After a sluggish start, the Democratic National Convention seemed to take off last night and soar to unexpected heights. Between Joe Biden's (right) rousing keynote speech (I admit, I cried) and Bill Clinton's ringing endorsement of Barack Obama (it has, indeed, been a long time coming), the stage was effectively set for Obama's acceptance speech tonight.
"The Obama era has begun in the Democratic Party. In a prime-time speech tonight, Sen. Barack Obama will try to launch an Obama era for the country," announced the Honolulu Advertiser.
Speaking on the forty-fifth anniversary of the historic March on Washington (when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream Speech"), Obama has his work cut out for him tonight.
The consensus across much of the country seems to be that Obama really needs to sell his candidacy to anxious white working-class voters. As Harold Meyerson astutely observed in the Washington Post:
The very voters he needs to win this election, the white working class that has been descending into post-industrial post-prosperity for a couple of decades and the past eight years in particular, are angry. American finance and corporations have abandoned them for cheaper climes, and they blame the elites of both parties for their woes. Obama's challenge is to become a tribune for some of that anger without looking like an angry black man.
Obama must be feeling the pressure right now to deliver the world in his speech tonight. There are a number of other sources pressuring Obama to clarify his message. The pundits and talking heads on TV political talk shows are telling Obama that he needs to address his apparent "lack of experience," his positions on foreign policy, his plans to revitalize the economy, his platform on energy. What are we up to now? Seventy-five minutes?
The list goes on. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell echoed the sentiments of millions of African Americans across the country when she wrote, "Barack Obama has spent the last four days reaching out to working-class white voters. I hope he spends at least a few paragraphs in his speech tonight reaching out to black ones."
Women, too, are hoping to hear some words of assurance in tonight's speech. "Convention Perspective: Obama needs to win over working-class women," said a headline in the Boston Globe. The Globe's Washington Bureau Chief Peter Canellos noted:
Instead of worrying about feminists, the Obama campaign should be thinking about women like Laura Klein, a Denver nurse, who opted for Clinton over Obama because she believes that Clinton "doesn't suffer fools gladly." Having had a "front-row seat" in the health-care system, Klein said, she was convinced that Clinton had the best plan to deliver universal coverage.
Advice, advice, advice. Everywhere you look, Obama is getting advice from someone. Do this. Do that. Say this. Say that. Reach out to X. Assure Y that you are, indeed, sufficiently experienced. Convince Z that you've got what it takes to be the president of the United States. If Obama read all the Bloggers, listened to tall of the Boob Tube commentators and radio gasbags, and paid attention to every word in the op-ed sections of newspapers, the guy would probably blow a gasket and be wheeled to a rubber room in a straight jacket.
A whole lot of folks have their hopes bound up in this election. Millions of people see in Obama what they want to see. Leftists and liberals treat him as a genuine progressive (or sometimes worry that he's not liberal enough); African Americans take pride in Obama the "black candidate" (even those who, early on, insisted he wasn't "black" enough); centrists see him as a safe middle-of-the-roader (or worry he's veering too far off to the left); conservatives play the "inexperienced" card all the time (and worry that people aren't buying it); fearful pessimists with fresh memories of 1963 worry he is a doomed man like JFK; and some Obama loyalists fear that "white working-class" voters won't vote for Obama come Election Day because they will see him as indifferent to their plight or because some of them are closet racists.
So many people are holding their breaths, praying for an Obama victory, dazed and demoralized after eight years of George W. Bush's misrule.
But Obama cannot be all things to all people. If he appears to be making an effort to win over everybody, then common sense voters -- and there are still plenty of them in America -- will begin to see him as an unprincipled Machiavellian. So far, Obama has done a spectacular job of balancing principle and pragmatism, appearing to countless voters to be an ideal combination of both.
Obama will deliver tonight. And people need to have faith in him. He is the closest candidate to an Abraham Lincoln or an FDR that we have seen in our lifetimes. He has already made history. And he will continue to shape it in ways that will make America America again.
Democratic National Convention photos courtesy Reuters.
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