Obama’s Solid, But Uninspired Speech
“There’ve been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long/But now I think I’m able to carry on/It’s been a long time coming/But I know a change is gonna come.” Sam Cooke, the great R&B singer, wrote those words in 1963 following a visit to a civil rights event in what was then Jim Crow North Carolina. Thursday evening, an era and more than a thousand miles away, Barack Obama echoed Cooke. “America, this is one of those moments,” Obama said. “I believe that as hard as it will be, the change we need is coming.” He then mentioned health care. If you’re sick, nothing is as important as health care — so I don’t knock it. But the subject is prosaic, and it was just one car in a long train of programs designed to rebut the charge that Obama’s slogan — “Change!” — is political cotton candy. Obama went on and on: taxes and schooling, outsourcing and Social Security, energy and drilling, wind power and solar power, and … etc. It was good. It was necessary, but it was poetry for auditors. There’s a difference between interesting and inspirational.
