Obama's Speech--Welding together Principles, Policies, and Testimony

The Tremendousness of it All. Barack Obama's acceptance speech was such a monster home run that it might be reverberate all the way through the Republican convention next week.

The speech was so good that it's difficult to think of images that fully capture the quality of Obama's thought, the skill in his rhetorical constructions, and forcefulness of his emotion.

But that doesn't mean I can't try.

Obama's speech was so tremendous it left the McCain camp speechless.

Hillary and Bill Clinton's speeches were terrific and hit all the supportive marks they needed to hit. But as good as they were, Obama was better and seeing the speech made it possible to understand why he won the Democratic nomination.

Like any other Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama has to face down the GOP slime machine. The speech succeeded extremely well at this as Obama confronted McCain's most popular ads head on without being defensive in the slightest. Describing how he saw the faces of his family in returning veterans from the Iraq war, college students who have to hold jobs while in school, and woman talking about setting up small businesses, Obama portrayed his own family as a model of everyday patriotism, hard work, and achievement. Then he addressed McCain's celebrity ads:

I don't know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine. These are my heroes. Theirs are the stories that shaped me. And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as President of the United States.

By rooting himself in lower middle-class striving, Obama rooted himself in everyday American life in a way that powerfully belied the celebrity aspersions in McCain's attack ads.

Finally, as a new public figure and an African-American swimming against the tide of racial stereotypes, Obama has to prove himself over and over. Tonight Obama proved himself yet again just as he proved himself against Hillary Clinton and during his overseas trip. For that, Obama will get another chance to prove himself during the debates.

Why Obama's Speech Worked So Well. Barack Obama's speech was excellent in many ways. He was especially successful in staking out his own positions and he could do so because he did such an excellent job os welding together core values, specific policy proposals, and personal testimony.

Obama articlated his idea of core American values in several versions of this sentence:

That's the promise of America - the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper.

There are two sides of the rhetorical equation--individual striving and obligations to other people. Andrew Sullivan views Obama's speech as quintessentially liberal--"more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism" in the 1960's. Actually, the individual elements in Obama's equation--responsibility, hard work, drive, innovation, and success--have strong echoes of the conservative Democratic themes that resulted in welfare reform during the 1980's and 1990's. But Obama connects these kinds of "bedrock" values to liberalism in a very common-sense way when he stresses that government needs to do "that which we cannot do for ourselves - protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology." By incorporating conservative values into a liberal framework, Obama articulates a kind of stripped-down "consensus liberalism" that had a great deal of rhetorical force but could also appeal to anyone socialized into American traditions.

Then, Obama articulated his specific policy proposals in terms of his core values. The Democrats often get criticized for either talking about values without policy or talking about policy in a way that's unconnected to core values. But Obama avoided these shortcomings.

Change means a tax code that doesn't reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the
American workers and small businesses who deserve it.

Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

I will eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and the start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.

I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95% of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class.

Obama avoided wonkishness by articulating his proposals briefly and clearly. But he was also successful in connecting each of those proposals to core values of striving, work, and responsibility. That's a lot of the reason these kinds of economic proposals--which are standard Democratic Party proposals--had a force that most Democratic politicians aren't able to give them. The same was the case with Obama's proposals on education, health care, energy, and foreign policy. They were brief, specific, and closely connected to his vision of what's at the core of American life.

What gave all of this even more force was that Obama was successful in further connecting his policy proposals and vision of core values with testimony about lower-middle class and middle-class Americans. At the beginning Obama told a number of anecdotes about his mother, grandmother, grandfather, factory workers in Indiana, women starting up small businesses, and the like. Having done so, Obama set himself up to pose the idea of his idea of political change as a force that emerged from outside Washington:

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.

And I've seen it in this campaign. In the young people who voted for the first time, and in those who got involved again after a very long time. In the Republicans who never thought they'd pick up a Democratic ballot, but did. I've seen it in the workers who would rather cut their hours back a day than see their friends lose their jobs, in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb, in the good neighbors who take a stranger in when a hurricane strikes and the floodwaters rise.

Obama's testimonials to the power and possibility of the yearning for change were capped by a final, and very moving, testimonial to the civil rights movement. Yesterday was the 45th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream Speech" and Obama held off any reference to the speech until the end of his speech when he represented Martin Luther King and civil rights activism as a particularly American movement that "pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend."

By linking up everyday striving and the various ways that most people sacrifice for each other with Martin Luther King in this way, Obama was able to present ground his policies in a compelling vision of the United States as a society brought together by a shared yearning for a "better future."

It was great stuff. I'm glad I saw it.