After listening to the opening speeches of the DNC Monday night, I felt overwhelmed by the frequency of the terms blue-collar, American, dream, hope and change. The all-American night began with Caroline Kennedy’s speech in which she spoke of all Americans as one and continued as Ted Kennedy mentioned the dream never ending. Craig Robinson’s introduction of his sister Michelle told their hard-knocks tale of growing up on the Southside of Chicago with a blue-collar worker for a father. Michelle then mentioned how she was living proof of the American Dream.

“America should be a place where you make it if you try,” stated Michelle. This American dream is exactly what ties us together. It is the thread that she mentioned in her speech, and it is the push for this common dream that will continue to win the Obamas support. Since immigrants have first arrived to America with little more than change in their pockets and their minds full of future aspirations, this country has always been full of dreamers longing for change. Now with unrest in our hearts (the environment, the military, the uneducated) we long for more again. We want a better place for our children and ourselves.

Michelle Obama’s speech demonstrated to fellow Americans that she was just like them. She is committed to fairness, justice, her children and her husband. By winning over the hearts of Americans, Michelle was able to open up a path for her husband to win them over as well.

As first written of by James Truslow Adams in “The Epic of America” in 1931, The American Dream is "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement…. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."