The Delegates

Let’s browse various reactions of interest to last night’s Obamaspiel, shall we? It’s what we thought about back in the nine-hour interlude between our elated trudge away from Mile High Stadium and wondering who Sarah Palin is.

• A copule of nice roundups and linkdumps and wordtubs and speaknotes from the Telegraph and the Guardian.
• In the Globe and Mail, John Ibbitson believes that Obama “largely abandoned his soaring rhetoric of speeches past” but concludes that “win or lose, no politician will ever be able to invest such words with such power.” The Globe also publishes a cautionary note on the international challenges confronting the next president from Timothy Garton Ash.
• In Politico, John F. Harris and Jim Vandehei hear “two speeches crushed somewhat jarringly together”, which leave “a default impression that he is a standard post-Clinton Democrat” while throwing some delicious kittens to the ravenous Democratic alligators with a “more straightforward denunciation” of John McCain.
• Paul Wells of Maclean’s thumps Obama by likening him photographically to two Canadians and one Brit who have never failed to rhetorically disappoint. For our non-Canuck readership, they are André Boisclair (briefly the Parti Québecois opposition leader, considered at once too dull and too slick to win an election), Gordon Brown (not dead, not Jewish, not Canadian), and Paul Martin (the finance minister turned prime minister who took his party from a majority government to a minority government to a thumping election loss in two short years, i.e., the Gordon Brown of the Liberal Party).
• In the Telegraph, Alex Spillius gets caught up in “a tide of emtotion” after Obama’s “most momentous attempt to sway the nation” and praises a speech full of “earthy aggression towards his opponent.”
• In the Financial Times, Edward Luce is more controlled but no less enthusiastic about “a new kind of speech that injected a sense of urgency and relevance” and that represents a well-timed move “from the poetic to the prosaic stage of the campaign.”
• In the Times of London, Tom Baldwin is guardedly pessimistic about the speech. “For all the fluted beauty of his speech, it was a defensive address rooted in his insecurity at having failed — so far — to close the deal with voters.”
• Finally, we will lose major snob points for failing to recognize burbly quasi-neocon Simon Schama, apparently seated near us in the press box. In the Guardian, Schama soars and veers like a giggly high-culture bat:

Architrave alert! Fluted columns! Cecil B DeMille Doric! What a gift to satirists who could lampoon Obama as a wannabe Demosthenes, so self-monumentalised that he seemed to be presumptuously rehearsing the inaugural oath on the Capitol steps. It’s possible that, even after one of the most memorably dramatic speeches in modern American history, they may still be betting on what they think is an eloquence aversion out there in the heartland; the ingrained suspicion that fancy phrase-making is a fig leaf for lack of substance