The real novelty was to find a politician who didn’t talk down to his audience but instead trusted it to listen to complete, paragraph-long thoughts that couldn’t be reduced to sound bites.
That's something we hadn't really thought about. Obama's speech marked the end of the Bush era. We are no longer being subjected, at least by this candidate, to endless rereadings of "My Pet Goat." As Frank Rich notes, though, "Beltway bloviators" doubt whether we the people understand whole sentences. That's like wondering whether someone who suffered through a blind date with a C- in personal hygiene would ever fall for someone clean.
Hillary Clinton uses whole sentences, too, but the "important" speech she gave on Iraq a day earlier went largely unremarked.
You have to wonder if her Iraq speech would have been greeted with the same shrug if she had tossed away her usual talking points and seized the opportunity to address the war in the same adult way that Mr. Obama addressed race.
What was missing in her speech was candor. She's lapsed into an update of "My Pet Goat" talk which was, of course, a coverup for incompetence and disaster. Like President Bush, she seems to believe that lies and half-truths will make her a leader if told often enough. In spite of the complete sentences she talks to us as Bush does -- disrespectfully. She assumes we're not really paying attention.
... She once again pretended her own record didn’t exist while misrepresenting her opponent’s. “I’ve been working day in and day out in the Senate to provide leadership to end this war,” she said, once more implying he’s all words and she’s all action. But Mrs. Clinton didn’t ratchet up her criticisms of the war until she wrote a letter expressing her misgivings to her constituents in late 2005, two and a half years after Shock and Awe.
Rich believes -- probably many of us believe -- that she would have helped her campaign a lot if she'd been more open and more honest.
... She repeatedly pretends that she didn’t know President Bush would regard a bill titled “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002” as an authorization to go to war. No one believes this spin for the simple reason that no one believes Mrs. Clinton is an idiot. Her patently bogus explanations for her vote have in the end done far more damage to her credibility than the vote itself.
Clinton's campaign-meisters seem to have decided that swift-boating Obama will work better than honesty. Rich believes the Clinton campaign is in the process of handing McCain the presidency.
... She is “looking for some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama” so that she can win over superdelegates in covert 3 a.m. phone calls. If Mr. Wright doesn’t do it, she’ll seek another weapon. Mr. Obama, who is, after all, a politician and not a deity, could well respond in kind. For Republicans, the prospect of marathon Democratic trench warfare is an Easter miracle.
