The tone of Obama’s speech was appropriate for the tone of the campaign, one which is attempting to argue that things are better now yet things are certainly not as they could be. Thus, this speech could be described as soaring, or transcendent, or uplifting, or at least not in the way such adjectives were applied to his 2004 address. As Obama said, I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President. The line as a sample, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that now, rather sums up the tone. Rather, Obama sought to set up the kinds of issues he will run on over the next two months: moderate deficit reduction along the lines of Simpson-Bowles, tax increases for those earning over $250,000, funding for education and job training, saving Medicare without voucherisation. The hows were absent, of course, but the key to the future of this campaign will be now these ideas play with in the swing states, and how they come to be manipulated into policy for utilisation in the debates.
If the whole of America does not know now that Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive due to the work of President Obama, then this convention ought to be considered a partial failure.
Dearest Joe Biden is to the word literally as Newt Gingrich is to frankly. His speech was littered with this superfluous word. The future of America is apparently literally, not figuratively!, in our hands, I learnt yesterday evening. To me the speech seemed fine, a little overwrought perhaps. I would worry, for example, if Barack Obama made all his decisions on the emotional level in the manner Joe Biden described. The best elements of his speech was the moment he gave to remember those in Iraq and Afghanistan, something no other speaker (to my knowledge) has done in either convention.
Nobody in the Democratic Party seemed to care much for John Kerry in 2004, much as the Republicans don’t much want Mitt Romney this time around. The situation is the same, actually: their greatest asset was or is that they were or are not the sitting President, whom either party despise(d). Tonight, however, Kerry gave a passionate and occasionally ironic defence of Obama, attacking with some venom and gusto Romney and his ‘neo-con’ foreign policy, or at times lack thereof: Mitt Romney says he “believes in America” and he’ll restore “American exceptionalism.” I have news for him: We already have an exceptional American as president—and we believe in Barack Obama!
And finally, earlier in the week I foresaw the following regarding James Taylor, that since the convention is being held in his home state of North Carolina, expect to hear either “Carolina In My Mind”, adding he might very well play “How Sweet It Is”. On both counts, I was proven correct, however I failed to predict him singing “You’ve Got a Friend”, which I should have, and for that I apologise.
