Thursday, August 28, 2008 - Posts
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On the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Barack Obama answered back tonight with a simple, “I Have a Plan.” He’s distilled the trademark soaring rhetoric and big ideas into a handful of crisp one-liners: “The change we need doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.” And “America, we cannot turn back.” But beyond that, it was a policy speech: Wonk 101. A point-by-point refutation of the claim that the man is all empty talk. He uncorked the soaring bits only at the very end and seemingly only to remind us that if he wanted to he could do it again the next time.
Obama deflected all the Swift Boat slime with a flick of his wrist: “If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. ... You make a big election about small things.” He went and clocked McCain, who both “doesn’t get it” and forgets that “we all put our country first.” And as this convention sometimes seemed to gasp for air amid all the vast, monster egos, Obama was smart enough to stop talking about himself. “What the naysayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you.”
This was a strong speech and probably not an easy one for Obama, who might have preferred to light up the night sky like he did in ‘04. But for my money, he reminded everyone who’s ever been blown away by Barack Obama that being blown away by Barack Obama is not a one-, or two-, or three-shot deal. It’s something we could, and should maybe start to count on.
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I've got a bone to pick with Peggy Noonan's assessment of the Democratic Convention speeches in today's Wall Street Journal. Well, two. First, since when is Laura Bush "the most popular First Lady in modern American political history?" I know she polls well—as my husband pointed out, she reveals little, and what's not to like about things you don't know?—and I'm not sure how we're defining "modern American political history" exactly (when I Googled it, many references to the term seemed to encompass the latter half of the 20th century, if not the whole thing), but I have hard time seeing her as any Jackie O.
Second, Noonan contends that in her speech, "In order to paint both her professional life and her husband's, and in order to communicate what she feels is his singular compassion, [Michelle Obama] had to paint an America that is darker, sadder, grimmer, than most Americans experience their country to be." Seriously? Give me a break. Peggy Noonan obviously has not been laid off recently.
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