posted by Christopher Hayes on 08/29/2008 @ 01:16am
I couldn't watch the speech from the press box. It was a room with glass separating us from the stadium's frenzied noise and dozens of other reporters, and the very core of both speech and the setting seemed to be about not sitting at a remove. I went down to the floor, amidst the dancing delegates and crush of photographers and sat somewhere near the stage.
So what was it like? It's a bit tricky to write about the moment when the first black presidential nominee in the 232-year history of the American Republic accepts the nomination. What, really can you say that doesn't pitch into cant? (four days of listening to convention speeches gives you a deathly allergy to cant)
But the moment he walked out to accept the nomination, when the crowd swelled and the people next to me began to cheer and some teared, this thing called History felt real and living and somehow inhabiting the stadium and the podium and Obama himself.
Obama's rhetorical genius is his ability to sink a well into the troubled history of this strange flawed beautiful republic, and call forth a geyser of optimism in the American Project. It's something that no one else can do, and once again, at a moment of maximum pressure, he delivered.
I want to collect my thoughts about the speech and the politics of it (a few lines of which I thought were terrible, a significant section of which I thought was boilerplate).
I need a bit of distance from the whole enormity to write something sensible.
But I can safely say Ill go to my grave remembering the air and light and sound of that stadium tonight. And feeling amidst the flags and black and white and Asians and Latino people around me a deep, almost physical sense of what the American promise is.
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