Barrack Obama in Austin

I went to hear the golden boy speak yesterday--a year before the first primaries in the 2008 election cycle and Barrack Obama gathered more than 15,000 to his Austin rally. I think the fact that he was able to draw that many people speaks volumes about where we are right now as a nation--people are hungry for something different. The few people that I spoke to, mainly regular people rather than volunteers or people sporting Obama-wear, seemed to be more interested in checking him out than in immediately throwing their support his way. However, this was not a representative sample as Obama had hundreds of volunteers working the event and there were others who were obvious supporters. I spoke to one guy who had driven in from Kilgore and was talking about starting an Obama Organization and taking out ads in local papers.

The big question I had going in was whether or not he would live up to the hype and the question I had leaving was whether or not anyone could have lived up to the hype surrounding Obama. I thought his speech was rather pedestrian--a lot of the usual red meat for anti-war folks, he talked some about universal health care, but his unifying theme (slight pun) seemed to be drawing Americans together rather than driving them apart. His presentation was good, but certainly not the oration I expected. He missed his beats on several obvious applause lines and flubbed a number of words along the way--that's to be expected in any stump speech but hardly the soaring rhetoric I was expecting. He seemed to be at his best when talking about the Civil Rights movement and his words actually did border on "stirring." But then as he headed to the finish line and was trying to inspire the audience to action, his big call to all of us to support him and help bring America together, there was no heat, no urgency, no passion. Maybe he was tired from the travel and events of the past couple of weeks since he announced, but if yesterday represented his best effort, his skills as an orator will not be enough to win the primaries.

The substance of his speech was very general, as one would expect from a stump speech. He called for getting our troops out of Iraq in an orderly manner but didn't say how he would achieve this. He called for universal health care as necessary for a country that outspends every other nation in health care and yet leaves 46 million uninsured; again, he didn't say how he would get this done. Much of his speech was devoted to the Vision Thing--contrasting the numerous times in our nation's history where most people thought the status quo couldn't be changed and yet small numbers of people began the movements that brought fundamental change--The Revolution, slavery, women's suffrage, Civil Rights and so-forth. If he can get enough people on board believing that he is an instrument of change, one of the people in history who can translate what "should be" into what is, he may be our next president.

Obama did have one really good riff in a part where he was ripping on VP Cheney. The gist of the section was that we can't trust Cheney's judgment on what's going to happen--wrong on the war, wrong on the insurgency, wrong on being greeted as liberators, etc. Essentially, he's been wrong on every prediction he's made, why should we trust him that the "surge" is going to do the job or that Iran is such a mortal threat and he's definitely wrong in saying that Tony Blair's move to get 1600 British troops out of Southern Iraq is a good sign. It was a gray and drizzly day and Obama brought it home with, "Cheney probably would have forecast it was going to be sunny today." It was funny at the time.

Did he win me over? He gave me enough to consider him and even to consider volunteering for him in some capacity, but mainly he gave me enough to do some research on his positions and find out what the substance is behind his policy goals. It's far to early for me to be picking who I'm going to support but it's not too early to begin the process of looking people over. Vilsack of Iowa is already dropping out of the race, who knows if Biden and Richardson will have the staying power to make it through the first few primaries?

http://www.barackobama.com/