Here's the witty and wise Jeremy McCarter on Obama's acceptance speech:
The view from Stumper's seat as Obama arrived on stage.
Someone should invite Barack Obama
to give an explanation of particle physics while wrestling a gator.
Short of that, I don't what could make him give a flat or faltering
speech. The oratorical challenges that life has thrown at him over the
last four years—the 2004 convention, the race speech, Berlin—have given
chance after chance to flop, but the man seems incapable of doing so.
Thursday night's challenge was one of the tallest: bringing the
Democratic National Convention to a crescendo without providing fodder
for those who think him a preening, grandiose celebrity. So he took his
inside voice with him to the cavernous Invesco Field, and used it to
deliver what might be the most intimate talk ever offered to a crowd of
80,000.
Obama described the speech as "workmanlike." That's true, in the
sense that it didn't have the rhetorical flights of some of his
previous talks. But it also implies a level of strain, of visible
effort, nowhere in evidence. (It sounded workmanlike only in the way
that Tiger Woods going eight under for the round is workmanlike.)
He
needed all his gifts for this one, beginning with the agile, dynamic
voice—an instrument that lets him, like a singer with a four-octave
range, hit notes and make tonal shifts unavailable to the rest of us.
"What the naysayers don't understand is that this election has never
been about me," he said, using a pianissimo note to draw people closer,
before booming: "It's about you." There's also the sheer quality of the
writing, not just the arc and the rhythmic drive of the overall speech,
but little flecks of language, as when he described the promise of a
democracy "where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides
and unite in common effort." Grace, the unexpectedly delicate word,
recasts the whole sentence, makes you listen anew.
The good news for the Democrats is that Obama did what they needed him to do; the bad news is how much they needed him to do.
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