Three Speeches on an Historic Night

The sight of Barack Obama actually being named presumptive Democratic candidate for President, no matter how expected. is astonishing to eyes that saw black people forced to ride in the back of buses and send their children to segregated schools and attacked for daring to exercise their right to vote. But then came the speeches.

John McCain elbowed into Barack Obama's moment of triumph with a Back-to-the-Future revival of his 2000 straight-talking self to distance himself from Bush and belittle the man who made history tonight.

Hillary Clinton delivered what was expected to be her concession but turned out to be a victory speech and a valentine to herself that barely mentioned the opponent who had taken the nomination from her.

Then Obama came on to eulogize Clinton's campaign, praise McCain but deplore his record of supporting Bush, and then lay out his own vision of a new America.

The contrasts in style and substance were telling. McCain with a straight face painted himself as the candidate of change while demeaning Obama. "I don't seek the presidency on the presumption I'm blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save my country in its hour of need," he said. "I seek the office with the humility of a man who cannot forget my country saved me."

Clinton praised herself with abandon. "Because we stood our ground," she said, "it meant that every single United States citizen had a chance to make his or her voice heard. A record 35 million people voted in this primary...And I am committed to uniting our party so we move forward stronger and more ready than ever to take back the White House this November."

No mention of who will actually be moving in.

Obama, after a long tribute to Clinton, took on McCain: "I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine. My differences with him are not personal; they are with the policies he has proposed in this campaign...It's not change when John McCain decided to stand with George Bush 95 percent of the time, as he did in the Senate last year."

The Democratic candidate-to-be said he looked forward to debating McCain on policies and positions, "a debate that the American people deserve--on the issues that will determine the future of this country and the future of our children.

"But what you don't deserve is another election that's governed by fear, and innuendo and division. What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon. What you won't see from this campaign or this party is a politics that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to polarize. Because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first."

Let the debate begin.

Hillary's Last Hurrah

So it ends not with a bang but a whimper, the slow dribbling away of her "tiebreaker" victory in Indiana as Barack Obama seals the nomination in North Carolina, "a big state, a swing state," as he put it, and more to the point, a state that gave him a resounding margin after the Jeremiah Wright disaster brought his viability into question.

The chatter about Florida and Michigan, the blather about remaining primaries should start to fade as the superdelegate slide toward Obama begins in earnest and the Democratic Party gets itself together for November.

Obama, in effect, gave his acceptance speech last night and began the campaign against John McCain. Clinton talked gamely about fighting on, but there was a valedictory tone in her voice. Both started the painful process of reaching out for unity and, if Obama chooses, sharing the ticket.

The New York Times headline, "Options Dwindling for Clinton," is an understatement. The campaign is running out of money, running out of arguments about electability and out of contortions to make the primary process look closer than it has been.

What Obama has accomplished in little more than a year, aside from the racial breakthrough, is unprecedented in modern American politics--coming from relative obscurity to take the nomination from a dynastic opponent who was almost universally believed to be unbeatable.

In the past month, he has been tested and toughened by the Wright stuff and surmounted it. John McCain is facing a long, hard summer and fall.

The Pox of Pigeonhole Politics

If Barack Obama has accomplished nothing else in his campaign so far, he has done us all a service by confounding the political consultants and pollsters who slice and dice voters by age, gender, ethnicity, religion, economic status, the population density of where they live and sub-categories thereof.

Unfazed by their spectacular failure in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, the identity experts appear regularly after each victory to report confidently on Obama's "progress" with younger women, blue-collar workers, Latinos, etc. to explain his march toward the Democratic nomination.

No turn of events escapes their expert analysis. In a classic gotcha, whatever they predict that turns out to be wrong is simply a new trend to be reported with confident expertise.

All this begs the question, to put it bluntly, of whether they know what they're talking about. One of the heartening aspects of the Obama campaign has been his capacity to reach across the lines that divide voters and tap into hopes that could unite them.

Each success has left Hillary Clinton's strategists scrambling for ways to stop losses among working men, shore up support among younger women, rope in straying independents and woo other perceived segments of society--a process that produces the picture of a campaign running off in all directions.

It's too much to hope that the experts will abandon their pigeonholing of voters. They will most likely respond by discovering a new demographic--true believers in the possibility of change, with subdivisions by age, gender, religion, etc.

Al Gore: Revenge of the Nerd

After years of being bullied by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and the jocks of the Supreme Court, this may be Al Gore's moment to exercise his muscle.

In the gathering storm over the Democratic nomination, the non-violent Gore is increasingly seen as the one figure who might mediate the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who could overcome divisions about superdelegates and the seating of the Florida and Michigan phantom contingents.

Gore, according to today's New York Times, "has been lobbied hard for an endorsement by allies of Mrs. Clinton and of Mr. Obama.

"Although it is not clear what role their past may play in his decision, Mr. Gore and the Clintons have a complicated, sometimes intense history, and Mr. Obama’s strength in the presidential race could make it even more complicated.

"Some of Mr. Gore’s allies have complained bitterly that Mr. Clinton concentrated more on Mrs. Clinton’s Senate run in 2000 than on getting Mr. Gore elected president. For his part, Mr. Clinton was surprised and hurt that Mr. Gore did not enlist him on the campaign trail in the final weeks of the presidential campaign."

Those wounds from the campaign that gave us eight years of George W. Bush may still be sore but should also motivate Democrats not to let anything like it happen again.

For the moment, Gore is watching warily from the sidelines, but the man who once claimed to have invented the Internet should be smart enough to get the warring factions of his party to communicate about ways to come together and retake the White House.

Ambulance Chaser-in-Chief

After each loss, John Edwards keeps demagoguing from the heart, rehashing his closing arguments against the corporations he milked for millions as a negligence lawyer and is now trying to pummel all the way to the White House.

In his past life, Edwards settled for one-third of the take, but now he wants it all, to been seen as an idealistic fighter for the dispossessed and be rewarded with the most powerful job in the world.

It's disheartening to react so vehemently to someone who sounds so dedicated to defending the victims of corporate greed, but Edwards' passion is just too pumped up to be believable, too obviously about himself rather than those he seems to be championing and too inconsistent with the little he has achieved in a second career of chasing high office rather than actually serving the public interest.

Democrats have two formidable contenders who will now go head to head for the rest of the primary season. From here on, Edwards will only be an annoying distraction.

A Living Rebuke to Today's Politics

You might sum up what's wrong with this process of picking a president in two words: Joe Biden. Why is he stuck in single digits?

In an interview with Judy Woodruff on PBS' News Hour last night, Biden was a reminder of the kind of candidate that old-fashioned, smoke-filled-room politics of the past century would often produce: experienced, knowing, comfortable in his own skin, someone to be trusted without being idealized.

Not always. There was Nixon, of course, but there were also FDR, Jack Kennedy, Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson and even Truman, if you overlook the cronyism.

Biden is a throwback to those days in refusing to play the Hillary-Rudy-Romney game of pandering from the heart. In Iowa, he is running a tongue-in-cheek ad about the phrase often heard in Democratic debates, "Joe's right," and he has been--about Iraq (after trusting Bush in 2002) and most domestic issues based on more than half a lifetime in Congress.

Peace to those cynics who will pop up with "plagiarism" and "shoot from the hip," but Biden seems to have learned from past mistakes and personal losses to emerge not sadder but wiser and optimistic. He deserves a closer look.

The old pols who used to pick candidates were a nasty, often crooked, lot, but they were realists who didn't fall for sound bites, test-panel slogans and shifty commercials. Nobody wants them back, but there must be a better alternative than this.

Maybe the YouTubers tonight will show us the way.

Obama Boomlet, Oprah to Come

As in Iowa, there are small signs of momentum for Barack Obama in New Hampshire.

In a new CNN poll today, he has narrowed the gap behind Hillary Clinton to 36-22 percent from 43-20, but more significantly, only 24 percent of likely voters tell pollsters they have made a choice. Another 29 percent are leaning toward one candidate, 47 percent are undecided.

Now the campaign is poised to bring out their big weapon. Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times, a close Obama watcher, reports his telling voters that Oprah is coming to New Hampshire and will probably stump for him in Iowa, too. One of his supporters points out, "Oprah can say to women ‘You don't have to vote for the first woman president. Vote for what you need.'”

Even Rudy Giuliani is pitching in (for his own obvious reasons). After Obama told high-school students today not to emulate his own experimentation with drugs and alcohol at their age, America's Mayor expressed admiration:

“I respect his honesty in doing that. One of the things we need from our people running for office is not this pretense of perfection. The reality is...we’re all human beings. If we haven’t made mistakes, don’t vote for us, because we’ve got some big ones that are going to happen in the future.”

After that validation, it would be churlish of Obama to point out that Giuliani has kept making some big mistakes long after high school. At the moment, however, they are both busy chipping away at Hillary Clinton's image of perfection.

Why Can't Kucinich Catch On?

On the two key issues for 2008, Denis Kucinich seems to be in tune with Democratic voters. He wants to get us out of Iraq, and he favors a single-payer not-for-profit health care plan.

But his campaign is stuck in the second tier of candidates in single digits. Why? Is he too short? Is his name too hard to pronounce and spell? Does he make voters uneasy by unconventional moves such as his recent visit to Syria? Do they tune out because his solemn air makes them uncomfortable?

Amid all the talk about a woman or African-American in the White House, there seems to be a resistance to taking Kucinich seriously because, in some way, he is not stereotypically presidential--too ethnic, too working-class, too head-on in confronting issues without softening the edges.

He voted against the Iraq war and, in 2004, paid his dues by earning double-digit percentages of the vote in the Maine, Minnesota, Hawaii and Oregon primaries. But this time, he comes off as a “tweener,” not as slick as John Edwards or eccentric enough like Mike Gravel to show up on a Bill Maher panel.

If we were living in a Frank Capra movie, he might have a chance. Growing up so poor that his family was often homeless, fighting his way up in Cleveland politics and slipping back so far that in 1982 he reported $38 on his tax return, coming back to win a seat in Congress and the heart of a beautiful, idealistic young woman, Dennis Kucinich is an exemplar of what used to be the American Dream.

But these days, Frank Capra movies seem to be appropriate only for Christmas, not Election Day.