Last Wednesday, Vice Presidential Candidate Sen. Joe Biden came to Nashua, NH to hold a town hall meeting. Just like we did during the NH Primary, I made it out to the event with some ONE members to make sure that the world’s poorest people were not forgotten in the battle-ground state of New Hampshire.

ONE’s Marine, Michael Castaldo was there, as was NH blogger Chaz Proulx who has blogged about ONE in the past. During the town hall Sen. Biden spoke about the global challenges that face the world today and right behind him was ONE member Penny Warren in her EDUN shirt and ONE band. You could see her and her shirt clearly on the NH newscast that night!

After the town hall ended, I had a chance to speak with Sen. Biden and thanked him for his leadership in passing the new global AIDS bill, called PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), which has helped save over 2 million lives around the world. He told me that he worked hard to pass PEPFAR in the US Senate, but that President Bush deserves a lot of credit for it as well. I agreed with his bi-partisan comment and asked him to make sure that the Millennium Challenge Corporation – a new program that pairs responsible, yet highly impoverished countries with new and better aid – gets full funding during appropriations as it only has about a quarter of its proposed funds this year.

As election season heats up, you can bet that ONE members will be hitting the campaign trail to make sure that both of them know that fighting global disease and extreme poverty is not only possible, but it is a priority. Stay tuned to the blog for future ONE Vote ’08 updates!

-Matthew Bartlett, ONE Regional Organizer