FIRST PERSON | PORTSMOUTH, N.H. -- I received news that my mother had passed just after midnight on Friday. Despite her Alzheimer's, she had been my biggest fan. She was the first to see the photos I took at campaign events; she had even accompanied me to several events. She had the honor of having her picture with her hero, Bill Clinton, and published in the Concord Monitor.
One, a Romney-Ryan rally at Saint Anselm College, had been an ordeal for her and she had asked me to take her away, away from the hate and bombast.
I sat with her until well past three in the morning saying my goodbyes. By the time I left -- if I was going to get to the Obama-Biden rally at Portsmouth's Strawberry Banke Museum -- I had slept all of one-half-hour in the past 24.
I felt I would go mad with grief if I didn't go to see the president. I struggled with whether it was the right thing to do, though I knew she would have wanted me to go. But did I want to go?
Thursday night was frantic, getting ready for the Obama-Biden rally and a Mitt Romney rally planned for Friday night, to counter the president in the battle for New Hampshire. I had visited my mother in the hospital in the morning and then later in the afternoon, before leaving to cover a "Veterans for Romney" press conference in Concord. It was a phony-baloney event in which the press was allowed to ask exactly one question -- a setup. As we left the conference, who should show up magically but Mitt Romney himself?
At the hospital, after seeing Romney sidestep a question about the Manchester's veterans hospital, I spent my last time with my mother. She was in full dementia. I did all I could to calm her. The nurse gave her medication and she went to sleep. I left with my sister.
She was to be transferred to a nursing home for short-term rehabilitation the following morning.
The calculations a family must do when confronted with Medicare (which would not pay for the nursing home unless she were in hospital three days) are inhuman and cruel. Should the Romney-Ryan ticket be elected, the dilemmas faced by families would be crueler, as there would be less options.
Did I want to go? Yes. I had seen the president several times, and after having been estranged from him and actually voting Republican for the first time in the New Hampshire primary (casting a ballot for Jon Huntsman), I had become increasing bound to him as the Republican Party had metastasized into a monstrous, anti-human thing.
The motto of the Romney-Ryan campaign seems to be "every man for himself," a command given sailors on a sinking ship. They had given up on America. I wanted to see Obama and his message of hope.
He did not disappoint. The 6,000 supporters who thronged the central square at the Strawberry Banke living museum had to wait two hours, but it was worth it. Obama was cool and in command, his tie loosened. At one point, he casually put his hand on his hip as he talked, alternating his cool with fire as he attacked the GOP. It was the Barack of old, the barn-burner orator.
And he did give me hope and helped lift my despair.
Because he cares. Barack Obama cares. He is not perfect, but when I was with him and his wife Michelle, Joe Biden and his wife Jill, I felt like part of a community. A community that cares.
Back home, the following day, I collected some of Mom's snapshots for her memorial. Pictures of my late father and her and a favorite dogs had been stuck into the frame of the mirror in her bedroom -- along with the temporary I.D. we had to get earlier this year so she could vote. (At the age of 86, it had been an ordeal.)
I saw she had draped my press pass from a N.H. primary debate over the mirror. As I removed the photos, I discovered she had also tucked into the mirror frame a photo of President Obama and his family.
It was nice to know I had done the right thing. It was a message from her.
It was nice to know the man I chose to see the day after she passed, seeking to be comforted, had been there to comfort her in her final days.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-gives-hope-son-portsmouth-n-h-campaign-130900215.html
dan marino david lee roth joe bodolai ben nelson extreme couponing taylor lautner sinead o connor
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