She's been telling me lately that she doesn't think Obama will come through. He hasn't said he will stop the ICE raids. She is fed up with national politics.
But something happened last night. She watched Obama. I had to depend on her opinion since I didn't turn the tv on except to see about hurricane Gustav. She said Obama convinced her that he could actually do something good for the country. This is a woman who voted for Bush in 2000 (she just recently admitted that to me).
Ok Obama - show us you mean what you say.
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Micheal Tomasky's Blog
Politics and Other Stuff
guardian.co.uk
August 29, 2008
Denver is a very nice city, but it doesn't remotely have the transportation infrastructure to handle this week's onslaught. So, as my wife and I left Invesco Field after Barack Obama's speech, the only choice was the usual one – to walk – and the only place to go was across a bridge that thousands and thousands of people were funneling into from many directions and despite the presence of various fences and barricades and jersey walls.
It was a nightmare, and under other circumstances (particularly ones where they served beer, which they did not Thursday night), distemper and impatience and testy rhetoric and maybe even a fight or two would've ensued. But this night all was calm. People were patient and cooperative. An African American woman walking in front of us carrying two small American flags turned to us to remark on this.
I use this as metaphor for the speech because I thought, while it was not one of those rhetorical barnburners for which the candidate is famous, it accomplished something else, more subtle but maybe more profound. Obama made his speech not about him but about his audience. He gave away some of his power this night and gave it to the people (sure enough, "Power to the People," John Lennon's somewhat unfortunate radical-chic anthem from 1971, was among the background music piped into the stadium before Obama spoke).
This to me was the single most important thing about the speech. There were other important aspects to it, and I'll get to those, but the main victory Thursday night was that he successfully made the night not about him in a way that could feed into the Celebrity/Messiah/The One/He Who Makes the Clouds Part narrative that the McCain camp has so successfully deployed.
The concerns that the speech-event would feed that narrative were palpable. You know – this was all about his endless ego and so on. There's no denying the man has an ego, but the worst fears of Obama partisans were not confirmed. He said explicitly at one point, "What the naysayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you." The non-verbal presentation worked as well. The stage set as initially described, a Roman temple of some sort, seemed horrifying and an awful choice sure to feed GOP themes. But in reality it turned out to be fine. It more resembled the Rose Garden portico of the White House than any place where Caligula hosted bacchanals. And anyway it didn't appear that any columns showed on television at all.
I haven't watched any TV coverage as I write these words but it's my strong bet that they're not talking any Messiah nonsense. And if the speakers at next week's GOP convention will try to poke fun at the speech on those grounds, they'll get laughs in the hall, but I will bet that the jokes won't resonate outside the pews of the already-believing. The speech was more workmanlike than that. And workmanlike was just what was called for under the circumstances.
He talked a lot about the economy. He did not – the speech's one failing, to my ear – have a short and strong bumper-sticker phrase describing the guiding philosophy of his economic plan. But after this speech, anyone who highly and mightily demands that Obama produce specifics will merely be showing his ignorance and laziness. He also focused on his empathy for working people's concerns.
And speaking directly before him were six or seven regular Americans who'd been hit hard by the Bush economy. Each was fantastic, especially Barney Smith, an Indiana factory worker and lifelong Republican who is disgusted with his party and voting for Obama.
It was Smith, not the silver-tongued one, who (surely by design – another way the night was not about Obama) got off the single most memorable line of the evening: "We need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney."
He took on John McCain in a tough and tonally just right way. He accurately painted McCain as a joke of an intellect on economic questions, and (again, subtly, but clearly) on foreign policy, he described a sort of crazy person whose experience has not given him superior judgment at all. Among the three of them, Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden made a sharp case against a McCain presidency.
Obama also addressed questions about his resume and experience, albeit indirectly. But he dealt with the questions about his preparedness and seriousness less with words than with demeanor. He did not look like a guy Thursday night whom Putin could push around and did not sound like a guy who couldn't run the army (about 15 generals also took the stage to endorse him).
It was just the right speech for the occasion. He did not aggrandize himself. He explained the seriousness of the task at hand in a way that did not send his shock troops over the moon in Messiah ecstasy. Rather, he equipped them with battle armor – and with determined serenity about what they had to do until November 4.
And that was why everyone behaved in such an orderly way as they exited through a veritable obstacle course. They're armed. They were given agency Thursday night, not made into abject Barack-o-maniacs. And that, for a campaign that's banking on winning this election on the strength of thousands of volunteers, may have been the most important thing, more important even than how the media received it.
guardian.co.uk
August 29, 2008
Denver is a very nice city, but it doesn't remotely have the transportation infrastructure to handle this week's onslaught. So, as my wife and I left Invesco Field after Barack Obama's speech, the only choice was the usual one – to walk – and the only place to go was across a bridge that thousands and thousands of people were funneling into from many directions and despite the presence of various fences and barricades and jersey walls.
It was a nightmare, and under other circumstances (particularly ones where they served beer, which they did not Thursday night), distemper and impatience and testy rhetoric and maybe even a fight or two would've ensued. But this night all was calm. People were patient and cooperative. An African American woman walking in front of us carrying two small American flags turned to us to remark on this.
I use this as metaphor for the speech because I thought, while it was not one of those rhetorical barnburners for which the candidate is famous, it accomplished something else, more subtle but maybe more profound. Obama made his speech not about him but about his audience. He gave away some of his power this night and gave it to the people (sure enough, "Power to the People," John Lennon's somewhat unfortunate radical-chic anthem from 1971, was among the background music piped into the stadium before Obama spoke).
This to me was the single most important thing about the speech. There were other important aspects to it, and I'll get to those, but the main victory Thursday night was that he successfully made the night not about him in a way that could feed into the Celebrity/Messiah/The One/He Who Makes the Clouds Part narrative that the McCain camp has so successfully deployed.
The concerns that the speech-event would feed that narrative were palpable. You know – this was all about his endless ego and so on. There's no denying the man has an ego, but the worst fears of Obama partisans were not confirmed. He said explicitly at one point, "What the naysayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you." The non-verbal presentation worked as well. The stage set as initially described, a Roman temple of some sort, seemed horrifying and an awful choice sure to feed GOP themes. But in reality it turned out to be fine. It more resembled the Rose Garden portico of the White House than any place where Caligula hosted bacchanals. And anyway it didn't appear that any columns showed on television at all.
I haven't watched any TV coverage as I write these words but it's my strong bet that they're not talking any Messiah nonsense. And if the speakers at next week's GOP convention will try to poke fun at the speech on those grounds, they'll get laughs in the hall, but I will bet that the jokes won't resonate outside the pews of the already-believing. The speech was more workmanlike than that. And workmanlike was just what was called for under the circumstances.
He talked a lot about the economy. He did not – the speech's one failing, to my ear – have a short and strong bumper-sticker phrase describing the guiding philosophy of his economic plan. But after this speech, anyone who highly and mightily demands that Obama produce specifics will merely be showing his ignorance and laziness. He also focused on his empathy for working people's concerns.
And speaking directly before him were six or seven regular Americans who'd been hit hard by the Bush economy. Each was fantastic, especially Barney Smith, an Indiana factory worker and lifelong Republican who is disgusted with his party and voting for Obama.
It was Smith, not the silver-tongued one, who (surely by design – another way the night was not about Obama) got off the single most memorable line of the evening: "We need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney."
He took on John McCain in a tough and tonally just right way. He accurately painted McCain as a joke of an intellect on economic questions, and (again, subtly, but clearly) on foreign policy, he described a sort of crazy person whose experience has not given him superior judgment at all. Among the three of them, Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden made a sharp case against a McCain presidency.
Obama also addressed questions about his resume and experience, albeit indirectly. But he dealt with the questions about his preparedness and seriousness less with words than with demeanor. He did not look like a guy Thursday night whom Putin could push around and did not sound like a guy who couldn't run the army (about 15 generals also took the stage to endorse him).
It was just the right speech for the occasion. He did not aggrandize himself. He explained the seriousness of the task at hand in a way that did not send his shock troops over the moon in Messiah ecstasy. Rather, he equipped them with battle armor – and with determined serenity about what they had to do until November 4.
And that was why everyone behaved in such an orderly way as they exited through a veritable obstacle course. They're armed. They were given agency Thursday night, not made into abject Barack-o-maniacs. And that, for a campaign that's banking on winning this election on the strength of thousands of volunteers, may have been the most important thing, more important even than how the media received it.
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