Obama's Acceptance Speech

I didn't think this was a strong speech. It lacked the aspirations and freshness that drove his 2004 convention address, and the charisma that animated his 2008 stump speeches. But I don't know that he could have done better.

Obama's appeal has been the offer of a new politics and approach. He certainly offers at least one important innovation: he's a black politician seeking a core white constituency. His de-emphasis of the civil rights agenda typical of black politicians is a powerful example of attending to common issues before interest groups. It's still more powerful (and really, only works) because it's tacit. And his opposition to the war is Change, as was his distance from a pre-invasion establishment consensus that seemed as much political calcuation as anything else.

Important stuff, and in a primary election these things signaled real differences. But these departures from expectation are less noticeable in a general election, and the Senator's more recent predictability has dimmed his novelty. Civil rights is never more than a part of a Democrat's Presidential campaign, so Obama's de-emphasis of the issue is less striking here than in the nomination campaign. The Democratic establishment's late repudiation of the war has made his opposition less dramatic. The Senator's reluctance to acknowledge the success of the surge is similar in kind, if not degree, to the Administration's craft of foreign policy comments for domestic political effect, tarnishing the testimony to integrity won by his early opposition to the invasion. He does offer the occasional responsibility trope, but not enough to suggest that the Democrats are attributing any real part of individual outcomes to individual choices.

And even in the primaries the Senator needed more to win the nomination. There he used his real innovations to cast himself as the most effective leader of the _existing_ Democratic coalition. His policies were similar to Clinton's, which were notably to the left of her husband's, and are quite similar to progressive Democrats going back to Mondale: redistribution, social insurance, prioritization of domestic spending over military, redress of problems by increased resources through established institutions and policies. Obama argued that his outsider status, detachment from prior bickering and opposition to the war would validate him to a worried and disappointed electorate. But he didn't propose a new coalition founded on new principles.

This becomes obvious when he offers specifics. His nomination acceptance, the first appeal to that Presidential electorate, was exactly what I would expect from any progressive Democrat. Maybe that's what the country needs, and it's certainly change from a Republican Administration, but it ain't change from the politics of the past thirty years. Progressive Democrats welcome this stuff, but swing voters won't read it as new or inspiring. And while Obama offers some real changes to our politics, his alliance of them to a powerful and established is hardly evidence of principle.

Obama was stuck as he walked to the podium. He had to offer specifics to refute the celebrity lightweight stuff. But those specifics distance him from the Change elements that made him so exciting to begin with. Rather than promising a revision of partisan alignments, Obama's acceptance speech promised good but solidly Democratic State of the Union speeches.