Barack Attack! Highlights, Day 1, Part Ia

As promised here are some highlights from yesterday. I’ll start with a synopsis of Barack Obama’s speech with select quotes…

Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith’s intro was swift and shrewd. Despite his professional tone, Smith was able to inject a good amount of levity - he even dropped the “Yeah I inhaled, that was the point” and the “Osama – Yo Mama” bits.

It didn’t take long for the junior Senator from Illinois to lay down the titular line, and lay it repeatedly: “This country if, on nothing else, has been built on the audacity of hope…” He is, after all, speaking at a book festival. This whole event is motivated by the sale of books, oh, and the cultural enrichment of Texas.
He continued saying:

That audacity I think has sometimes been lost in the past decade or so, we’ve replaced it with a politics of cynicism. A politics that feeds on negative campaigns, sound bite solutions to complicated problems, a lot of sound and fury that doesn’t signify much… so much of politics in Washington now is sort of the intellectual equivalent of WWF wrestling. Everyone is acting tough and they’re smacking each other, throwing chairs and nothing really gets done.

The wrestling analogy provoked some laughter from the packed house chamber. Out of this analogy he drew the conclusion that “people,” even those who barely pay attention to politics, are fed up.
He really was stressing unity, or uniting qualities:

The reason I think I wrote this book was because in my travels, first in Illinois and then around the country, what I discovered is that the country is not as divided as our politics would suggest… you go into these so-called red states that are deeply conservative, I don’t know if you guys know any that come to mind, and it turns out that people are concerned about the poor, they’re concerned about the Constitution, they’re concerned about civil liberties, they’re concerned about the environment. You go to these liberal havens like Manhattan… Los Angeles, and, lo and behold, people are worried about morality and values… it turns out there are a set common values and common ideals that really do bind us together as people and the hunger… is to excavate those values and those ideals. To recognize them and… use those ideals and those values to make some common sense, practical, non-ideological decisions about some of the challenges we face in this country… if we don’t make some good decisions now, we may be locking them [our children and grandchildren] into a future that’s a little meaner and a little poorer than the one we inherited.

He addressed health care and education in terms that imply it’s affecting our competitiveness in the world. Simply put, somethings need changing:

It certainly doesn’t make sense for us to send 800,000,000 dollars a day to some of the most hostile nations on Earth. We are funding both sides of the war on terrorism. And, by the way, there are a couple of hold outs in the White House, but the other 10,000 scientists have concluded that this climate change thing… [roaring applause]

He mentioned the instance of Brazil’s sugar gas and then applied the "if we can put a man on the moon" logic to our energy situation. His use of the logic concluded that we can find a solution that is good for the economy and the environment.

He called for a consistent approach to diplomacy: "We cannot simply impose our will on the globe militarily."He likened an approach to the war on terror to the containment policies of Truman and Marshall.

He concluded that his book isn't a campaign strategy, but an illumination of American values and how he maintains his identity in the politcal sphere:

I like to hang onto that kernel of truth, that essence of myself, that expression of what’s best in me, how do I maintain that? I conclude that the best way for me to do that is to spend a lot of time listening to the American people and a lot of time listening to my wife

In sum he really played the "common ground" appeal effectively. Obama seems to be steeped in idealism and, in such a jaded, "WWF" political scene it is refreshing. The hope would be that in an intense race to become president he can remain audaciously idealistic.