cascadian telegrams: August 2008

Is the word that springs to mind as Barack Obama delivers a great acceptance speech in Denver and becomes the first-ever black nominee for President of the United States. (click picture for speech).

from dailyKos:

Gay marriage, guns, abortion, social security, and more. When you touch the third, fourth, fifth and six rails of American politics in your acceptance speech, that's gutsy. And brilliant.

This is muscular liberalism, and a man with righteous anger at the abuses of the last eight (nay, 30) years:

This country is more decent than one where a woman in Ohio, on the brink of retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a lifetime of hard work.

We're a better country than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment that he's worked on for 20 years and watch as it's shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.
We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty...
... that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.
This moment, this moment, this election is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive.

Sullivan, as ever, says it better than I:

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.

Personally I keep reflecting back to the newspaper editor in Iowa, back when this all began:

(we) are about the select the smartest person in the room.

History is being made.

Crouching amid the Tennessee delegation on the floor of the stadium, I noticed him, this tall black man standing behind me. His face was as broad as his shoulders. And as Barack Obama finished his speech, as fireworks shot off and red white and blue confetti fell, tears rolled down his cheeks.
What emotions are running barreling through right now?
“So much, I see so many things,” replied Keith Norman in a rich baritone. “I see my earliest dreams as a child. I see a man being given a fair chance because of his talent.”
His chest heaves; he is looking at the stage and the Mr. Obama hugging his wife and his two daughters.
“I see his faith in God. And I see the hand of God,” he said, “And it makes my heart glad.”
A friend, a barrel chested black man in a black Obama beret comes over and puts his arm around the midsection of Mr. Norman and asks another man to take a picture of them together.
Both men are crying and smiling.

Run, Barack, Run!

And godspeed to ye. You won't arrive a minute too soon.