Iqra’i

So it’s  just over two hours to go until The One makes his case for the Presidency, and large extracts are beginning to spurt out all over the web.

The first thing one has to admit, is that it’s very very good. No matter how many speechwriters Obama employs, a speech this important in a career will always in its fundamentals be the personal expression of the orator - and it makes Obama look like a very smart guy indeed. (Incidentally, one of the many ghosts, a guy I know living in London, even emails the text of speeches in every week from the UK), The most uplifting for me is the line that seems to justify all the sentimentality of the Obama campaign:

“America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.”

It’s a reminder that dissent in a time of war is not unpatriotic and an assurance that a political life built on aesthetics rather than policy is traditional in a country that has always been built on abstract ideas. It manages to remind one that America’s image abroad does matter, without being explicit enough to open the speaker up to the old accusations of being too focused on adulation abroad. At the same time, it’s a piece of political ingenuity because it puts at the heart of Obama’s own message an echo of his most damaging claim against McCain, the baseless but powerful fear that the older man could be a repeat of a President who now enjoys the worst approval ratings since Nixon.

Keep watching for commentary and updates.

Updates: Is this a counter strike against the rumors that McCain camp might just leak their VP pick in the middle of Obama’s primetime assault on US television?  The more clued up journalists are on Obama’s remarks in advance, the less willing they might be to drop a well-prepared analysis of a speech they’ve actually worked on for a confusing attempt to report a sudden surprise. Of course, a VP leak tonight would be a massive risk of humiliation for Team GOP - what if Obama is just so gripping that the networks keep streaming him without interruption, or find it easier (never forget that journalists are an inherently lazy species) to stick with their prepared analysis during the post-speech post-mortem? After all, today’s speech will always be on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death - cue the assembled TV experts talking of their own emotional memories and swearing to remember this day until death - whereas discussion of a VP pick loses no aesthetic resonance by waiting til tomorrow. And the VP leak seems such an obvious dirty trick that even the average voter is going to see through it, quite possibly with resultant distaste for the Republican machine. Certainly, it gives the Dems plenty of opportunity to hammer home their current key line, that McCain represents the continuation of the “nasty” Bush-Rove era. Crashing other people’s press parties is the type of thing Washington politicians do, and McCain has been fighting hard to demonstrate that he’s just as much of an innocent outsider as Saint Obama.

Update 2: note that in all the extracts leaked, there is not a single mention the MLK-related significance of the date. So either Obama really has decided to finally cultivate some humility by tuning down the historical associations, or he’s saving that for the big surprise. Also, there’s no reference to the progress that the American nation has made in producing an African-American politician of such stature - a true sign of a post-racial campaign, or an indicator that the Obama campaign wants to downplay any ‘otherness’ in a campaign where issues of race continue to swirl like dark water under a boat, threatening to pull down anyone who ventures to poke at them? Unless the secret grand finale turns out to be a re-enactment of the march on Washington. We’ll see in one hour…