Obama's speech was reasonably good. He sounded tough and firm in his challenge to debate McCain anytime on his fitness to be commander in chief. I loved the way he swatted away McCain's jibes on his "celebrity" status - - not only demolished the attack completely but at the very same time made McCain look foolish and out of touch. (Incidentally, there's a lot to be said for repeatedly making him look foolish and out of touch - - the audience will supply the words "old," "over the hill," etc., and Barak doesn't even have to say it.) And he completely turned around McCain's "experience" argument by turning his long years of service into a negative. (which IMHO, they are and they ought to be.)
I thought the delivery was at times bad - - Obama looked like he was stumbling his way through a teleprompter and at the same time as he stumbled, his eyes were fixed at some point high up and to the extreme right or left. Much of the speech was routine, boilerplate and didn't really come alive. The punch lines had a somewhat wooden delivery. I've never seen him perform that poorly. He's been pretty good before, as a matter of fact.
There was some stuff that I thought was just plain bad - - grandiose promises, one about eliminating the dependency on Middle East oil in ten years. Why would anyone believe that shit? How? Promises about huge changes in health care, in education. What else is new? And worst of all - -how'd he plann to pay for it? In answer to the latter question, it's easy: He'll go through the budget line by line and eliminate wasteful expenditures. At that point I really expected a huge collective groan to rise to the rafters, but of course - - as the conservatives here like to say - - the audience had drunk the Kool-Aid.
I was very disappointed with two major defects in the speech - - there was no forthright denunciation of torture (although there was a very veiled reference to it) and there was no suggestion, when the issue was raised of how to pay for all the big promises, of cutting the military budget. These, IMHO, were HUGE omissions.
Something else that rankled my ass was the "reaching out," in very Hillary-like manner, to the very bane of the liberals' existence - - the right-to-lifers, the gun owners. It was one of those really wishy-washy whines, "We're all Americans here, can't we get together across the aisle and find a workable compromise?" Fuck dat.
Last, and maybe this sounds kind of petty, I was disappointed at the general age of the crowd. I expected all age groups, and there were, but there weren't anywhere near the number of fresh, young student faces that I had expected. This wasn't a Children's Crusade along the lines of the Eugene McCarthy or RFK campaigns of the 1960s. Middle age seemed to predominate, and some pretty kooky or eccentric-looking middle-aged people indeed. I thought back to my relative who had been a chairwoman of the Wayne County ADA back in the Fifties, and they had the same kinda look - - these ladies, and men, were Democrats, couldn't possibly be anything else. Where was all the dynamism of youth?
