After a long week of work I get around to checking out speeches, and lo there is a mighty one diaried here by SusanG.
While listening to that speech, jaw agape, I kept coming back to one crystal clear thought: this is what Obama saw in him. And I knew then that despite major reservations I have had about Biden, Obama was wise to choose him. Their message and delivery are in absolute harmony.
"But, I'll tell you, it's not so much of what I heard in the Republican convention. When you heard John speak last night. It's not so much what I heard, when I heard part of what the Governor had to say, the vice presidential candidate. It's what I didn't hear."
When his voice soared at the parts that sent chills down my spine, I heard echoes of the MLK-like populist cadences that first drew me to Obama the night of his 2004 keynote address.
"The silence of the Republican Party was deafening... it was deafening! On jobs, on health care, on the environment. On all the things that matter to the people in the neighborhoods I grew up in. Deafening!"
I heard the emphatic repudiation of Bush Republicanism that I yearned to hear from Kerry in 2004 and never did.
"Their America is not the America I live in! They see something different than I see."
I heard the same brilliant vivisection of McCain/Palin's out of touch campaign on the basis of sound reason and evidence rather than red meat character attacks.
"Ladies and gentlemen... literally. Those of you, I can't swear to this because I didn't see every bit of every speech. But I asked my staff to check. Do any of you recall either candidate on the Republican ticket utter the phrase 'middle class'? Did any of you hear them utter the phrase 'health care' and how we're going to help?"
I heard the exposure of the McCain campaign's negative strategy for the last refuge of the morally bankrupt that it is, and heard him successfully link it to the whole Republican Party.
"Rick Davis, John's campaign manager, said two days into the convention, he said 'this election is not about issues.' That's what he said. And everything I saw at the convention demonstrated that."
I heard a gift for both words and delivery that not only delivered a message, but made you want to repeat it to others because it makes so much sense and it's fun to retell.
"It was about how well placed--and boy she is good--how a left jab can be stuck pretty nice. It's about how Barack Obama is such a bad guy. It's about how in fact, how in fact, they got great quips. Man, they're like the kids you know when you went to school and you were very proud of the new belt or the shoes you had, and there was always one kid in the class who said, 'oh, are they your brother's?'
Crowd: Yeah.
"Remember that kid? That's what this is reminding me of. 'Oh, I love your dress, was that your mother's?'"
You know what I'm talking about."
I saw, in his closing, the same emphatic rejection of the politics of personal destruction, wrapped up in a message that is as simple as it is timeless in politics:
"What do you talk about, when you have nothing to say?
What do you talk about when you cannot explain the last eight years of failure?"
(Standing Ovation)
"What do you talk about? What do you talk about?
You talk about the other guy."
Like many others, I watched Barack Obama's speech at the 2004 convention and said to my family, "that man will be president one day." From the starting gate he had my vote, but as I heard him speak more and more, he earned my loyalty as well. I began to truly believe in him, in his sincerity and ability to deliver on the promise of progressive politics.
When a candidate has that, you won't just pull the lever for them. They inspire you to become more active, to tell others, to go the extra mile for them. To more emphatically defend them against the inevitable Republican smear tactics.
That's what made Obama special, made millions realize four years ago that he was presidential. And now I see that it's also what makes Joe Biden the right man for this job.
Full transcript can be found here, among other places.