A few bleary eyed reflections on last night’s three speeches:
The McCain Speech: I am not W
Demosthenes he’s not! The Senator from Arizona, as we learned again, is not an inspiring orator. But in his defense, he was saddled tonight with the most subdued audience in the history of rhetoric. Where are those four guys whooping it up behind Father Pfleger when you need them?
Then again, maybe “low-key” is the way to go. McCain will never out-dazzle Obama. He knows that and perhaps that’s why he staged his remarks in what looked like a crab shack. Making a virtue out of necessity his handlers will cast him as a down-to-earth alternative to the spectacular, high-falutin' Obama.
Still, he made some strong points (at least, before CNN pulled the plug on him). In a classic ji-jitsu maneuver, the Maverick reversed all the negative energy about his age that had been hurled at him by critics and threw it back at his opponent.
He painted Obama as a mere youngster. He did so while dwelling on foreign policy and we can be certain that McCain will insist in the coming months that when it comes to world affairs this kid's in over his head.
Attempting to neutralize an effective Obama weapon, McCain strained to decouple his name from that of George W. Bush. (He's on the defensive here. Obama recognizes this later on when he relentlessly pounds home the equation: Maverick = W).
The Clinton Speech: You Want a Piece of This?
The speech takes place at Baruch College in Manhattan. I used to play in an indoor soccer league there. One year, my side went 0-8. Each loss was more dismal than the one that preceded it. This was a state of affairs that induced alcoholic recidivism in two of our players--one of whom we found lying face down in a gutter in the East Village. So we find this guy passed out on like Avenue C and 6th Street and-- OH MY GOD!!! Did Hillary just say she will be making no decisions tonight? Did she just send us back to her web site?
Senator Clinton looks comfortable and relaxed. This crowd is pumped and they look, well, angry. Not New-York-angry. More like Michigan-angry.
If there is any coded message in this address, it might go something like this: Ms. Clinton has pieced together a surprising Blue-Collar coalition. She fights for them. She speaks for them. She sees them. They are not invisible to her, she reminds us. And if Senator Obama wants to see them too on Election Day, he better be offering something good in return.
The Obama Speech: Damning with Excessive Praise
In spite of having had his ears flicked earlier in the evening by a snarky McCain, and faced with the spectre of an uncooperative Hillary, Obama manages to deliver a tactically clever speech.
He stays away from religious themes which is prudent because religious themes have not been a winner for him lately (On this night of speechcraft only Clinton trots out the small (God) talk.
He smartly damns the Senator from New York with excessive praise. By lingering on Ms. (and Mr.) Clinton's accomplishments he gives the punditry and Super Delegates ample space to depict her (and him) as lacking similar grace.
As for McCain, Obama seems a little perturbed by his early evening philippic. He returns the compliment by refusing (wisely) to let go of the association with George W. Bush.
The 20,000 folks in attendance are ecstatic. The loudspeakers are blaring. The Blue Angels are doing a fly-over for all I know and somewhere in Louisiana the McCain people are hunkering down in their crab shack polishing old talking points about a big government, tax-and-spend liberal who won't be ready on day one.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
