After the madness that was the Precinct 4001 caucus, I rushed over to the Obama rally. It was only six blocks away.

They had waited until 9 to start letting people in, in order to make sure that everyone attended the caucuses. I got a pretty good spot to stand, roughly 20 feet away from the stage.

The group of people around me shared stories about their caucuses. Most were giant messes. We all checked our cell phones for election returns and traded information. Obama was ahead in Texas, but Clinton was closing fast. It seemed cruel to stick us out there without a TV.

Look, it’s Max Kennedy!

We didn’t know when Obama was going to come out. It was cold. Most of us were tired and hungry.

Finally, at about 10:30, Michelle and Barack Obama came out.

The audience went nuts. He kissed Michelle and told her he loved her before stepping up to the podium.

You can watch the speech here. It was short and a bit toned down compared to some of his other speeches. But it was moving nonetheless.

“If I am the nominee of this party, I will not allow us to be distracted by the same politics that seeks to divide us with false charges and meaningless labels. In this campaign, we will not stand for the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon.”

“There is a young man on my campaign whose grandfather lives in Uganda. He is 81 years old and has never experienced true democracy in his lifetime.”

Without missing a beat, a woman in the audience shouted, “Neither have we.”

“During the reign of Idi Amin, he was literally hunted and the only reason he escaped was thanks to the kindness of others and a few good-sized trunks. And on the night of the Iowa caucuses, that 81-year-old man stayed up until five in the morning, huddled by his television, waiting for the results.”

“The world is watching what we do here. The world is paying attention to how we conduct ourselves. What will they see? What will we tell them? What will we show them?”

– Hillel Aron