Obama in person

I was at Obama's speech in Detroit last night, and I was absolutely blown away. As a speaker, he's even better than Bill Clinton, whose speeches I used to record on videotape as a teenager. A Clinton speech made you feel calm and relaxed, drifting off in a warm comforting sea of sensible policy measures and quiet optimism; an Obama speech is all fire and energy. Clinton let you know it was all going to be OK; Obama puts the burden on you to get out there and do something, like a coach getting his players riled up at halftime.

In fact, I was so overwhelmed by my first Obama oratory that I barely noticed what a great policy program it outlined. Yglesias sums it up nicely:

[A]s a policy speech [it was] pretty awesome, one of the best efforts to chart a truly progressive, forward-looking approach to the big picture questions that I've seen from a practical politician. Rather than a world in which we try to whether (sic) economic storms by slashing taxes and cutting services to the bone, or by sealing our borders to trade and immigration, Obama is outlining a vision in which government plays a crucial positive role in providing human capital (i.e., education), physical infrastructure, basic R&D, and in putting our energy policy on a sustainable basis.

This is the clearest example I've seen of Obama as education reformer, talking about universal preschool and investing more resources in the most challenging classrooms, but also noting that "resources alone won't create the schools that we need to help our children succeed" and we "need to encourage innovation – by adopting curricula and the school calendar to the needs of the 21st century; by updating the schools of education that produce most of our teachers; by welcoming charter schools within the public schools system, and streamlining the certification process for engineers or businesspeople who want to shift careers and teach."

On energy and infrastructure there aren't really any ideas that he hasn't advanced previously in the campaign, but the National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank concept gets a more substantial pitch than I'd heard since the day it was first mooted. (all emphasis mine)

The four things Yglesias notes are the very four things I've been talking about for a long time now - the public production goods. In fact, it looks like Obama's long-term economic program is moving more and more toward the investment-and-growth-based approach that I've been hoping for. Instead of "investment," Obama made the theme of his speech "competitiveness," which probably sounds better to the general public. But the idea is the same.

And I also loved it when he said something like "or are we going to keep borrowing billions of dollars from China and using it to buy planet-destroying oil from countries that use the money to fund terrorism?" It gave a very nice summary of the crazy "cursed equilibrium" that our economy has fallen into this decade. (In fact, I hope Obama continues to play up the "borrowing from China" angle, since that dubious practice is one big ingredient in our current economic woes.)

So to sum up: great message + great messenger = great speech. And yes, I did get the T-shirt.


PS - Al Gore was also there, (finally) endorsing Obama. I noticed what a better and more relaxed speaker he's become, to the point where he's much more at ease in front of a crowd than Bush ever was.