Obama-partisan enough for ya

Like many watching, and especially those who live in Chicago, I felt a special pride watching Illinois Democratic Senate candidate Barack Obama deliver the keynote speech at the DNC tonight. The speech has met with almost univeral accalim by the pundits, progressive and fasc-conservative alike. Two of my own personal favorite commentators, David Brooks and Tucker Carlson seem to have especially loved his speech. Brooks loved it because Obama showed his conservative values while Carlson thought that unlike other Democrats campaigning, Obama did not trash the president, oppose the war, bring up the ghost of Florida or decry Ashcroft. Huh? What god damn speech were these people watching? What I saw was the most proudly leftist speech given on a national stage in decades. Mr Carlson, how are statements like "our votes will be counted-at least most of the time," "John Kerry . . . will never sacrifice our basic liberties nor use faith as a wedge to divide us," "when we send our men and women into harms way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why we are going," and "we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states," not direct ciritcisms at George W. Bush, John Ashcroft, the debacle that was the election of 2000 and Iraq?.\ For his part, Brooks argued that Obama's was an essentially conservative speech because he talked about hard work. Oh, that's right David, I completely forgot only Republicans think working hard is a good because all us progressives think that the best thing for government to do is to give us money so we can buy crystal meth or crack and sit on our ass not working and watching Springer. In fact Mr Brooks, you should be flattered by Obama's speech, he went out of his way to show how your red state-blue state logic about American values not only is wrong, but completely absurd and often downright offensive (I for one almost cried when he noted how those in red states have gay friends as it simultaneously tackled two of my biggest beefs with Dem. politics-the failure to stand up consistently for gay rights and the tendency to abandon people in so-called "backward" states). Make no mistake, Obama's speech tonight was historic, not though, because he showed a "Clintonian," (as Carlson said) way of putting himself into the center, but for precisely the opposite reasons, because he articulated the values and beliefs of those on the left in a way that no one has done in decades-common sensical, simple, well argued and compelling. This was a brilliant speech, a speech that gave this diehard cynic his first glimmer of hope for leftist politics in an admittedly short lifetime.