in Boston because his candidacy epitomizes a kinder, gentler, more caring politics.

He said he found that voters shared his ideas of individual responsibility, religious faith, decent schools, taking care of the sick, allowing seniors to retire with dignity.

“People want their politicians to attack problems, and not each other,” Obama said.

The Republicans in Illinois, in desperation after their nominee dropped out because of sexual allegations, are trying to draft Alan Keyes, an African American single-digit presidential candidate from days past, even though he doesn’t live in the state.

“I know that you have a lot of out-of-state friends,” Geronimo Rodriguez, who is heading up the John Kerry-John Edwards campaign in Texas, said in introducing Obama. “But it’s something else to have an out-of-state opponent.”

Obama, who also is African American, said he got past his fear of messing up his keynote address once he got on stage.

“When I got up there, I didn’t feel nervous,” he told the happy, mixed-race crowd, who had kicked in at least $25 apiece to hear him talk. He said all he had to do was express the “enormous elegance” of the American people.

“They get confused sometimes,” he joked. “They watch Fox News.” But like him, he said, they also go to church, have some gay friends, and believe that in a rich country, money can be spent to help those less fortunate or having trouble.

“We are on the verge of a breakthrough in which we can have a different kind of politics,” Obama said. “The most important office in a democracy is the office of citizen.”

He said the idea of taking care of one another shouldn’t be taken as an admission of weakness or fear of defending the United States.

Americans like him, Obama said, “would willingly take up arms to make sure that 9/11 never happened again, and believing that the notion that we would send our young men and women to fight the wrong war, with the wrong plans, with the wrong equipment, with the wrong training, and not take care of their families back home, and then when they come back, not give them long-term health insurance, even when they’ve been wounded, there’s something wrong with that.”

Obama complimented the crowd for being Southern progressives.

“You know if you’re a progressive from Texas,” he said, “you are doing it because you believe.”