Missouri getting much attention this week...Dean fires up St. Louis

Just a few minutes after the warmup speakers were finished, the Register For Change bus arrived. Gov. Dean stepped off the bus to much appreciative cheering. He went down the front row of the crowd to greet people and shake hands, including my own.

He then took the podium to more cheers, and began his address. The Governor laid out all of the issues at stake in this election, issues that all of us here know very well now, but he did so in his typically plain-spoken and clear style. He got some great digs in at McCain, as you might expect. As for Sarah Palin, he said that she did a good job in the first half of her speech telling the story of who she is--but he then went after her for the second half of the speech.

"Politics is community organizing," he said, and expanded on the point by giving examples of how organizers of the past brought people together to change the system. Dean tied this together with his old-but-still-good slogan, "You Have the Power" to enact change if we are all willing to work for it. I thought this was the strongest part of his speech, and my words cannot do justice to it; fortunately, bloggers from Show Me Progress were there also, and they plan on posting video of his speech. In any event, this section got one of the loudest yells of approval of any part of his speech.

Dean also spoke about the erosion of rights in our nation, specifically including torture and detention without charges in his explanation that our nation needed to return to the rule of law to regain our moral authority. He also spoke up specifically about guaranteeing rights for all Americans, including--and he spelled it out, not using the common abbreviation--the "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community" to great acclaim, especially from the GLBT students that were present.