A friend from Texas has sent me a couple of stories about last night’s Obama rally in Dallas:
Obama’s Dallas crowd not short on passion
Barack Obama fires up thousands at Dallas rally
“The bandwagon does seem to be rolling,” as my fiend said. One story estimates the size of the Dallas crowd at around 17,000. That and the crowd’s makeup suggest to me that the Dallas rally was very much like the one in St. Louis I wrote about a while back. There’s an interesting video attached to the first story, with lots of interviews with young people. It breaks up quite a bit, but if you stick with it you get a sense of the issues that younger voters are responding to, many of them concerned about the Iraq war and proud of Obama’s opposition to it.
The second story documents some of the attractiveness of Obama to older voters. “Beverly Love, 51, a Garland nurse, had never been to a political rally.”
“It was fantastic. I don’t want to leave,” she said 10 minutes after Mr. Obama had departed. “He speaks from the heart, with so much passion.”
The first story quotes one young person who thought Obama’s speech ended too soon. (I’m remembering that I thought the St. Louis speech was a little long, perhaps because I was standing and I’m old; but the young people I met on the train afterwards thought the speech was wonderful). Anyway, the young woman quoted in the first story above laments, “Why didn’t he do, ‘Yes we can’?” . . . as if a concert had ended, the biggest hit not performed.”
If you look around for what various detractors are saying about Obama, most are echoing themes of the Clinton and McCain campaigns as they attempt to turn Obama’s success against him. Obama is an empty windbag, riding a wave of mere celebrity. To the extent that he has proposed anything in the way of policy, his proposals are either ridiculous or naïve, especially where foreign affairs are concerned. He’s dangerous in the way that other charismatic leaders have been dangerous–I’ve heard Jim Jones mentioned, etc., etc. But Obama seems to go from strength to strength (someone will surely accuse me of plagiarising from Tennyson).
I’m thinking that the content of Obama’s campaign is pretty obvious in spite of his detractors’ claims to the contrary. He’s trying to create a movement because he’s trying to create a new majority that can be mobilized behind a list of policies and programs that can be found laid out on his website. But right now he needs to keep the movement going. I’m impressed–and not just because I’m a kneejerk liberal.
I’m impressed because Obama’s success has been a triumph of organization and skill at communication. He’s taken on not just the Clintons but the Democratic Party establishment and run rings around them. When he’s made mistakes he’s recovered quickly. It’s the most impressive political campaign I’ve seen since, well, since the earlier Bill Clinton. And Obama has succeeded so far substantially without the sort of ad hominem attacks that the Clinton’s are known for. To the charge that he is inexperienced and potentially ineffectual he seems to say, “Watch me run this campaign,” or maybe– “Eat my dust!”