Barack Obama Speech: "Hope is NOT Blind Optimism"

Hillary Clinton may have unintentionally written the obituary for the Iowa and New Hampshire phase of her presidential campaign, and perhaps her candidacy, when she told voters on Sunday: "You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose."
Clinton has not heeded her own lesson. She is campaigning in prose and has left the poetry to Barack Obama. She has answers to hard policy questions but he has the one answer that voters are hungering for: He offers himself as the vehicle for creating a new political movement that will break the country out of a sour, reactionary political era.

The most telling laugh line in Obama's stump speech is his description of the dreadful charge his opponents make against him. "Obama's talking about hope again," the candidate says, mimicking his foes. Then his tenor drops to a low, conspiratorial pitch: "He's a hope monger." His audiences roar. There is a certain melancholy in watching Clinton do battle, aware that the bottom is falling out from under her here. By way of proving her tenacity and the depth of her policy knowledge, she subjects herself to unremitting rounds of questions from voters about every issue from health care to global warming.

Yet if Clinton's answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably to John F. Kennedy's. "Do you remember," Stevenson said, "that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.'" At this hour, Obama is the Democrats' Demosthenes. It is no accident that the two best preachers on the trail, Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee, broke through in Iowa -- even if Huckabee's prospects here and in the long run are dimmer than Obama's. And it has to be painful for Bill and Hillary Clinton, who saw themselves 16 years ago as the heirs to John and Robert Kennedy, to watch Obama march off as the champion of a vast band of young and practical idealists.

The Clinton campaign is rooted in the idea that "Experience Counts" -- ironically enough, Richard Nixon's slogan against John Kennedy in 1960. But it is Obama who may have precisely the right experience for the mood of the moment. As a community organizer early in his professional life, Obama understood his task as catalyzing citizens into building movements for change. Obama's speeches are about citizen action, assembling coalitions, forcing change through popular demand. "I'm betting on you," Obama told a rapturous audience in Derry on Sunday afternoon. "I don't believe change comes from the top down. It comes from the bottom up." Change will come "if you believe," Obama declares, an inspiring line for this state's many Red Sox fans.

"When you've got a working majority behind you," he says at another point, "you can't be stopped." Transformation is not about policy details, but about altering the political and social calculus. Obama presents himself, in one of Karl Rove's favorite phrases, as a game-changer. If Obama seems to have history's winds at his back, Clinton is carrying history's burdens. In trying to push her way back into the contest by Feb. 5, when nearly two dozen states vote, Clinton would have to press her sober case that as good as Obama sounds, she's the one who is vetted and tested. "If you want to know which kind of change we will make," she pleaded to her Sunday night crowd, "look at what we've already done." Here again, the echoes of the past are eerie. It was Hubert Humphrey, on the aging side of the generational divide in 1968, who declared: "Some people talk about change, others cause it." Hubert Humphrey was a great man. He did not become president.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/obamas_poetry_beating_clint...

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Barack
• Obama
• Hillary
• Clinton
• John
• Mccain
• Montana
• South
• Dakota
• Iraq
• war
• George
• Bush
• bill
• elite
• bitter
• Rev
• wright
• Edwards

[AdDigit]

"when he's not in front of a teleprompter" Then have a look at the town hall meetings. No teleprompter and no pre-prepared questions. Most of which I have seen Obama answer the questions pretty well directly and explained more in-depth. So, you would probably be more interested in the town hall meetings.

[Richardgwm]

Obama, unlike McCain, has not sold his ideals to the devil for his political aspirations.

[jdroklylgola]

see, thats the difference between people, you have the people (populi) who just watch youtube for fun and then you have the PEOPLE (populi falsus), the people who watch youtube to use big words to comment stuff adn who hate on a man who is just doing his job, trying to put bread on the table... for all the people out there who read this, keep on the good work. for all the PEOPLE out there, get over it, use your big words in private and stop hatin this guy, please... and btw, im PEOple

[FastingOnClowns]

"The Nazi Party’s use of torchlight parades, brass bands, massed choirs, and similar techniques caught the imagination of many voters, particularly young people."

[nathan9384]

@pantsonfire247 I don't think what you have written is a political debate. Not only is it not the government's job to be charitable with my money, but they have proven time and time again that they care for no one but themselves, only give money to people in need when it benefits them politically. If people are incapable of love on their own then we don't deserve to live, period. If its not given freely, its not love, and its worthless.

[pantsonfire247]

Ok man. I'm a Canadian and you two are sooooo lost in the rhetoric of big corporate interest. You see this man as a person that will take money out of your pocket but what any human being should do is to help the sick and poor. Think how much money is it worth it for you to not help the down and out but for you to buy your new T.V. HELP others if only just a little bit.

[FatalAnimal]

@ThefieldGeneral84 well at least he is not a communist Republican

[DarkCalmor]

I Agree brother! He is the worst thing that we have done!

[ThefieldGeneral84]

Fuck this socialist piece of shit Barack Hussein Obama.He is fucking are country over.

[BrnEverlasting]

Hope is believing and then working, and then fighting for things.

[BrnEverlasting]

what makes you say that?

[roscoe85cj]

Real Patriots are like a pack of dogs with full bladders and Obama is the fire hydrant