As you, your professor, The Daily Cal, and probably even your mom already know, Barack Obama paid a visit to our fair Bay Area last Saturday afternoon to give a speech outside of Oakland City Hall. I arrived at 12th Street around 12:30 in the afternoon to help sell t-shirts, buttons, and stickers for the campaign, and although the gates for the event didn’t even open until 3:00 (not to mention the fact that Obama himself didn’t begin speaking until around 4:30), crowds were already lined up around the block by 1:30!

I’m relatively new to this great big game we affectionately call politics, and in my very few years of activism and involvement with the Democratic party, I’ve only seen a handful of politicians speak in person. But even I could tell that this was no ordinary rally. I was stuck outside on the sidewalk when John Edwards spoke at a YWCA in Berkeley a few weeks ago because there wasn’t enough room inside, but the Obama event on Saturday was on an entirely different level of crowded. A radio reporter who I spoke to at the rally agreed; he told me, “I’ve been covering these things for thirty years, and I’ve never seen anything like this…”

Ever seen a photograph of one the Civil Rights rallies of the 1960s, where tens of thousands of people gathered in a single place at a single moment? I’ll probably offend at least a handful of Berkeleyites by comparing the Obama rally to the March on Washington, and by no means do these two events compare on a level of political and historical significance, but to see ten thousand people all gathered, motivated, mobilized—shouting, yelling, crying, clapping, hollering—for a single cause, for a single man: it felt like my March on Washington. It brought tears to my eyes, and it made me proud to be a Democrat.

P.S. On a side note, I’m loving this SNL clip that’s made its way onto YouTube, thanks to NBC. It may not be politically correct, but what’s politics if you can’t laugh at yourself at the end of the day?

More on the event: Oakland Tribune, Daily Cal, LA Times, AP, California Progress Report