The Verdict on MSNBC

Regarding your "Obama should offer the VP job to Hillary" segment and panel: A couple of your guests seemed to have it right, but failed to articulate. Obama needs to think outside the box and not pick merely to win as has been done in the past, not pick to unify the party, as has been done in the past, but pick a VP that will help to unify the country. Chuck Hagel would be an excellent example of this, but I'm sure there are others.

I'm sure your smug little mealy mouthed republican apologist would try to twist my words also but as I white male, I have no difficulty understanding what Michelle Obama was saying, when she said she was truly proud of America for the first time in her adult life. As children we are taught to expect a lot, perhaps to an unrealistic degree for and from America. Even if America is the best of all the countries in the world, I would still expect that America should hold itself to an even higher, idealistic standard. One of my first memories was of JFK getting shot. I was horrified what might happen to America then. Later I was horrified again and again when Martin Luther King was gunned down and Robert Kennedy shot. I was proud of America when we landed on the moon in 1969 and was in England then and let them know it. But I was only 9 then... I was not proud of Nixon, the Vietnam war, our involvement in the Bay of Pigs, Iran-contra, Guatemala, and our other not so secret enterprises. It infur iates me that Americas taxpayers dollars are spent secretly and stolen by those who have taken oaths to serve. I was not proud of America was I saw a movie about the Tuskegee Syphillis Project. I was proud of the US Hockey Team and all of Americas Olympians, win or lose, if done honorably. Perhaps Mrs. Obama is not a sports fan ... I am not proud of our mishandling our our foreign policy, the Iraq war, destruction of our economy and am deeply saddened by our impudent attempts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.


Yet, Barack Obama's Campaign has made me proud of America again and given me new hope for America. If we are a strong enough as a people to unite over our racial prejudices and elect Barack to the highest office in the land, we can certainly solve global warming and learn to power our economy in new ways. Perhaps we can even realize that health involves the whole of a population