Sunday, January 27, 2008

55-27

Not a great speech, but it has its great moments. I gotta admit: it brought some tears to my eyes.



Yes We Can.


(h/t: Tim Dickinson)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hate to spoil your mood. I want to be optimistic that the Clinton-Bush style of nasty politics will end. I'm usually disappointed.

http://www.economist.com/world/na/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10566696

"The senator from Illinois has at once the most to gain and the most to lose from a racially divided electorate. If they had to choose, Democratic candidates would probably pick the black vote over the Latino one: it is bigger and more partisan. But the real prize is not the black vote or the Latino vote but the white vote. A fractious contest threatens to turn Mr Obama from a post-racial into a racial candidate. Small wonder that, in this week's debate, he strove to avoid discussing race, preferring to talk about “low-income people” and the need to “bring the country together”.

There were signs in Nevada that some damage may already have been done. Mr Obama was soundly beaten in Henderson, a mostly white, middle-class suburb of Las Vegas. (It helped that Mrs Clinton hammered the issue of home foreclosures, a big problem locally, during a well-attended rally in the city.) The next challenge is South Carolina, where blacks make up about half of the Democratic electorate. To its discredit, Mrs Clinton's campaign has already put it about that black voters are likely to tip the state to Mr Obama. An impressive victory would thus be spun as a simple matter of ethnic allegiance.

This is a very dangerous game. In nine months the entire country will go to the polls. Without black voters, the Democrats would struggle to win in the Midwest and could not compete in the South. Without Latinos, their dreams of seizing western states like Colorado and Nevada would be much less likely to come true. The risk for the eventual nominee, whether Mrs Clinton or Mr Obama, is that an alienated group might tend to stay at home in November—or, worse, send a bundle of votes to a centrist Republican xenophile like John McCain. If that happens, the White House could be lost."

bjkeefe said...

balt:

I agree -- the Clintons have really turned me off lately.

One thing that makes me hopeful -- if not for this election, then at least for the country -- is that Obama consistently outpolls Clinton among educated whites.

John Evo said...

No tears for me on this one, but a few chills down the spine. His "losing" speech in New Hampshire was a better speech. Still, he looked incredibly confident and reinvigorated. I wish he had used a few of those speech lines during the debate when Hillary went on the attack! A win for Obama in S. Carolina was critical. The huge win he got was, well, HUGE. Can it turn around a couple of those Super Tuesday states? Maybe.

The Exterminator said...

The one thing great about Obama is that he's a "committed Christian" and "called to Christ," as a pro-Obama pamphlet in South Carolina pointed out. And it's terrific that on Sunday, he gave a 30-minute speech to the faithful here.

I just love that. He'll make a great president of the United Christian States of America. And, of course, he stands against everything I hate in Republicans, which is their constant pandering to all those atheists and other degenerates who think that church and state should be separate.

Anonymous said...

Somebody asked me Barack's position on Roe v. Wade with him being an evangelical and all. I presumed he supported it but I didn't really know. You can find his positions and voting record on everything (and Hillary's also) by googling up: "Barack Obama on the issues" or "Hillary Clinton on the issues"

One of the pundits made a good point tonight that since a lot of absentee ballots were sent in in Florida before the So. Carolina primary and before Barack's speech, if there is a difference between the absentee ballots and the live vote count we can put it down to the events in South Carolina. Many of the Californians had already voted absentee before So. Carolina also.

bjkeefe said...

jiminy:

Good point.

T. Ex and TC:

We've sort of had this debate before, on John's blog and via email (TC). As you know, I don't love Obama's religious aspect, but given the reality of life in America, especially for ambitious politicians, I don't find it especially disturbing. Also, I think he's got a lot of other qualities that outweigh this drawback.

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