VOTE FOR KARLOS IN 2040!

But, the truth is, you younger viewers have it easy. When we were your age, we had to blow on our Super Mario 2 Nintendo video game cartridges to make them work. There was no wireless power back then. We had to plug in our electronics to charge them. We were allergic to voicemail, addicted to texting, and checked Facebook twice in the time it took me to read this sentence. Of course, this was in the ancient days before commercially-available virtual telepathy.

We were too young for Ronald Reagan, who has been fossilized for us in grainy YouTube videos. Booming, rock ’em sock ’em speeches of American jingoism that toppled the Soviet Union. [That, or the rapid rise and then fall of oil prices.]

We revere Bill Clinton because he’s the last president we remember who led over a roaring U.S. economy. He evokes memories of the heady late-1990s Tech Boom when our parents had jobs, and the NASDAQ spiked higher everyday. And we loved him again when he was our nation’s first First Man in 2016. Bill Clinton always had the charm but also the sleaze. Bill posed with … adult actresses and we simply laughed: Bill being Bill.

We came of age under George W. Bush, or simply, Dubya. Dubya’s eight years coincided with our formative ones. Dubya meant well but was not the brightest, and allowed his father’s neocon Cold War hawks to get the best of him.

Dubya’s Texan twang became the voice of certainty to a superpower that saw red. He ordered the world to pick sides with a “You’re either with us or against us” Manichaeism. And the world did not pick terrorism, but the world did not pick President Bush either. The War on Terror polarized into us vs. them, black vs. white absolutes.

And so Dubya resigned himself to a post-presidency of swatting away “knowing-what-you-know-now” Iraq War hypotheticals, clinging to the Churchillian argument: he kept us safe, and “tried” getting his hands dirty for international aid:

We believed in Barack Obama when he said we were the ones we were waiting for. We saw Barack Obama as one of us. He was the cool professor. Obama’s rousing rhetoric, not being George W. Bush, and social media prowess awakened our generation’s sleepy political activism during the 2008 presidential campaign. We joined his Facebook group, donated money, and showed up at the polls in record numbers.

But many of us were jaded by 2012. “Change” looked a lot like the same old. Shovel-ready didn’t always mean shovel-ready. And lobbyists donated Obama’s iconic “Hope” poster to a museum.

True, President Obama did not live up to all of the FDR bally-hooped hype. He misread his 2008 mandate as a call for Bigger Government, when, in truth, America simply didn’t want George W. Bush anymore. He did not make good on his climate-change proposals, and Iran got the bomb by the late 2010s.

So yes, many were jaded by Barack Obama. But I am not one of them. President Obama ended our nation’s third longest war, in 2011, and our longest war, in 2014. He ensured Americans could not be dropped for a pre-existing medical condition—not because it was politically-convenient, but because it was right. He steered our nation out of the worst recession since the Great Depression and into a solid economy again by the end of his second term. He overhauled immigration reform early in his second term to make sure everyone—no matter where they came from—got a fair shake.

And he did all this while having to tangle with an extreme-right Republican party, the likes of which Washington had never seen before. Where “compromise” was a dirty word. Where believing in man-made Global Warming and evolution were disqualifiers (Ask: Jon Huntsman).

But timing was always President Obama’s thing. And he presided over an inflection point in American demographics. He presided over a 2010s when America’s minorities and youth voters discovered they weren’t such a minority anymore. He ushered in a younger, more liberal Supreme Court that forever guaranteed a women’s right to choose, a gay man or woman’s right to marry whom they wish.

It’s true, the country is very different today than it was back in 2012. Texas is a blue state. Marijuana joints are sold wholesale at Costco. Fusion power nears commercial availability.

But my friends, I stand here on this stage tonight because Barack Obama stood on a stage like this for us over thirty years ago. I also stand on this stage tonight because of Grandfather Fred.

Fred was stationed on a destroyer during World War II in the South Pacific. He was in the engine room when a Japanese plane kamikazed the ship, knocking him unconscious.

Fred spent three days in a life raft under the blistering South Pacific sun with a gashed neck. Tiger sharks circled below, Japanese Zero planes, above. But he never gave up.

Because Grandfather Fred had a dream. He would get off that life raft. He would get back to western Massachusetts, marry his sweet-heart, and build a big family house with his own bare hands. A big comfy one for the kids and, later on, maybe their kids, too. And that’s exactly what my grandfather did.

My fellow Americans, I will fight for America because Fred fought for us. I will build America neighborhoods because Fred built his!