Democratic National Convention, Part II - Obama's Acceptance Speech

I’ll admit, while I did watch it, I was at my friend’s house and we were enjoying some super-hoppy Imperial IPA so I wasn’t exactly paying rapt attention. Anyway, here are my thoughts:

A day or so ago it leaked out that Obama’s backdrop was being built to look like a small classical Greek temple. This news lead to lots of derision on the right-leaning parts of the blog-o-sphere. I looked forward to being able to make great fun of it myself, but I have to say, I barely noticed it. Yeah, there were some columns and such, but it didn’t seem very temple-like to me. Someone commented today that the columns were supposed to invoke the Lincoln Memorial and MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech (Obama's speech was on the 45th anniversary). While this wouldn't surprise me, I didn't see that either.

As for the speech itself: Well, the man can put on quite the show. He’s got a real presence on stage, and has the perfect voice, pitch, inflection, timing, etc. to sound wonderful. However, when you listen to what he’s actually saying, it’s all fluff. He set lots of lofty, fine sounding goals, but no actual plans as to how to achieve them. Now, I understand that this is a convention speech, and not necessarily a wonky policy speech, but still…

As with Hill, Bill, and Biden (and perhaps other speakers that I didn’t watch) he attacked Bush’s record. On and on he went talking about how awful things had become under the Bush Presidency. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this was 2004 when Bush was up for re-election.

He also followed the Democratic mantra in proclaiming that the economy is horrible, we’re in a recession, millions are out of work, etc. None of which is true. The economy is not booming true, but it’s growing. Yes, the unemployment rate is the highest it’s been in five years, but it’s still below what it was during the Golden Years of the Clinton-era. I just don’t see how this sort of negative message can be a winning campaign message.

So, did he do well? I don’t know. He gave a great performance, but it was all sizzle, no steak. However, I’m a bit of a political junky so I’ve seen this performance from him many times and it’s old and stale to me. If I were like most Americans, and was only now beginning to pay attention to the Presidential race, I think I would have been quite impressed. We’ll see how it all plays out over the next month.