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OBAMA'S SPEECH


I watched the speech on the Internet here in Brasilia. To be honest, I had concerns about the apparent closeness in the various tracking polls that placed Obama and McCain neck-and-neck. Like many, I had begun to wonder if this might be more change than the US electorate was willing to admit.

Earlier in the day I had read in Tim Egan's NY Times blog that, "The most frequent thing I heard in the suburbs of Colorado recently was a simple question: Who is this guy?" In a flash of insight, Egan summed up the challenge facing Obama not as to whether he might convince the viewing audience that he was a regular guy like them, but "What people will remember is whether the stranger in the stadium sounded like someone who could lead them to a better day."



[Update: You can link to a higher resolution HD version of the video HERE]

[Update #2: Nielsen Media Research reports more US viewers watched Obama speak than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final "American Idol" or the Academy Awards this year.]


So, how did he do?

By now, the day after, there are thousands of answers posted on the Internet. I liked the view offered by Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish:

It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety. It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism - in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.

What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again ... and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

He took every assault on him and turned them around. He showed not just that he understood the experience of many middle class Americans, but that he understood how the Republicans have succeeded in smearing him. And he didn't shrink from the personal charges; he rebutted them. Whoever else this was, it was not Adlai Stevenson. It was not Jimmy Carter. And it was less afraid and less calculating than Bill Clinton.

Above all, he took on national security - face on, full-throttle, enraged, as we should all be, at how disastrously American power has been handled these past eight years. He owned this issue in a way that no Democrat has owned it since Kennedy. That's a transformative event. To my mind, it is vital that both parties get to own the war on Jihadist terror and that we escape this awful Rove-Morris trap that poisons the discourse into narrow and petty partisan abuse of patriotism. Obama did this tonight. We are in his debt.

Look: I'm biased at this point. I'm one of those people, deeply distressed at what has happened to America, deeply ashamed of my own misjudgments, who has shifted out of my ideological comfort zone because this man seems different to me, and this moment in history seems different to me. I'm not sure we have many more chances to get off the addiction to foreign oil, to prevent a calamitous terrorist attack, to restore constitutional balance in the hurricane of a terror war.

I've said it before - months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away.

Know hope.

Obama ended his speech by invoking the memory of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington 45 years ago:



The men and women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord. They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.

But what the people heard instead - people of every creed and color, from every walk of life - is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.

"We cannot walk alone," the preacher cried. "And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."

Barack Obama's mission is more than the realization of the dream of equal opportunity. It is a giant step toward transforming the dream of individual achievement into the realization of a destiny -- beyond any political ideology -- that builds a new WE for the 21st Century.