Both Democratic candidates addressed a large crowd Friday night at North Carolina’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. Hillary Clinton’s theme was two-fold: she’s going to tie George Bush around John McCain’s neck and she’s the doer/fighter. Her funniest line: “If you listen closely, you can almost hear in the distance the sound . . . of a moving van pulling away from the White House.”
As for her current race, she offered up extra helpings of praise for John and Elizabeth Edwards, but focused on her core message. “I am no shrinking violet.” She is going to fight, fight, fight (did she mention she’s going to fight?) for the middle class against big business, rich people, gas companies, and . . . well, the list goes on. There’s nothing terribly lofty. She’s selling “real and immediate solutions.” (Conservatives might scoff at the notion that any of her proposals are really “solutions,” but she has lots of them and they are immediate.) She does, however, project optimism about America and a gritty determination that America will solve its problems.
Barack Obama came later in the evening. He entered to raucous cheers but seemed tired, almost subdued. He too gave a nod to the Edwards duo, but in the perfunctory list of thank-yous at the top of his speech. Remarkably, this was largely the same speech we have heard for over and over again: the “fierce urgency of now,” babies born when he began to run who now talk and walk, the pettiness of politics, his cousin Dick Cheney won’t be on the ballot, the end of Scooter Libby justice, change we can believe in, etc. (One wonders if he has anything else in his arsenal of rhetorical weapons.) The only differences are the local touches–now it’s an Indiana group of workers being thrown into unemployment–but his dreary and bleak view of a land bereft of hope and opportunity remains. One note: his position on gas tax must be causing problems, since he defensively added a line about Clinton’s false, McCain-like solution for a gas tax holiday.
He did, at the close of his speech, mention the concerns about him. He argued that his opponents were only successful when they talked about him rather than “the issues.” (Apparently the character and judgment of the potential President is not an “issue” in his book.) He reeled off a bit of biography about his relatives’ humble beginnings. It was a laundry list of meager circumstances, suggesting a growing irritation and defensiveness about his elitist image. He even noted that his story would not have been possible except in the United States. Perhaps if he had talked about this before his campaign took a nosedive it would have come across as more sincere.
Will Obama win in North Carolina? Almost certainly. (Although Clinton may try to claim a moral victory if she continues to narrow the race to mid-single digits.) But it seems unlikely he picked up many new votes by sleepwalking through the umpteenth recitation of his standard stump speech.
