A hard balancing act
James Forsyth 5:25pm
The expectations for Obama’s speech tonight are a mile high. I’d be tempted to say they’ll be impossible to match but, as First Read points out , Obama has never yet failed to deliver on one of these set piece occasions.
Obama speaks as the first African-American nominee of a major American party on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech’, emphasising the historic nature of this moment. Add to this the fact that Obama is regarded as the best political orator in a generation and that his political career took off with his 2004 convention address, and you realise just how much people are expecting. To give you a flavour of the mood here in Denver, I passed through a party last night where people were dancing to music spliced heavily with extracts from Obama’s speeches.
If Obama had a large poll lead, the temptation for him would be to deliver a workmanlike speech designed to show that he had substance. But in the current circumstances, that’s a risk as the press might declare that the air had gone out of the Obama balloon. But equally the Republicans have ingeniously set up a situation where people will quickly ask where the detail is if Obama delivers a speech that hits the rhetorical high-notes.
The convention so far has been dominated by the Clinton drama making Obama’s speech all the more important. Obama’s task tonight is to remind people why there has been such excitement about his candidacy and to show them that his head is not in the clouds, that he is ready to lead both at home and abroad. It is hard a balancing act to pull off but one that his chances depend on him doing so.
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Verity
August 28th, 2008 6:21pm Report this commentJames: He is not an African American as the term is understood. His family wasn't captured (by their own kind) and sold to traders and transported across the Atlantic and put up on auction stands to be sold off off as slaves. Husbands and wives separated. Mothers and children separated. It doesn't bear thinking of.
His family wasn't involved in the 200 year stuggle for freedom ad the patience and the planning. He's riding on the coattails of true heroes.
James writes that Obama has to demonstrate: "that he is ready to lead both at home and abroad."
Oh, pull the other one. Until three years ago he was a state senator in the Illinois Senate, for God's sake, mixing round with the sleaze in the Democratic party machine and cutting cozy deals and receiving favours. And mixing around with convicted terrorists. Now he's been in the national Senate for a giant 2 1/2 years - that time spent campaigning to be president. Ad do you know how he voted on 90% of the votes? PRESENT. He's not ready for anything.
Austin Barry
August 28th, 2008 8:37pm Report this commentOn purely empiracal observation Obama is a strutting, supercilious, arrogant flim-flam man. Sure, he appeals to elderly women of both sexes, teenage girls, the anguished liberal media, otherwise anti-American foreigners and the paradoxically earnest and hysterical misfits who become convention delegates, but to Joe Paycheck he would, I fear, be regarded as an anal aperture. Come November it will be Obama, we hardly knew you.
Al Wood
August 29th, 2008 12:43am Report this commentMile High Stadium 2008= Sheffield Rally 1992. The undecided won't like the scale of this event. It's a major misjudgement on the part of Team Obama.
Frank Pulley
August 29th, 2008 12:51pm Report this commentAustin Barry
He hasn't won you over then? A classic AB post! :-)
Verity.
"He's not ready for anything"
I'm not even sure he wants to win. He must know by now that if he becomes President his various string pullers will be tearing his gangly wooden limbs off as they try to pull him in different directions. What with that and his ball-breaker at home trying to work her own sub-agenda through him, he must by now be a little trepidatious to say the least. Let's hope he doesn't have to worry about it once McCain wins the election. But then I suppose we'll have to suffer another season of the Clintons as they scream, "We told ya so" and then spend another four years trying to get their Washington pad back.
Btw Gerard Vanderleun, over at American Digest, wrote a great piece about the airbrushing of Lyndon Johnson From the Democratic annals during this campaign, despite the fact that it is his centenary this year and it was he, rather than MLK (or even JFK) who initiated the moves that led to the Obama phenomenon:
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/the_democrats_f.php
Whatever anyone thinks of Johnson's unsavoury traits, connections and duplicity, I think it's indisputable that he was a political giant compared to today's prattling pygmies. WSY?
Johnson did some great work in the background of the fight against Organized Crime too, despite Bobby K rather than because of him.
It's a characteristically great essay from Gerard, read it all and some of the links attached thereto.
JONNY
August 29th, 2008 2:19pm Report this commentClearly Obama has problems.
An awful lot of Spectator commentators don't like the cut of his jib.
Verity
August 29th, 2008 2:41pm Report this commentFrank Pulley - No one will ever forgive him for The Great Society, which bred six or seven generations of welfare dependents and is still steaming ahead.
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