We said yesterday that Obama needed to come out swinging in his acceptance speech. If you saw it – and shame on you if you’re interested in story and didn’t – you know he did that in spades.
If you missed it – hey things happen – you can see it here.
It was a classic five-element story line. The crowd was wildly PASSIONATE before he spoke, having been fired up by Al Gore and Stevie Wonder so he wasted no time and moved on to immediately accept the nomination, becoming the Dem official HERO. The vast majority of his time he spent defining his ANTAGONIST by methodically connecting McCain to Bush’s unpopular policies – specifically linking him to the failure to catch Bin Ladin (“Don’t say you will follow Bin Ladin to the gates of hell. You won’t even go to the cave where he lives!) and to higher gas prices (“Senator McCain has voted 26 times against alternative energy sources… More drilling is just a stop gap measure”). Then he went for the jugular, bringing up the issue of “judgement and temperment” on a day when McCain’s nasty side had surfaced in an interview with Time magazine, throwing the press some fresh meat and making “temperment” a point in the upcoming debates.
At the same time Obama was laying out specific policy initiatives – that is, he was giving us clear AWARENESS of how we as a nation can get back on the right track. And he ended on his theme of Change – TRANSFORMATION. So the speeches storyline was complete. He touched all the bases, and that is the very definition of a homerun.
I’m not usually a big fan of Chris Mathews, but as a political speechwriter himself he did a great analysis of this speech. Check it out here. I particularly like what he said about “attacking from a defensive position.”
But maybe Al Sharpton had the best one-line summary, “Obama took the gloves off but never stopped smiling, and that is a very dangerous opponent for John Mc Cain.”
Comments