Obama rallies at Pitt

Regardless of whether Sen. Barack Obama wins the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, he wants… Regardless of whether Sen. Barack Obama wins the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, he wants Americans to be reassured by one thing: George W. Bush’s name will not be on the ballot in November.

“The name of my cousin Dick Cheney won’t be there either,” he said, jokingly referring to the October discovery by Vice President Cheney’s wife, Lynne, that the two politicians are distantly related – eighth cousins, to be exact.

“That’s embarrassing,” Obama said to a standing crowd at the Soldiers ‘ Sailors Memorial Friday.

Obama began his Pennsylvania bus tour in Oakland. Tickets to the event were free, but they sold out in mere hours Wednesday.

Loudspeakers were placed outside the venue to broadcast his remarks to the dozens of people who weren’t allowed in.

As a surprise prelude to the candidate’s speech, Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., endorsed Obama at the start of the rally.

“He started this campaign as an underdog, but he knows what it’s like to be a fighter,” Casey said.

He referenced Obama’s work with the people of the South Side of Chicago and his past, “a great American story,” as reasons that he can relate to rural and urban Pennsylvanians alike.

As Obama took the podium, he was met with chants of “Yes we can.”

After acknowledging the long road that has been the primary campaign trail – reminiscing on the thousands of hands he has shaken, hundreds of babies he has kissed and hundreds of chicken dinners he has consumed – Obama said that he has concluded “people are ready.”

Leaning heavily on his campaign themes of change and hope, Obama addressed the economic recession facing the country.

“Everywhere you go, people are working harder and harder just to get by,” he said.

And when he listed the things that people are spending more on these days – eggs, milk and gas, to name a few – the crowd burst in a mix of cheers and boos after the mention of the price of a college education.

Obama proposed his vision of a system where the government would give $4,000 toward every college student’s education every year while the students would be required to perform community service.

“We’ll invest in you, you invest in America,” he said.

The war in Iraq, which has recently passed both the five-year mark and the 4,000th American death, “has not made us more safe,” Obama said.

While voicing his support for the training and the respect of the U.S. military, Obama said his goal is to be out of Iraq by 2009.

He also made it clear that, if elected, his foreign policy would involve discussion with both allies and enemies.

“I want to end the mindset that got us into the war,” he said, dismissing tactics that he said the current administration uses to scare the American people into supporting the war.

But Obama also wanted to solidify his position on defense and the use of military force.

“I will not hesitate to strike at those who would do us harm,” he said.

When it comes to health care, a subject near and dear to the hearts of both Obama and his opponent, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., Obama wants to make sure that everyone is able to get it – before the end of his first term.

Forty-seven million Americans go without health insurance today.

Obama pledges that those without it should have benefits “as good as the health care that Bob Casey and I have.”

As for those with health insurance, Obama said he would make sure their premiums were lowered by $2,500.

Obama said he also plans to tackle the nation’s environmental issues. By charging polluters for the carbon emissions they release, he would put money toward windmills, the creation of solar energy sources and making buildings more energy efficient, thereby creating more jobs.

Obama has been a member of the U.S. Senate since 2004. This, he said, is Clinton’s main argument against his candidacy, that it is to his disadvantage that “[Washington] hasn’t seasoned and stewed you long enough,” he said. “They haven’t boiled all the hope out of you yet.”

But Obama disagrees with Clinton’s criticism.

He sees his age and his relatively new voice in Washington as advantages because if the contest was decided based on who had worked in the capital the longest, McCain would beat them both, he said.

“Longevity is not the same as judgment,” he said. “I’m not running to become more like Washington, I’m running to challenge Washington.”

A few dozen Clinton supporters set up shop across Fifth Avenue from the rally and encouraged passing motorists to “Honk for Hillary,” but by the time the rally was over, they had dispersed.

Pitt freshman Toby Schad, a long-time Obama supporter, left the event starry-eyed and more of a believer than ever.

“Everything he said he stood for, he meant it,” Schad said. “It’s time that politicians tapped into our generation.”

Kristin Tolbert, a Pitt graduate student and teaching assistant in the department of Hispanic languages and literatures, agreed.

Tolbert arrived at the event at 9 a.m.

The line wrapped around Soldiers ‘ Sailors Memorial, and she joined the line on O’Hara Street. She was ticketless.

“I was here on hope,” she said.

Luckily, Tolbert heard a person behind her offering up an extra ticket, and she made it inside.

As both a student and a teacher, Tolbert said she appreciated Obama’s acknowledgment of skyrocketing tuition prices and his ideas about government funding for education in exchange for community service.

“It would give students a reason to leave Oakland – to get out of this bubble and get involved,” she said.

-News Editor D. Clark Denison contributed to this report.