Yes We Did!

Unfortunately I can't stop to savor the moment because I have two early morning photo shoots in NY.... I wish I had time to do a better drawing or wax poetic, ... I did this 5 am doodle and I'm off to catch a train, but feel free to wax to your hearts content, I'd like to here your thoughts on this historic day.

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....this is your time. Go Vote!

The Polls opened at 6:00 am this morning, I got there at 5:58. Of those who's name ended in L-Z, I was number eleven. It took me 15 minutes.

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Most concede that Senator Barack Obama has run one of the smartest, well run campaigns in the history of our nation. If you believe the polls, he will be the next President of the United States. So, what can we expect from an Obama administration? Most believe he will deliver the cool, thoughtful approach that he has demonstrated during this hard fought campaign. He delegates to a very close circle of smart people... No rock stars here. They are loyal, tight lipped and keep their eye on the prize. On the agenda in the first one hundred days will be structuring a plan to bringing troops home from Iraq in a little over a year, develop a far reaching energy plan and provide universal health care coverage.

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Ball point pen on the morning newsprint

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Last night the Democratic party kicked off its four day convention to nominate Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden to lead the party in this falls election and become the next president and vice president of our nation. The delegates were treated to a speech by Caroline Kennedy; a Ken Burns tribute film to the Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy; a speech by the 76 year old senator, who recently suffered from a malignant brain tumor but made the journey to Denver to endorse Barack Obama; what I thought was a great speech by Michelle Obama; and capped off by Michelle and Barack's adorable girls teleconferencing with their daddy from Kansas City..... but I couldn't help notice that there was a subtext to the proceedings... especially if you were watching CNN....Get over it already!

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Ball point pen on the morning newsprint

The 2008 Democratic National Convention starts today. Obama has already proven that he and his campaign have great stage craft and there should be a big bounce from the four day show.... but then again, this is the democratic party... factor in the protesters, demonstrators and team Clinton, and all bets are off.

Piggybacking off of Stephen Gardner's Sketch of the Day postings of multiple versions of the same drawing I'm posting these doodles this morning. These are done very quickly (about a minute or two) so I don't mean to compare them with Stephen's studied drawings. Spontaneity often takes precedence over accuracy with these quick doodles. They are filled with mistakes, but hopefully they all capture an impression of the subject.

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The simplest solution is the best.

Sometimes I callenge myself to draw a likeness with the the greatest economy of strokes. If the strokes are in the right place, nothing more is needed.

In politics, nothing ever seems as simple as, we need oil, we have oil within our borders, lets get the oil.

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Ball point pen on the morning newsprint

Senator Obama's political views may be 180 degrees from Ronald Reagan's, but like the former president, Obama has studied the stage craft of a winner.

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Sport has often been used as a metaphor to describe battlefields, strategy and competition. It was in this light that the Clinton campaign first started to draw the parallels between the horse, Eight Belles and Senator Clinton. Leading up to the race the campaign started to talk about the only woman in the race, an underdog, a tough filly that had the stamina to go the distance. The story line was almost too perfect to ignore. If Eight Belles had won, it would have been the campaign's battle cry going into tomorrows contests. But Eight Belles didn't read the script. While she did make a valiant effort, she finished second to Big Brown (the actual winner). Then things went from bad to worse, when seconds after the race Eight Belles collapsed with two broken ankles and had to be euthanized on the spot. While Hillary is not in any mortal danger from this weeks primaries, I think many on the Clinton team fear that the Kentucky Derby is a closer metaphor for this campaign than they would like to admit.

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Yesterday I took a break from my work to watch Senator Obama deliver a speech about race relations in America. Sometimes we can recognize a transformative moment in history as it's happening i.e., man steps on the moon, Kennedy is shot, a plane crashes into the World Trade Center. No matter what follows, you know the world will never be the same. Other times, society needs to digest it and history put said moment into context. Whether Obama goes on to loose the primary race to Senator Clinton, capture the nomination but loose in the general election, win the presidency but become an ineffective president, or win the presidency and become a transformative figure in American history will likely be the context by which we remember this speech. I hope I can someday say I remember watching the speech while I scribbled this doodled on a napkin in my kitchen. That would mean that history has judged Obama to be the latter. Can we do it? I'm not sure.

Ball point on Newspaper text of speech

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