I have heard Barack Obama deliver speeches better, but in
this acceptance speech, Obama did exactly what he needed to do to set the stage
for the fall campaign.
He had to do three things for the fall, which he
accomplished in his speech: first, he focused the campaign on the economy--and
did so by personalizing the fear and anger that many Americans now feel.
Secondly, he answered forcefully arguments about his ability as commander-in-chief.
And third, he invoked his own biography to dispel fears that as a president he
would favor one group over another.
And he did all these things thematically. There was a very subtle interweaving of
Obama’s past themes with the new theme of the American promise. (I like to think that Obama has read Herbert
Croly’s The Promise of American Life, which inspired Theodore
Roosevelt’s progressive campaign in 1912 and the founding of The New
Republic in 1914.) Here, in outline,
is how the past and present themes came together:
Change: In this speech, “change” did not refer to the
kind of sweeping good government notion that Obama evoked in the campaign to
skewer Hillary Clinton. Rather, it
referred specifically to change from the eight years of George W. Bush. Indeed, Obama drew a contrast between the
Clinton and Bush years. With that simple modification, change became relevant
to the fall campaign.
American promise: Obama used this idea to refer to
the promise that each American, regardless of the circumstances of his or her
birth, has an opportunity to get ahead. In that sense, it was intertwined
with his own biography and with his appeal to a higher equality of Americans
regardless of race, class, and region.
But it also fed two other arguments. First, it figured in the liberal or
progressive (to use Croly’s term) argument that government has a responsibility
to make good on the American promise: through regulating the market, and
through providing health insurance and education for all citizens. Second, it
figured in Bill Clinton’s “New Democrat” argument (that has goes back to the
Puritans) that in order to achieve the promise of American life, Americans have
to exercise mutual and individual responsibility. People have to be willing to work; parents
have to look after their children; corporations cannot behave like
brigands. So through this notion of the
American promise, Obama united the two historic strands of American liberalism:
the older New Deal argument of the 1930s and the “New Democrat” argument of the
1990s.
One America: Finally, Obama invoked his vision of a
single America--and he used it not only to put forward the promise of racial
reconciliation, but as an attempt to defuse the great social divisions of the
last decades over immigration, abortion, gays and guns. And that, too, dovetailed back into the idea
of the American promise, which could not be achieved, Obama suggested, if America
continued to be rent by incivility and social discord. It was one of the most intellectually elegant
speeches I’ve heard. Besides that, I
expect that it will do Obama and the Democrats a lot of good in the weeks
ahead.
--John B. Judis