“I’m going to take my coat off here, I don’t want to look too stiff!”  - Barack Obama

A crowd of 350 crunched together in the large machine shop room at Patrick Henry Community College in Martinsville, VA to attend a town hall meeting with Barack Obama.  Today’s theme was about how we can keep good jobs in America. Steel car frames, both classic and NASCAR-themed, stood in the background. It was a particularly fitting setting for former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who introduced Barack. Warner was an enthusiastic supporter of the Virginia Motorsports Initiative, which tapped into the local passion for automobiles to become a successful program at Patrick Henry.   This program worked by putting old machines to work for new ideas.  Warner asked, “Can we take what we do best -- this love of industry and racing -- and make it work for Virginians?”

Barack passionately agreed with this concept and said, “Let’s not let somebody else make the cars of the future, let’s make them right here in the United States of America.” He delved further into this theme, pointing out that our old factories can be retooled to make windmill turbines and solar panels, and that abandoned tobacco fields can be replanted with switchgrass to make the fuels of the tomorrow.

Here are Barack’s full remarks from this afternoon’s town hall:

Arun Chaudhary
August 20, 2008
En route to Lynchburg, Virginia