Political hoohah:
- Hollywood Democrats shifting to Obama as a perceived winner and cutting off donations to Hillary.
- Major flip-flop on immigration by Romney caught; in 2006, he says ‘but you can’t just deport 12 million people’, and now, he says ‘oh, yes, you can and must.’ The Republican blooger who caught this one says: Flip, pander, flop, pander some more. I don’t think Romney believes in anything except winning. But everybody but Hugh Hewitt and Dean Barnett have known that for a long time, haven’t they?
- EJ Dionne does a masterful analysis on the Clinton / Obama matching over hope and experience.
Yet if Clinton’s answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy’s. “Do you remember,” Stevenson said, “that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke,’ but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, ‘Let us march.’ ” At this hour, Obama is the Democrats’ Demosthenes.
As a community organizer early in his professional life, Obama understood his task as catalyzing citizens into building movements for change. Obama’s speeches are about citizen action, assembling coalitions, forcing change through popular demand. “When you’ve got a working majority behind you,” he says at another point, “you can’t be stopped.” Transformation is not about policy details but about altering the political and social calculus. Obama presents himself, in one of Karl Rove’s favorite phrases, as a game-changer.