Obama speech: the reaction

How have American commentators reacted to Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech in Denver? In an editorial, the New York Times says that the 50-minute speech represented "significant progress" for Obama. He "long ago proved his skills as an orator. He went further on Thursday night… he promised to rewrite Bush’s tax code to restore fairness to working people… He promised universal health insurance. He offered a grand, perhaps grandiose, vision of ending America’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil in a decade."

Marc Cooper, an editor for the Nation, was more straightforward in his praise. It was, he said, "the most impressive campaign speech from an American presidential candidate I can recall in my lifetime."

The blogosphere’s liberal lynchpin Markos Moulitsas was overjoyed at the unapologetic liberalism of the speech: "When was the last time we saw a speech like tonight's - a full-throated defence of progressive principles, devoid of mushy 'centrist' crap?" he asks. "It didn't avoid the tough social issues like abortion, guns, or gay marriage. It wasn't apologetic. Unlike Bill Clinton's and Biden's, it didn't unnecessarily praise John McCain. It drew sharp distinctions between Democrats and Republicans."

Likewise Kevin Drum at Mother Jones was cheered by the seriousness of the speech. "Obama has put a serious dent in McCain’s ability to continue campaigning with dumb soundbites and too-cute-by-half innuendo," he writes. "This isn’t a teenager’s campaign for junior high student council, he was saying, it’s a campaign for president of the United States and you’re old enough to know that you should damn well treat it that way."

His speech was not met with blanket positive reviews however. "This was not an uplifting, unifying, post-partisan speech", says a leader on the Red State website. "It was a typical Democrat speech, an act of attack to disguise a record thinner than that of any president.” The problem was a lack of policy specifics: "For all his fancy promises of hope and change, at his core, he is just like every leftist messiah we have seen before. A man wandering the world convinced of his rightness and purity, with no answers to offer but the collapsed policies of the past. There was nothing new there other than a new face."

Megan McArdle on the Atlantic agrees. "I was disappointed by the speech," she says. "It was basically standard Democratic Convention Boilerplate: nothing we haven't seen before from Obama, or for that matter, every Democratic presidential candidate in living memory." The bar had been set so high by Obama’s previous speeches that he "would have needed to channel Martin Luther King Jr on steroids to knock our socks off".

However on the Huffington Post James Love thought that the policy details were all present and correct in their own way: "The tone tonight was very effective, focusing on the specific ways that ‘change’ will make people better off and more secure, both economically and in terms of national security." Obama’s discussion of "gay rights, immigration, and other social issues were eloquent, and show his gifts to move the country to a higher standard of justice and fairness".

Finally Jonathan Chait at the New Republic magazine writes that Obama took a “needless risk” by invoking Martin Luther King at all. "He needs white Americans to think of him as a president, not a civil rights leader."

FIRST POSTED AUGUST 29, 2008