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Y! MyWebCOMMENTARY
Martin Gottlieb: This Obama visit has a different feel to it
Friday, October 10, 2008
Thoughts upon and after watching Barack Obama speak at Fifth Third Field at lunchtime Thursday, Oct. 9:
It's hard to remember a time when anything so newsworthy as this financial crisis has happened in October of a presidential election year.
Before the crisis, the election had been utterly captivating to certain people, replete with historic firsts, titanic struggles, political deaths and rebirths, shooting political stars, you name it. Add the fact that the race has remained unresolved in most minds — that polls are still changing in the likes of Ohio.
But for a lot of Americans, the race was starting to get a little bit old. It's been going on forever, after all. Ask people watching the debates and they'll tell you they're not hearing anything new anymore.
Well, this is new.
Dayton sees the presidential candidates or their running mates all the time. It's not that big a deal anymore. But the last time a presidential nominee came to the stadium named after a bank — John Kerry in 2004 — the names of banks had a whole different feel to them.
The earth is shifting under the candidates even as they draft their latest speeches. One story unfolds as another story unfolds and affects it.
How do the candidates react? Obama's Fifth Third speech was an indication that this national financial crisis could work well for him, politically speaking, in more than one way — or two.
When his poll standings improved after the sense of crisis hit, he seemed to be benefiting just from not being in President George W. Bush's party. And some say that Sen. John McCain's response to the crisis has been kind of odd. That's two ways.
A third thing: A sense of national crisis can provide a great opportunity for a guy whose forte is soaring rhetoric.
Obama began Thursday's speech with a mundane critique of McCain's new proposal about the government buying up bad mortgages at, Obama said, full price (as opposed to just buying packages of loans at a reduced rate). Obama explained what he thought was wrong with the proposal: that it rewards lenders for bad decisions, while hurting taxpayers. And he accused McCain of changing his proposal between the Tuesday night debate where he unveiled it and Wednesday.
Obama went on in this vein for a while. He didn't really connect with the crowd. Part of the problem was a balky audio system. But it was more than that. The subject was too complex for a speech at a political rally.
(That's not to say he shouldn't have brought it up. He did need to respond to McCain's idea.)
Later in the speech, Obama got away from specifics and started talking about how Americans can overcome this crisis like they have overcome past crises. Yes, "overcome," that magic word from the civil-rights movement.
He asked rhetorically whether people in the future will look back on this period and say this was a time when "we turned on each other."
"Or," he continued, "will they say that this was one of those moments when Americans overcame."
Stuff like that provided the moments when he really connected with the crowd, really got it going. People saw it as trademark Obama.
He's still honing his message on the financial crisis. When he has it down, it could be a roof-raiser.
McCain will try to match Obama in trashing Wall Street. He talks about obscene levels of greed in corporate offices and about a "casino" culture. Like a lot of Republicans these day, he's sounding a lot like a Democrat.
But Obama recognizes better than most Democrats that such populism isn't enough, that people are less concerned about whether bad people are punished — or even reined in — than about their own economic well-being. They want to know about their jobs and their 401(k)s.
(Obama said Thursday that 401(k)s are now diminishing into 101(k)s.)
In short, what people are worried about is the country that their interests are tied up with. And Obama knows how to talk country.
This issue in the campaign is not really what to do about the financial meltdown. That's too much a technical question.
The real issue is who should be trusted to do it.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News. He may be reached at 225-2288 or by e-mail at
mgottlieb@DaytonDailyNews.com.
