PS: THREE MOST POIGNANT MOMENTS FOR ME LAST NIGHT

1. When Hilary made the motion to make the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party Barack Obama and history was made in more ways than one (and went a long way to healing the wounds she and her husband had inflicted on the nominee and the party during the primaries).

2. When Joe Biden began his speech after one of his sons (who he raised as a single parent for a while, something I experienced as well long before that became common) introduced him, and who happens to be on his way to Iraq in the military (but he had enough class not to mention that directly, nor did his dad Joe) and pointed out his mother (Joe’s) and what she had taught him and referred to the tragedy of losing his wife and daughter in the car accident that made him a single parent (before he married his present wife, a school teacher and as others have pointed out, the most regular-folks looking wife we’ve seen in the political arena for a long time) and the TV camera caught Michelle Obama openly weeping, and I remembered that what I dug most about my “black” friends back in the 1950s when I “went black” for a while because I was fed up with the racism and hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness and intolerance of so many of the “white” folks I was around in those days, was a capacity to show emotion, especially weeping, either with joy or sadness or a combination of both, and thought how refreshing it will be to have someone in the white house who isn’t afraid to show her humanity without filtering it through political expediency).

3. When John Kerry, I think it was, pointed out Obama’s white great-uncle Wade who had been part of the American troops that liberated Buchenwald at the end of WWII and he hugged Michelle after being applauded for a few moments and the reality of Obama’s mixed heritage was on display for all to see, and how much more Obama’s life and himself represent not only the future racial mix of this country but it’s racially mixed past that has been ignored or downplayed for too long (how many “whites” have some Native American or African slave blood in us, and how many African-Americans share “white” European ancestry.

(And one personally poignant moment at home watching it, when Obama came out and riffed on what had gone before in the previous nights and last night, my ten-year-old said to me, “He doesn’t sound like the other people, he sounds like a regular person,” not just because Obama was so relaxed and personal (a key to the success of the two speeches by the Clintons, though when they were at the stage of their political lives that Obama is at their speeches were still relatively stilted and wonky and in other ways not as personal and personable) but because he used the phrase “rocked the house” and other contemporary idioms that made him seem much more real and familiar and “like a regular person” to my little freckle-faced mostly Irish descended son, who had spent the day playing with his mostly mixed-race friends of varying shades of skin color and ancestry from several different continents. Which said to me, whether Obama wins the general election or not (or is allowed to by rightwing ballot shenanigans or worse) he is definitely and definitively more representative of the future than any Republican, let along backward-looking John McCain and his party.)