LANSING, Mich.—Roy Gross doesn’t know exactly what he’s going to say next Thursday when he takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention. But the former truck driver from Taylor knows his comments will focus on the woes of the middle class.
Gross got the call last Saturday that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wants to share the stage with him. He’ll get three minutes to speak on the night that Obama will formally accept the nomination before 75,000 people at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High football stadium.
“It’s hard to get all of your thoughts into three minutes, but on the other side, I think three minutes will seem like an eternity on that big stage,” Gross told The Associated Press Thursday in a phone interview.
The 49-year-old business agent for Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit says he was shocked and excited to get the invitation. The Obama campaign will fly Gross to Denver on Wednesday and put him up. He expects to be back to work Friday.
The daughter he has raised as a single parent is finishing up her final year as an education major at Bowling Green University in Ohio. She won’t be able to accompany him because of her school schedule.
Gross said he came to the Obama campaign’s attention when he introduced the Illinois senator at a May 14 campaign event at Macomb Community College in Warren.
He wrote his own comments then, but said he thought “that they would provide me with a speech so I would say the right things” when he spoke in Denver.
Instead, the Obama campaign told Gross they want convention watchers to hear what he has to say in his own words.
“I find that so great that they would allow a regular working Joe to actually put his thoughts on paper and go up there,” he said. “I’m doubly impressed that Senator Obama is going to solicit the opinion of the common, working guy.”
Gross is one of more than 20 “real people” from around the country the Obama campaign has asked to speak about their everyday struggles during the convention, which runs Monday through Thursday.
Gross said he has plenty to talk about, given Michigan’s economic slump, it’s 8.5 percent unemployment rate and a struggling trucking industry that provides the livelihood for many Teamsters.
“Too many companies have relocated, went bankrupt. It’s a daily struggle out there,” he said. “I get to see the look in my members’ eyes every day on ‘what can we do to protect our jobs and to secure our jobs?'”
Gross hasn’t finished writing his speech, but he’s working on it. He’ll get an assigned staff member in Denver to oversee his schedule and logistical movements, including media interviews, speech coaching and on-stage rehearsals.
Also Thursday, R&B singer Usher helped launched a voter registration drive at the Obama campaign’s Detroit headquarters.
And Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the national Service Employers International Union and chairwoman of the Change to Win labor organization, held a town hall event in Dearborn with U.S. Rep. John Dingell to discuss the health care needs of working mothers.
Burger planned to be in Pontiac Thursday evening to launch door-to-door campaign and voter registration efforts with local Obama supporters.
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EDITOR’s NOTE: Kathy Barks Hoffman heads the Lansing AP bureau and has covered Michigan politics since 1986.
