Barack Obama is the first political speaker I can think of who actually sounds the way present-day Hollywood has insisted a politician should sound. His speech tonight, which was a stunner, was profoundly reminiscent of those third-act climactic addresses in movies and television shows in which the political protagonist gives an inspiring talk about what is best in all of us, which is to say, he throws off the shackles of cautious convention and talks like an unabashed liberal. The music swells, the rhetoric soars, and the  nation swoons. (See Michael Douglas in The American President, Kevin Kline in Dave, Martin Sheen in The West Wing.)