"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Election '08: Kevblog's Donkey Talk
Convention Impressions
The Obama Acceptance Speech
Posted 12:59 a.m., Aug. 29, 2008
I've had a few hours to digest the speech.
To me, here is the most telling moment, when Obama confronted the most prevailing doubts about himself directly, but with subtlety and grace:
"I get it. I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don't fit the typical pedigree. I haven't spent my career in the halls of Washington."
I cannot think of a presidential candidate in my lifetime who has been so forthright in acknowledging the elements about himself that cause the greatest concerns. He didn't try to convince people that the uncertainty they feel about him is wrongheaded. Instead, he delivered this line.
"I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's about you."
Obama made his speech about the meat-and-potatoes economic issues that are at the front of the American mindset right now. It was a speech somewhat devoid of the loftiest reaches of his rhetorical talents. And yet it seemed to me still effective, perhaps more so than the speech I saw him give to a packed audience at the Minneapolis Target Center.
This one was aimed at people with backgrounds like mine. People from states like Wisconsin and Minnesota, Ohio and Michigan, Missouri and Montana. People who are not in the highest income brackets, but come out of decent public schools and have reserves of intelligence, who understand well what a candidate means when he uses the high-flown language of the stump, but just don't find it that compelling.
I think he communicated to those people. I think he might have won some of them over tonight.
Obama was aggressive. "Don't tell me Democrats won't protect this country," he said. Elsewhere, he added,"John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of hell. But he won’t even follow [bin Laden] to the cave where he lives.”
He alluded to McCain's notoriously bad temper by raising the question of temperament, highlighting a possible tactic for the coming home stretch. Obama said that if the Republican wants a debate "about who has the temperament and judgment to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have."
He addressed McCain's military service respectfully--a Democratic tactic throughout this convention that I think will play less like the weak-sister political correctness that it was perceived as in 2004, and more like a contrast to the dirt that the Republicans are likely to sling next week here in the Twin Cities.
But he blasted Phil Gramm, McCain's economic policy advisor, reminding voters that Gramm had remarked earlier in the campaign that Americans are in a "mental recession" and that we had become a "nation of whiners."
"Tell that to the proud workers of a Michigan auto plant, who after they found out it was closing kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever because they knew that there were people that were counting on the brakes that they made.
"Tell that to the military families who shoulder their burdens silently as their loved ones leave on their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty. These are not whiners. They work hard and they give back and they keep going without complaint. These are the Americans that I know."
And with that Obama effectively, I thought, associated himself with the struggle of working Americans, reminding people that his mother once had to turn to food stamps, but worked hard, saved, and with the help of scholarships and loans, got her kids into good schools.
He spoke of how his mother had to fight with insurance companies as she lay dying of cancer in her bed.
And he also revealed what I think will be the hammer he will use to hit McCain the hardest as the campaign wears on. He will turn McCain's assertion that Obama is ill-prepared for office on its head.
"I don't believe that Sen. McCain doesn't care about what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think that he doesn't know," Obama said in is speech. "It's because John McCain doesn't get it.
"For over two decades, he subscribed to that old discredited Republican philosophy. Give more and more to those with the most, and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the ownership society. But what it really means is, you are on your own.
"Out of work? Tough luck, you're on your own. No healthcare? The market will fix it. You're on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don't have boots. You are on your own."
It's time for Republicans to own their failure, he said. "It's time to change America, and that is why I am running for President of the United States."
David Brooks commented tonight on PBS that he thought the speech was flat, that it failed in its mission. I didn't see the same speech he did. Pat Buchanan, on the other hand, praised the speech for being partisan but not classically liberal because of its appeal both to "self-responsibility and mutual responsibility." It was, said Buchanan, one of the greatest nomination speeches ever.
I don't know about that either. But I do believe that the speech was effective in addressing in very cogent and down-to-earth terms the problems that Middle Americans face most directly, and that it has helped his cause.
This may not be soaring rhetoric, but it touched me, and probably a lot of other people:
"Government can't solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: Protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education. Keep our water clean and our toys safe. Invest in new schools and new roads and science and technology.
"Our government should work for us not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should insure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who is willing to work.
"That's the promise of America, the idea that we are responsible for ourselves but that we also rise or fall as one nation. The fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper. That's the promise we need to keep. That's the change we need right now."
It may not be "I have a dream." But it may have been something like, "I have an idea for a new reality. Follow me, and let's go there."
I have one area of concern. There have been strong indications in recent days, and parts of tonight's speech verify this, that Obama is interested in moving the Democratic Party back to the realpolitik hawkishness that characterized the party during the days of Truman and Kennedy.
I'll address this at some length later on, but for now let me just mention that that kind of foreign policy "realism" is what got us stuck in Vietnam.
For now, let's just wait a couple of days, and see how tonight's speech, and the Democrats' four days in Denver, played in Pittsburgh and Pueblo and Pierre.
Posted 9:13 p.m., Aug. 28, 2008
Obama's on the stage...
I'm going to watch uninterrupted, and I'll post some impressions when he's done....
The Nerd is Heard
Posted 9:03 p.m., Aug. 28, 2008
This is why I'm so glad we have public television.
While the endlessly scintillating talking heads on the cable news networks prattle on about what Barack Obama is going to say tonight, the Democrats have put on the stage a series of regular citizens from battleground states explaining why they're supporting Obama. And PBS is actually airing them.
One of them, Barney Smith of Indiana, is the class nerd type. Glasses, bad front tooth, bad hair cut, worse red, plaid shirt. But I'm not making fun of him. It is exactly this man's type that will decide this election.
Barney is not the type who can follow stage directions, or deliver a speech with a flourish. He looks uncomfortable, but he looks like a man who wants to be believed, because he means what he is saying.
"I used to be a proud Republican," he says, "but not anymore."
He says that his father started at Marion, Indiana's RCA plant in 1949: "He was manufacturing picture tubes for TV sets. I started in 1973. My wife worked in a high school cafeteria. Together we made a living and raised a family. Then in 2004, the plant closed. Today, a foreign worker does my job. After 30 years I received 90 days severance pay and was unemployed.
"Republicans talk about putting country first, but tell that to Marion, Ind.," Barney says. "They sent my job overseas. America can't stand more of the same. We need a president who puts Barney Smith before SmithBarney."
Nice job, Barney.
Maybe if all those news anchors would shut up and listen to likes of this guy, instead of listening to themselves drone on, they might learn why they're so consistently wrong about everything they seem to predict.
Nice job, too, Democrats, for finding these "regular people" to give the talks. Their talks have all been pretty resonant. But America mostly isn't listening because the braodcast networks sure would never cover this, and the cable channels have too much redundant analysis to share with us.
Too bad, too, because Pamela Cash-Roper, who spoke before Barney, was even better. A big, robust, take-no-shit-from-anyone gal from North Carolina, she told of how she and her husband worked night and day, raised kids, saved some money. "It was the American dream. We did everything we thought you were supposed to do to live it. We really felt America was working for us."
Then her husband Keith needed open heart surgery and lost his job. There went the health insurance. "I couldn't afford to pay for the health insurance on my nurse's income, so we don't have any. Health insurance works as long as you stay healthy."
Five years later she needed quadruple bypass herself. "Our medical bills grew unbelievable," she said. I am a lifelong Republican. I voted for Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Bush. Then she raised her hands to wave off idea the McCain candidacy.
"I can't afford four more years like this," she said. "I can't do it! I can't do it!"
Gore, or Eeyore?
Posted 8:25 p.m., Aug. 28, 2008
Staying locked in on Gore's speech.
Interesting that he makes the comparison between Obama and Lincoln. I've thought that before too, just as Al Gore is saying, that an inexperienced Lincoln showed the good judgment during his one term as a U.S. congressman to oppose a war that was popuolar at the time and fell out of historical favor later. Gore's talking about the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848.
My reading of Lincoln's resistance to that war is that it was very, very close to Obama's opposition to Iraq. (It cost Lincoln his job in Congress ultimately.) So it's hard not to think of the two in parallel.
But, you know, if Obama's elected, let's hope he doesn't replicate all of Lincoln's experience. He did launch a Civil War and everything...
Posted 8:19 p.m., Aug. 28, 2008
Still on Gore's speech.
Ooh, boy, here comes the hot lova. (I'm freezing this on my DVR, so I'm obviously behind. He's probably done talking now.)
Says Gore: "After [Bush-Cheney] wrecked our economy, it's time for a change.
"After they abandoned the search for the terrorists who attacked and redeployed the troops to invade a nation that did not attack us, it's time for a change.
"After they abandoned the principal first laid down by General George Washington when he prohibited the torture of captives because it would bring, in his word, 'Shame, disgrace and ruin to our nation,' it's time for a change.
'When as many as three Supreme Court justices could be appointed in the first term of the next president, and John McCain promises to appoint more Scalias and Thomases and end a womam's right to choose, it is time for a change."
He's definitely warming up.
Updated 8:02 p.m., Aug. 28, 2008
Let's see what else Al has to say...
He's offering his opinion about why the election is so close. This could be worth listening to.
"I believe this election is close today mainly because the forces of the status quo are desperately afraid of the changes that Barack Obama represents.
"There is no better example than the climate crisis. As I have said throughout this land for many years, we are borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization.
"Every bit of that has to change..."
He's calling, not surprisingly, for an end of carbon-based fuels. And he shares a little Thomas Edison anecdote that I'm not familiar with.
"Almost 100 years ago, Thomas Edison--our most famous inventor, said, 'I would put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power. I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.'"
Posted 7:59 p.m., Aug. 28, 2008
Al Gore is a little slow to warm up. There doesn't seem to be quite the ferver over him that we've seen at, say, you're average Oscars ceremony.
A little sample of his speech:
"With John McCain's support, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have led our nation into one calamity after another because of their indifference to facts, their readiness to sacrifice the long-term to the short-term, subordinate the general good to the benefit of the few, and short circuit the rule of law.
"If you like the the Bush-Cheney approach, John McCain is your man. If you believe it's time for a change, then vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden."
Not bad as rhetoric, but the overriding feeling is that Gore is yet again getting eclipsed by Bill Clinton. Unless Gore starts hitting his stride, he's about to lose the elder statesman status that he gained somewhere along the way while he was doing that PowerPoint presentation, and Clinton is going to steal his juju.
-- Kevin Featherly
Wonder of Wonders
Posted 7:33 p.m., Aug. 28, 2008
Just watching Stevie Wonder on MSNBC. He says he loves us.
We love you, too, bro. Love it too, that he's giving us an early vision of what it might be to have a funky president.
The first tune, Stevie did tonight, don't know what it is. But I loved it. And I love too that he brought in all those international and native American rhythm instruments and players. A powerful musical message there: We might all dance to our own drummer in this crazy world, but maybe it's not impossible that we can get all those individual rhythms in some kind of sync.
-- Kevin Featherly
