Happy Obama Day! Berkeley, CA 11/05/08

Last night we played the final show of our tour at the ‘Silicon Valley for Obama’ election night celebration. Approximately 1,500 volunteers attended this event held in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. These volunteers, like so many that we met all across the western swing states, are the ones who did the heavy lifting of this campaign.

Cumulatively hundreds of man-years were devoted to phone calls, walking and knocking door to door, and organizing and hosting gatherings and fundraisers. Thank you EVERYONE for all of your dedication and hard work! What is even more amazing than Obama’s landslide victory is the awakening and realization of empowerment that has just occurred for America. We did this. We got involved. We made it happen. YES WE DID!!! Now that we know we can do the impossible, what else shall we do?

It was more than a landslide – it was a loveslide! Barack Obama himself bridges many divides, Black-White, Christian-Muslim and he won across traditional race, gender and generational divides. How extraordinary to have a uniter instead of a divider leading our nation, someone who has inspired not only America, but the WHOLE WORLD. This morning looking at images from the Huffington Post of people celebrating around the world, I was moved to tears. My dear friend Anna from South Africa called me to say that people were celebrating in the streets tonight and that it had the same feeling as when Nelson Mandela became president – “a huge balancing, the end of slavery, from Africa to the ‘free world’ and now free!” The whole world is celebrating with us…

When we started out on this tour the outcome of the election felt very uncertain, but as we traveled through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona over the past three weeks, we saw overwhelming support for Obama out on the streets. We are so proud of our swing states! All of the swing states we tagged are now painted blue. While we can’t claim credit for this, we speculate that the “Obama-rama bump” effect might be related to the state capitols being marked with his face ; )

Here’s a little movie we made of our video tagging… and hey – can someone send this to Shep for us? He’s not answering our emails!

Stay tuned for a mini-documentary of our trip and thanks for all of your support and for joining us on our journey. Three cheers for Obama! Let’s take a break, and then roll up our sleeves for the real work has yet to begin.

Barack on, good people!

P.S. We want to do our Obama-rama show for Barack at the inauguration party – help us out if you can pull those strings! Oh, and we want to get on Oprah too!