Obama’s big speech: can he recapture the magic?
Four more years, and plenty more promises to keep. Tonight President Obama sets out his argument for re-election. Will his vision be compelling enough to inspire his supporters to the polls?
Michelle Obama brought them to their feet: Bill Clinton raised the roof with cheers. Now it is Barack Obama’s turn to address the Democratic party faithful, in the closing act of the Democratic convention later tonight.
A crowd of twenty thousand will pack into the Time Warner Cable arena in Charlotte, after the original outdoor venue was jetisoned for fear of impending thunderstorms. Tens of thousands left without tickets will have to make do with television screens, at watch parties planned around the country.
But Obama’s biggest challenge is not the weather: but the sheer weight of overwhelming expectation, and memories of that vibrant, optimistic vision of hope and excitement that he captured back in 2008: a sense that things would never be the same again.
Tonight, according to his former chief of staff, the Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, the formal acceptance speech will be “big, visionary.” It will need to be. Not just an idea of where the country is going, and how it will get there – but why Obama is the man to stay at the reins.
“The president now has an opportunity to talk about how we lift the country, how we rebuild the middle class, the things we have to do together to achieve the kind of future that people are looking for”, his top strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC.
Finding focus
At his best, Obama is a supremely gifted orator, who can switch from a remote, rather controlled figure into a firebrand who can inspire a crowd to rise to their feet and shout with him in one voice: yes, we can. Or he can muddy the story in detail, lose focus, forget the central message.
“America doesn’t need a storyteller in chief”, mocked Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan last week, but that is exactly what the Democratic party needs: Obama’s chief failing, over the last four years, has been his frustrating inability to articulate the narrative of his presidency, to sell the story of what he believes and what he has achieved.
Today, the Democrats put out a new video, Promises Kept, using clips of that 2008 speech to argue that the president has indeed made good on his pledges, that despite all the talk of disappointment and disillusion, he has created millions of jobs, ended the war in Iraq, signed the Fair Pay act.
According to Republican fundraising supremo Karl Rove, it’s impossible for Obama to recapture that pool of young, enthusiastic voters who were such an integral part of his 2008 campaign. “On every front”, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Mr Obama is on the defensive, fighting to keep states and voter groups in his winning coalition.”
One of the president’s most trusted advisors, David Plouffe, was more confident, telling NBC that the entire convention was building towards this night: “We’re telling a story here.” He said the president wouldn’t just be talking about his record, but also the choice the country now faced.
On prime time tonight, watched by tens of millions of people, Obama has one chance to sieze the moment, to capture the imagination of his supporters, to persuade them that it is time to dream once again.
Not just a vision of promise, then, but a promise of vision. And one compelling enough to persuade millions of voters to make it happen.
Felicity Spector writes about US politics for Channel 4 News