Birmingham Blues

Sen. Chris Dodd spoke to a near-capacity crowd at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens last night.  The Birmingham News put the crowd size at around 200; my count was closer to 300.  The Senator’s plane was late, which actually turned out to be a good thing, as people who were negotiating a major traffic tie-up (yep, another truck lost its load — this time junk cars — on I-65) had more time to get there.

In attendance were some Democratic Party luminaries, lots of regular folks, at least one Republican (likely a few more, but I only met the one), and fellow bloggers Joe of Bessemer Opinions and Trent of Aladems and Sack Sessions.

Sen. Dodd opened with a few words on the importance of winning back the White House and holding on to the Congress, but he spent most of his time talking about issues, focusing on what kind of world we will leave to our children.  He comes from a family of teachers and spoke strongly about the importance of education, not only so we can be competitive economically but also because understanding and maintaining our system of government requires an educated populace.  He noted that our healthcare expenditures equal 16% of gross domestic product while yielding some lousy results: 42nd in infant mortality, 45th in life expectancy, 47 million uninsured.

He has a detailed plan for energy independence and environmental protection, and you can read it here.

Of course, he addressed the war in Iraq, reinforcing what we already know: there is no military solution to the conflict.  We’re mired in the middle of a civil war in a country that hasn’t even decided if it wants to be a nation-state.  He had high praise for our military, and his words drew cheers from the crowd.  He wants the US to begin re-deployment of forces over the next eight to nine months but also to offer other means of aid to the Iraqi people.  There’s “not an army big enough or a treasury deep enough” to bring about a military victory.  It’s time for a change of mission, and he believes that the majority of the American people, regardless of political affiliation, agree.

He strongly advocates diplomacy with all the players in the region, not, as he said, because he likes all the leaders or wants to have dinner with them, but because “great nation-states ought not to be afraid of diplomacy”.  He pointed out that Reagan reviled the Soviet Union and Nixon reviled China but both were willing to sit down with the leaders of those nations and achieve diplomatic breakthroughs.  The US can still provide leadership to the rest of the world if we’ll just do it.

I came away from Sen. Dodd’s speech feeling uplifted.  His message is positive — no denial of the challenges we face, but a great optimism that we can meet them.  There was no nasty partisanship, no cheap shots at other candidates.  He did say that he intends to be the nominee, and he told us if he wins in ‘08, we’re all invited to spend the night at the White House.  I have it on tape, and if he gets there, I’m planning to hold him to his promise.

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Congratulations to the Over the Mountain Democrats for hosting another very successful event.  Check out Sen. Dodd’s website here.

UPDATE:  Joe posts about Chris Dodd’s visit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 11:46 am and is filed under National Politics, OTM Dems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.