Tonight, August 28, 2008, Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech at Invesco Field in Denver, Colorado. This speech may well be ranked as one of the best speeches of the 21st Century.
Democrats are uniformly ecstatic about the speech. Republicans are trying desperately to give it a negative spin. Neither group really matters. What ultimately matters is what independents and undecided voters think of the speech. I can’t see how anyone could listen to that speech without being moved.
Even conservatives, like Andrew Sullivan were moved by the speech.
more after the break…
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 closes his blog entry with the following lines.
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.
This is the full video of the speech. The video is 45 minutes long.
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