Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

It’s been often remarked that Obama’s speeches sound very good, but offer very little.  They’ve even been compared to soufflés — nice looking, but ultimately light and airy.  Clinton, on the other hand, gives speeches that are packed full of policy detail and plan.  Not only will she tell you that America would be a better, stronger place if everyone has more health care, she’ll overwhelm you with how her plan is implemented and how much she plans to reduce health care costs.  THis dynamic peaked, I feel, at around New Hampshire, when much of Clinton’s momentum was explained by her exhaustive Q&A sessions where she would answer any and every question.  Obama would instead just give a 25 minute speech and head off to his next event.

It’s safe to say now that OBama has gotten the message, and watching his victory speech, you get all the soaring rhetoric and promises of change, but you understand exactly what that change would be and what policies he intends to enact.  So instead of just hearing about college tuition credits, Obama talks about college tuition credits in exchange for community service, Peace Corps service, learning a foreign language or joining the foreign service, as he puts it, roughly, “we’ll invest in you if you invest in the community around you.”  College tuition seems like one of those bread and butter issues that Clinton should own Obama on, but because he’s able to weave in a simple issue with his message of a unified, progressive majority committed to change, he’s able to outflank her.

Also, his section on John McCain really shows why he ought to be the nominee.  As Matt Yglesias is so found of pointing out, Clinton won’t be able to run against Bush’s “blunders and incompetence” in Iraq, because Bush is going up for reelection.  Especially since the media has declared that McCain is a bold truthteller on Iraq who criticized Bush and Rumsfeld, anything less than a full-on strategic critique of the Iraq War and Bush Doctrine will suffice. And Clinton, who largely bought into Bush’s approach to Iraq and to his arguments about executive flexibility in launching the war, is hardly in a place to make that critique.  Obama, of course, can do it, because he opposed the war as a strategic blunder from the beginning.

Here’s the speech:

Jon Cohn called it his “best speech yet.”