Word: speeches
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JUNE 7 Clinton at last ends her campaign with a speech at the National Building Museum in Washington...
...Heading into a crucial moment in this race - his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention - Obama was failing as a candidate in two crucial areas. He had failed to define his opponent, and he was failing, in all but the most amorphous ways, to define himself. He desperately needed to do unto McCain what McCain had done unto him: hammer his opponent in a sustained, thematic way - not just a few tossed-away lines in a stump speech. That shouldn't be too difficult. An argument can be made that McCain is trigger-happy overseas and out of touch...
...other words, he hears America singing - and griping, fretting, seething, conniving, hoping, despairing. He can deliver a pitch-perfect expression of the racial anger of many American blacks - as he did in his much discussed speech on race relations earlier this year - and, just as smoothly, unpack the racial irritations gnawing at many whites. To what extent does he share any of those emotions? The doctor never exactly says...
...Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. Many Democrats placed their political bets on anger in recent years: anger at the war, anger over the disputed election in 2000, anger at Bush Administration policies. Obama doubled down on optimism, beginning with his careermaking speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention: "Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope. In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead...
...fills arenas while others speak in school cafeterias. He knows that detailed policies tend to drive people apart rather than bring them together. People arrived to hear him out of fervor or mere curiosity, and they stayed for the sense of possibility. They heard rhetoric like this, from his speech claiming victory after his epic nomination battle: "If we are willing to work for it and fight for it and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when...