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OBAMA CONVENTION SPEECH PT.1 - DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL 2008

OBAMA CONVENTION SPEECH PT.1 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL 2008 CNN Barack Joesph Biden ticket John McCain race political commercialIt wasn't a rock concert or a revival meeting. And despite the fireworks and the neo-Classical columns lining the stage and giant television screens, Senator Barack Obama did not look like the lead in "Oedipus at Colonus."
Mr. Obama, wearing a flag pin and a confident mien, looked like a presidential candidate accepting the nomination of the Democratic Party.

The speech was draped in American flags and weighted with symbolism — the timing coincided with the 45th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, and the place echoed John F. Kennedy's acceptance speech in 1960 in an outdoor stadium in Los Angeles.

Mr. Obama quoted President Kennedy but waited until the end to allude to Dr. King. And he presented himself as a postracial candidate running on the content of his character by mentioning the civil rights leader only once, and not by name, butas "a young preacher from Georgia" who taught Americans that "all together, our dreams can be one."

The finale of a political convention is a little like a wedding: the bride is always radiant, and the nominee is always stirring. In an unusual turn, even Senator John McCain, the expected Republicannominee, felt compelled to pay tribute to Mr. Obama's historic milestone with a television advertisement congratulating his opponent on "a job well done." (No good ad goes unpunished: after Mr. McCain's spot on CNN came a Mutual of Omaha commercial about retirement plans for the elderly, and another promising to reverse baldness.)

Critics worried and commentators warned that the stadium rally would look too grandiose or gaudy. But television forces intimacy on even the largest gatherings. It was only when the cameras pulled back to a wide overhead shot that viewers could fathom the vastnessof the crowd. Mostly, they saw Mr. Obama's face and close-ups of his supporters in the audience, especially African-Americans moved to tears by the moment.

The prime-time portion of the spectacle was devised to play down race and highlight Mr. Obama's presidential stature: Stevie Wonder sang "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours," but a group of retired generals and Susan Eisenhower, a Russian affairs expert who is the granddaughter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, waxed lyrical about the senator's readiness for the Oval Office.

Mr. Obama brought the crowd to its feet many times to cheer and applaud, but perhaps just as importantly for audiences back home, for almost 50 minutes he silenced the ceaseless chatter of television anchors and commentators who had insistently put their own stamp and faces on one of the most exciting political conventions in modern times.

People do want to watch: the audience for cable news coverage this week was about double what it was in 2004. Yet despite the huge public fascination, the three major networks limited their coverage to an hour a night, a prime-time patchwork of highlight reels, catchup snippets of live speeches, and commentary.

Anchors at conventions used to serve as omniscient narrators; at this convention, they mostly served as human V-chips blocking live speeches with their own palaver and predictions.

The broadcast networks long ago ceded gavel-to-gavel coverage to cable and, more recently, to the Internet and news Web sites. Concerned citizens have more ways than ever to follow political events, but it requires ingenuity and patience to cobble together a coherent narrative.

And even the 24-hour cable news channels proved unreliable at times, giving too much screen time to their gassiest anchors.

Of the three cablenews networks, CNN was the least intrusive: Wolf Blitzer and his colleagues were willing to let speakers speak for themselves. When Martin Luther King III spoke on Thursday, so did Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, who chose to entertain his viewers with a Doonesbury cartoon about Mr. Obama and the Clintons that also featured Mr. Olbermann and his co-host, Chris Matthews. (Fox News mostly focused on Mr. McCain's possible choice for a running mate, but raced back to the convention when Sheryl Crow took the stage.)

It's a bad reading of the audience. For most of the convention, CNN — staid, stable and anchored by fewer egomaniacs — won higher ratings than the other cable news channels, as well as ABC and CBS. And Wednesday, CNN was neck and neck with NBC, and for a while even ahead, suggesting that when a political event is this interesting, television commentators are less so.

OBAMA CONVENTION SPEECH DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL 2008 CNN Barack Joesph Biden ticket John McCain race political commercial







Channel: News
Uploaded: August 29, 2008 at 5:48 am
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