On Tuesday, March 18th, Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama was scheduled to give a speech in Philadelphia's National Constitution Center, in what could have been just another attempt to get across a soundbite in the media's exhaustive coverage of the presidential footrace.  What unfolded instead was one of the most significant speeches delivered by a politician in my lifetime.

The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and so many other major and minor newspapers, websites, and channels in the United States and around the world, have reprinted or broadcasted the speech in full.  How rare is that in a time when the world's most important figures struggle to get across just a sentence?

Making Obama's speech even more astounding is that it wasn't filtered through focus groups and polling or his speechwriters.  Obama wrote the speech himself.  According to Daily Kos user LarsThorwald, Obama is the first presidential candidate to do this since Richard Nixon in 1969.  Add all this to the fact that this is the first time that I actually wanted to read or listen to a speech by a major presidential candidate, and you have an event, a piece of political rhetoric, that my children will likely be asking me about.

You see, I'm what you would call a politically active cynic.  I've spent most of my life believing that the words "Republican" and "Democrat" were two different names for the same thing.  I did not vote for Obama in the Massachusetts primary and it's likely that I will not vote for him in the general elections if he is the Democrats' nominee.  Before Tuesday, I thought Obama was simply following a tried and true political formula that has been mastered by his chief strategist, David Axelrod.

Despite all of these feelings,  I cannot deny the importance of Obama's speech and I cannot but admire his decision to go through with it.  Already people are suggesting that he might have made a strategic mistake -- That his nuance and erudition might not get across to the masses.   To them, I would say that this is one 21 year-old that appreciated being spoken to like a rational and thoughtful human being by a mainstream politician.

I mean, how frightening is it that in my entire life, this is the first time I actually feel like I've been leveled with by a politician?  How frightening is it that this is the first time I don't have to comb through pages and pages on the internet to understand the implications of what someone that is vying to represent me is saying?

Notice that I haven't said anything about the substance of Obama's speech.  I don't even want to try, and it doesn't make sense for me to do so.  You can read and watch it for yourself.   This post is about the fact that for the first time in my life, a candidate that has a real chance at the presidency has looked me in the eyes, looked the world in the eyes, and told it like it is.