Obama: The Speech
I'm writing this just after 4am, having stayed up late to watch Barack Obama accept his party's nomination as candidate for President. And I've been thinking back to the first time I watched a Democratic Party convention, exactly 40 years ago: Chicago, 1968, when there were fights, literally fights, over whether delegations from southern states should be allowed to participate because they refused to accept any black members.
Well, tonight, the Democrats embraced a black Presidential candidate. Forty years is a long time in politics.
While I was waiting for Senator Obama, I began leafing through a book that's been sitting for months on my desk.: it's called "Speeches that changed the world." And it has reminded me that speeches do sometimes matter, do sometimes make a difference.
Will Obama's speech tonight be one of those? I have no idea. But the speech he made at the Democratic party convention four years ago certainly changed his world: it launched him on a meteoric political trajectory that just might take him all the way to the White House.
And consider these:
The Conservative party leader David Cameron's speech to his party conference in Blackpool three years ago, which certainly changed his world too: it won him the party leadership , and might well take him all the way to Downing Street;
John F Kennedy's inauguration speech in 1961: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country", which changed the way Americans thought about themselves and their country, at least temporarily;
Franklin D Roosevelt, in his inaugural address in March 1933: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", steadying American nerves after the banking crash.
And, of course, Winston Churchill, in May 1940, as the Nazis swept across Europe: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."
So I could have written today about the continuing crisis in the Caucasus, or about the collapse of the coalition government in Pakistan following the resignation of President Musharraf. But I decided not to simply because, in many ways, Barack Obama's speech - and American voters' reaction to it - may well have a profound influence on developments in both Georgia and Pakistan.
My impressions of tonight's speech? There was more steel - and even more anger - than I had expected ... this was a Barack Obama grittily determined to put America back on the right track, ready and willing to attack John McCain ("it's not that he doesn't care, it's that he just doesn't get it") - and ready to strike one of the lowest blows I've heard from the man some commentators call Saint Barack: "If John McCain wants to have 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." (McCain has a reputation as a man with a tendency to blow a fuse.)
There was plenty of the high-blown rhetoric we have come to expect; there was the personal back-story that is a given on such occasions - but there was also a hefty dollop of detailed policy proposals (on tax cuts, health care, and job creation, for example) that many American voters probably won't have heard before.
So what the Democrats are hoping for now is a great big bounce in Obama's opinion poll ratings as they head home, and the Republicans start heading for their convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Even before he spoke, a Gallup tracking poll was showing him six points ahead of McCain after two weeks of level-pegging. So from their point of view, the early omens are good. But of course, the same thing may well happen for McCain after the Republican convention, and then we'll all be back at square one.
Oh, one final thing: happy 72nd birthday today to Senator McCain.
I'm going to be travelling in the US for the next couple of weeks: next Friday, I'll be presenting The World Tonight live from Missouri, the bellwether state where only once in the past 104 years have they not voted for the winning candidate in a presidential election. I do hope you'll be able to tune in, either on air or online.
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:)
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Well if you seriously believe that Obama will change America then just dream on.
If there is going to be change then you change from something to something else. What effectively he is saying that America has been doing something which it should not. That is not a criticism of America it is a criticism of Americans.
'They' do not take your job from you and transfer it to another country. It is a person who makes the decision. It was an American that did that.
It is not 'they' that foreclose on your mortgage, it is not a computer, it a person, somebody, probably a fellow makes that decision. It is not banks that do these things it is bankers, people.
It is not 'they' that drop bombs on innocent people using Reaper and Predator, it is somebody in a room in the desert who decides what will happen.
When a soldier a gun and kills somebody it is a soldier following orders. Now these soldiers do not have to fire, they do not have to kill innocents.
In a democracy it is the people who elected George Bush, America did this to itself. When Obama talks about this election not being about me it is about you, well this is nonsense, of course it is about Obama, yet how they cheered.
I know that America had the attack on the Twin Towers, and many lives were lost, but the attack on Iraq was wrong. It was, and is illegal, Guantanamo Bay is an abominaton. America has not done these things, Americans have.
He says his is the party of Kennedy and Roosevelt, his is also the party of Woodrow Wilson, the American that took America into the Great War. On the promise that, if elected, he would not. I foresee the same problem, America will end up deeper in the mire than they have ever been.
I think that an America with Obama as its leader will be a disaster. The economy will implode, and he will be tested over his foreign policy and will be found wanting.
I'm no Republican, I do not support their policies either, the problem with America is Americans, they seem to be to be totally deluded and unrealistic. Oh, how they cheer, they are on the road to destruction, and the problem is that 'they' are taking us all with them.
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"So I could have written today about the continuing crisis in the Caucasus,"
Well, Joe Biden talked tough about Georgia and has taken the Saakshvili line on events.
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Robin,
In 1968 at Sussex University we were all living the Vietnam War ( and Apartheid ) - by proxy, as students do. We marched on the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. We watched the Kent State killings by the National Guard. This is our America.
The scale of the Vietnam War is admittedly not that of Iraq, save in one important respect the reason for the War. The USA strives to be the World's policemen legal or not - however ineffectual the results. The reduction in scale of foreign wars may well be due to the actual and visible cost in cash and American bodies.
Americans live, vote and largely still remain in the USA for all of their lives. They are not citizens of the World. They vote with their pocketbook.
Great speeches have a correlation with great achievements only when policy can be carried through. Presidents are the prisoners of the Congress - one of the few areas that can actually do anything is in foreign policy as there are no (or very few c.f. the Jewish Lobby) representatives to block policy.
Your are quite right to point out the (possible?) sea change from the pro-slavery days of the Democratic party to its (reluctant?) adoption of a black man as candidate - incidentally they were still not able to pick a woman!
Journalists, like yourself, see the World through the (self important) 'powerful' people whom they interview. People matter - Presidents, particularly USA ones, generally only destroy! The international stage is their performance space, their agents and agencies, legal and otherwise carry out acts that would be illegal at home in the name of the USA.
Many people, with a little training and possessed of a team of speech writers, can deliver a reasonably rhetorical composition to a group of willing listeners. But what of middle America - where the election is won and lost? Please gauge the Midwest red necks feelings on your travels.
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Talk is cheap. "Words, words words, I'm so sick of words. I get words first from him, I get words now from you. Is that all you blighters can do?"
Can a man who has had only two years of experience in Congress sell his expensive new programs to them when the government is already nine trillion dollars in debt and it's continuing to rise? Politicians are great at making promises they can't keep. It seems that's what they do best. How will he capture Bin Laden, by bombinb Pakistan? By invading it? What will he do if he pulls our troops out of Iraq and a regional civil war ensues? Lots of empty rhetoric. BTW, Franklin Roosevelt was in office for almost nine years before the depression ended and that was due to WWII, not his failed policies. A year and a half after Kennedy made his speech he nearly blew up the world in a direct confrontation with the USSR over their nuclear weapons in Cuba. As for Churchill, he really did have nothing to offer...except hoping somehow the Americans would come to Britain's rescue and save it from Germany before it concentrated its efforts on Japan while Britain was being finished off by the Nazis. Empty words designed to appeal to emotion. If that's what Americans base their decision to cast their votes on, they will get the government they deserve. Probably one no less incompetent than the one they have now.
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Obama ain't black, he's mixed race. Why does everyone insist that he is black? Does his blackness trump his whiteness? Apparently it does. Now we have to ask why that is the case.
Is it mainly because he has thrown his lot in with black people and is married to a black woman? Or is it because white America is obsessed with proving its non-racism by electing a 'black' president?
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**"You have shown what history teaches us - that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it - because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time"**
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