After a month of attacks by his Republican opponent John McCain, which had succeeded in narrowing his lead in national polls, Barack Obama chose last Thursday night, 28 August, to finally respond to them.
Only time will tell how effective Obama's acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination was in answering the Republican attacks on his candidacy, because his audience wasn’t really the 84,000 people who joined me to listen to him speak at Denver’s Mile High Stadium. Obama’s real audience was the record number of 43 million-plus voters who were watching on the US television networks.
On a warm summer evening, under clear skies and in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, Senator Obama delivered what I believe was the most important speech of his presidential campaign thus far. Unlike his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Convention, or his Philadelphia speech on race relations earlier this year, this one wasn’t notable for its inspirational message. It was, however, exactly the type of speech Obama needed to deliver under the circumstances. As such, it may well go down in US political history as one of the best purely political speeches ever delivered.
THERE IS AN old saying that goes ‘all’s fair in love and war’. Since many people believe that political contests are very much akin to war, they also use this analogy to justify the use of whatever tactics they think will help them win elections. While the vast majority of American voters decry the use of negative personal attacks on political candidates by their opponents, the fact of the matter is that the only reason many politicians continue to use such strategies is because they work.
Senator Obama’s message of ‘change’ is rooted in his belief that for America to move forward and deal with its many foreign and domestic problems, US politicians must move beyond these bitter and divisive personal attacks and instead focus on the issues. Even McCain has espoused a similar approach in years past but, with the US presidency almost within his grasp, he’s decided to abandon this approach in favour of the same negative personal attack campaign strategy that worked so well for president Bush.
So the challenge for Obama in his speech last Thursday was to respond to McCain’s personal attacks, which are designed to portray Obama as a ‘celebrity’, lacking any real substance, who is also ‘unpatriotic’ and an ‘elitist’ – but without retaliating at the same level. The situation reminded me of that facing King Henry V almost 600 years ago at Agincourt in northern France.
Henry V’s men were exhausted, so all Henry wanted to do was sail home, but the French were determined to engage them in battle rather than let them withdraw to England. Forced to fight when he had no desire to do so, Henry countered the overwhelming advantages of the French army by turning their offensive attacks against his positions back against them. As a result, King Henry won this famous battle even though he and his men had no desire to fight on the grounds of Agincourt.
In a similar vein, last Thursday evening Obama succeeded in hurling all of John McCain’s attacks back against him, saying at one point: “If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament and judgement to serve as the next commander-inchief, that’s a debate I’m ready to have.”
In response to McCain’s claims that he was ‘unpatriotic’ because of his political positions, including his opposition to the Iraq war, Obama said: “What I will not do is suggest that [McCain] takes his positions for political purposes. Because the thing that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and patriotism. The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan [Republican] playbook. “So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a red America or a blue America – they have served the United States of America. So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.”
During the course of his speech, Obama also responded to McCain’s ‘elitist’ attacks by noting his upbringing by a single mother who struggled to support her family, and the college loans he and his wife needed to use to finance their educations. And in response to McCain’s charges that he was just a ‘celebrity’ with a message of hope that was lacking in substance, Obama went point-by-point through the various economic, energy, environment, health insurance and tax issues, and specified what exactly he planned to do to address them once he became president.
Finally, Obama closed his address by borrowing a line from Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, delivered in Washington DC on the same date 45 years previously: “America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done.” What Obama did not do was attack McCain’s elite upbringing or any of his numerous shortcomings as a person. It will be interesting to see how McCain responds to Obama when he gives his own Republican presidential nomination acceptance speech this evening. I’ll discuss that next week.
