Oh, yes. Finally. After what seems like years since Iowa, decades since they first announced, Barack Obama collects enough delegates to sew up the nomination. I watch Hillary Clinton speak around nine-thiry, Senator Obama around ten.
Her speech is as graceless and classless as ever. She has lost. Her job is to concede. But, she famously declares, she will be making no decisions tonight.
Apparently John McCain speaks tonight as well. His speech before literally hundreds of supporters is universally panned, even by the talking heads at Fox.
Senator Obama packs the joint in St. Paul, in the hockey arena where the Republicans will convene later in the summer. Tens of thousands in the place, with tens of thousands more outside. The earth rumbles as great tectonic plates are shifting, as he’s changed the party and the game and the nation, no matter what happens in the fall.
I notice and especially enjoy the little moment with his wife Michelle when they bump fists as she glides off, gives way for him to speak. I think it’s so cute. Others apparently don’t.
Slate has a terrific little post about what different media outlets call the bump. My favorite is something called Capitol Hill Blue, which hilariously calls it a “fist to fist thumbs up.”
The following weekend I will argue with a retired school teacher, a McCain supporter, a Fox News watcher, about the fist bump. I still can’t quite figure out if what she thinks about it, beyond gathering that she doesn’t seem to like it. She somehow gives the impression that she simultaneously thinks Obama is both too black and not black enough with his fist bumpage. One of us is confused.
Oh, and E.D. Hill, a host of something called America’s Pulse on Fox News, of course, calls it a “terrorist fist jab.”