Milwaukee
HILLARY CLINTON AND BARACK OBAMA shared a room on Saturday night, speaking at the Wisconsin Democratic party’s Founders Day gala. Two-thousand Democratic donors packed a ballroom in downtown Milwaukee while 400 others bought tickets to sit in an overflow room and watch the event on closed-circuit television. And people say there’s nothing to do in Wisconsin.
Senator Clinton did not have her best night, veering from the banal to the ridiculous. “It’s time we started acting like Americans again,” she noted solemnly. Speaking about Iraq, she observed that, “We are an honorable country and we have to withdraw in a way that keeps faith with the sacrifice of those who have been lost.” And looking forward to the general election, she said that John McCain “is a good man, with the wrong ideas.”
(Obama would criticize McCain in a far less attractive manner, saying, “I am looking forward to a debate with John McCain. John McCain is a good man. He’s an American hero. We honor his service to this nation. But he has made some bad choices about the company he keeps.”)
Perhaps remembering that she was booed for criticizing Obama at a similar dinner in New Hampshire, Clinton kept her jousting to a minimum. She noted obliquely (and clunkily) that “It’s not about speeches for me. It’s not about the bright lights and the cameras. It’s about the changes we can make that actually deliver results in people’s lives.”
Still more obliquely, she said that “This election is not just about the failures of the past . . . or the condition of the present or the excitement of the moment. This election must be about the future we want and how we can make it a reality.” And later: “We have to be ready to summon the experience, the wisdom, and the determination to solve our problems. It will take more than just speeches to fulfill out dreams. It will take a lot of hard work.”
All in all, it was an underwhelming performance. The crowd’s reaction was polite and supportive, if not gushing. Just a few minutes after she left the stage, however, they erupted for Obama.
One of the key questions of the campaign is how well Obama will wear with voters once they’ve seen him repeatedly. Certainly the Founders Day crowd was in his thrall. He gave them one of his virtuoso performances. Yet after you’ve heard Obama speak seven or eight times, it becomes hard not to notice how meaningless and syrupy his speech is.
For instance, he told the Milwaukee crowd that he is running for president because of the “fierce urgency of now; the fierce urgency of now” (he almost always uses this phrase twice in succession). The line is borrowed, of course, from Martin Luther King. Like another of Obama’s oft-repeated bits–JFK’s “we should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never fear to negotiate”–it is used more as a device to link himself to an American icon than as a coherent expression of thought.
But most of his mushy sentiments come without any pedigree. Just at the Founders Day dinner, Obama proclaimed that:
* “Change does not happen from the top down, it happens from the bottom up.”
* “We take refuge in cynicism and think it’s wisdom.”
* “I did not get into this race to tear anybody down, I got into this race to lift this country up.”
* “The problem is not a lack of good ideas; it’s that Washington is a place where good ideas go to die.”
Obama preaches each of these koans with gospel authority; each is ultimately meaningless. All of them are parts of Obama’s stock speech, but the Founders Day event also featured a new addition meant to counter the Clinton charge that it takes more than just words to be president.
As rebuttal, Obama thundered, “‘I have a dream.’ Just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words.”
It’s a powerful passage and Obama’s delivery is pitch-perfect. But it doesn’t withstand even the most gentle scrutiny. The famous phrases Obama is cleverly aligning himself with were, of course, more than “just words.” They were words connected with actions, ideals, and concrete goals; with soldiers and war and sacrifice and death.
Listening to Obama discourse about himself and his message calls to mind a remark Leon Wieseltier once made of John Updike. Like the gifted, but hollow, Updike, Barack Obama is “a man who has words for everything and nothing but words.”
Jonathan V. Last is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
