To my mind, Barack Obama has always been wildly over-rated as a speaker. He has a great voice–really Saruman-caliber pipes. But his delivery is erratic and his material is rarely anywhere near as good as people think in the moment. His 2004 Purple America convention speech, for instance, might be the most over-praised political oratory in living memory. Except, perhaps, for his Jeremiah Wright race-relations, speech: a bundle of nothing that Obama’s cheerleaders sold like it was the Gettysburg Address, Washington’s farewell, and Reagan’s Challenger speech rolled into one.
All of that said, Obama has given three blue-ribbon, four-star speeches that were really something. Not suitable for framing at the Smithsonian, perhaps, but very impressive by the standards of modern politics. And one of them was given eight years ago tonight: His Iowa victory speech. Since you having nothing better to do for the next three hours, you might as well watch the whole thing. It’s only 13 minutes long:
I’ll be surprised if either of the winners comes close to that level tonight.
(For the record, the other two were his Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech in Iowa in 2007, his New Hampshire concession speech a week after the Iowa victory which is, to my mind, the best of the bunch.)
