It wasn't just significant because of the way he began to take on McCain. It was also big because of the way he began to bring around some of his more liberal critics.
In a post entitled "You Had Me At Working Families," health care policy wonk Jonathan Cohn writes:
Those of you who have read my comments after earlier primaries know that one of my main concerns with Obama is that he talks too much about his movement--too much about change for change's sake--and too little about concrete issues. Policy seems like an afterthought, which is fine if you like great oratory (and, to be clear, I do) but not so fine if you want your presidential candidate to start building a mandate for particular reforms.So while an early shout-out to working families may be boilerplate for most candidates, for Obama it actually has some significance.
He then followed it up with this in a post entitled "Obama's best speech yet":
...he is really going after John McCain. And he's doing a damn fine job of it.
He started by honoring McCain's service, with all apparent sincerity, and then pivoted quickly to this line: "John McCain has the wrong priorities -- because they are bound to the policies of the past." He then promised "a clear choice," tying McCain to the Bush tax cuts and, in particular, the war in Iraq: "John McCain won't be able to say I ever supported this war in Iraq, because I opposed it from the start. Senator McCain said the other day we mght be mired for a hundred years in iraq. A hundred years -- which is reason enough not to give him four years in the White House."**The rest of the speech was Obama at its best: Compared to his early speeches, he's far more deft at weaving policy into his promises of movement-building. As I said previously, where he used to talk about change for change's sake, now he talks about specific changes -- and how he intends to build a popular mandate for those changes.
He's also doing a nice job of mixing the old Clintonian theme of rights and responsibliity. Talking about his proposals for college tuition assistance, coupled with national service, he promsied, "We'll invest in you, you invest in your country, together we'll move forward, that's what we dream of."
Towards the end of the speech, he returned to his theme of "yes we can" -- but in a way different than I had heard before. (Again, maybe he's been doing this lately and I just missed it.) He tied that theme to all the great movements in American history -- the revolutionaries who fought the British for independence, the abolitionists who crusaded against slavery, the Greatest Generation who served in World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and so on. Not only did this cloak his ideas in the mantle of patriotism, which is always a good thing, but linked them -- once again -- to tangible, pivotal changes in American life, which is precisely what his campaign needs to be promising.
Cohn has long been skeptical of Obama, but it seems even he is beginning to come around.
I've said this numerous times before, but it is worth repeating here: many progressives fear that Obama isn't progressive enough. They hear his calls for a new, post-partisan era and think that he is moving to the center, triangulating against a perceived Republican majority. But they've got it all wrong. Obama isn't moving himself towards the center, but shifting the center towards him. He's using the rhetoric of post-partisanship to redefine the center so that it sits much further to the left than it has for many, many years. Take control of the narrative and the policies will follow. If you can change the metaphor, you can change the world.
And here's the best part about this prediction: over the coming months and years, it will be easy to test. If I'm right, Obama will use his post-partisan rhetoric to build a new political majority, and the larger that majority gets, the more progressive his policies will become. He's not doing this by accident. It is a conscious choice, one that would seem to be built atop a deep understanding of the way political change takes place in this country. Just as Reagan praised FDR for his transformative effect on politics, so too has Obama praised Reagan. I have no idea whether or not Obama has actually studied realignment theory, but whether he has or not he obviously understands how they work.
Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. Soon enough, we'll know, won't we?
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