The Speech.

Here are my random thoughts about Obama's speech Thursday night. First a few notes about the warm-up acts and the overall atmosphere.

-I tuned in an hour early to see Algore warming up the crowd. I expected him to put everyone to sleep, but in the last 8 years he's become a more passionate, dynamic speaker. He compared Obama to Lincoln more than once, the validity of which remains to be seen. Like a lot of the Obamamessiah stuff I thought it was a little unfair to the Senator to put that kind of expectation on him. I'd settle for a Taft at this point.

-The set looked a lot less gaudy than I expected from the descriptions I'd heard. All day on talk radio they'd been describing it as some kind of pagan temple. It looked very subdued when I actually saw it.

-The larger stadium crowd wasn't quite the visual I thought it would be. This may be because I'm used to seeing crowds that size at sporting events, or it may be that on tv a crowd of 20,000 or 80,000 are more similar than they would be in person.

-There were about 30 minutes of "ordinary people" speeches. The ordinary people were a little too ordinary. The one that stuck out most to me was an auto worker from Detroit who said: "Working class families were doing fine in Detroit until the Bush administration took over". Bullshit. I laughed out loud at that line. (Because Detroit was heaven-on-earth when I lived there in the mid-nineties) Detroit has been in a free-fall for about 40 years now. In that time the state and federal governments have been controlled by each party and the nation has had its ups and downs, but Detroit has only been run by one party and there haven't been too many "ups" to speak of.

-as to the speech itself, I thought it was very good, not quite as good as the one he gave in '04, but it served a different purpose. The '04 speech was soaring and inspirational, while this one had to be more workman-like.

-I thought the most effective part was where he directly addressed the "celebrity" stuff. This was important to show that he identifies with "hard-working Americans" (which may be my least favorite political buzz-word these days).

-For a lot of the speech I got the impression he was running against Bush. Not a bad idea, but they've been trying to tie McCain to Bush for about 6 months now, and I've seen no signs that it's working with the electorate so far. McCain's maverick reputation (rightly or wrongly) may very well be too entrenched in the minds of the public to be reversed.

-He's definitely a "big picture" guy rather than a policy wonk.

-Make no mistake about it. We are a nation of whiners. Remember how much whining ensued when Senator Gramm said that? They kind of proved his point.

-Both candidates are promising to end our dependence on foreign oil... and both will fail to deliver if elected.

-I thought he left McCain some openings to counter-attack by claiming McCain doesn't know what "ordinary" people go through, etc. Also this makes it a little easier for McCain to attack Obama without looking too mean-spirited.

-Overall, I thought it was a very good night for Senator Obama. I'd give the final night an A, and the rest of the convention a B-. It was kind of unfocused as Democratic Conventions usually are when compared to the absolute "message-discipline" that permeates Republican conventions. The high points for me were the speeches of Biden and Obama, as expected.