HIS NEXT GOOD SPEECH WILL BE HIS FIRST:

Watching President Obama give his nomination speech last night, it occurred to me for the first time that he might actually lose. [...]

[I]t wasn't pleasant hearing Obama talk, in his nomination speech, about how hard it's going to be:

I won't pretend the path I'm offering is quick or easy. I never have. You didn't elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear. You elected me to tell you the truth. And the truth is, it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades. It will require common effort, shared responsibility, and the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one. And by the way--those of us who carry on his party's legacy should remember that not every problem can be remedied with another government program or dictate from Washington.

We're dangerously close to Jimmy Carter territory here. First, there's the boast ("You elected me to tell you the truth") disguised as an expression of humility ("I won't pretend the path I'm offering is quick or easy"). Later, I actually winced when Obama humblebragged, "And while I'm very proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, 'I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.'" Just because our greatest president was a bit depressive, that doesn't mean we want the present one to lacerate himself over his failures, and we certainly don't want to hear him tell us about it. The mention of FDR only served to remind us of how different, temperamentally, Obama is from the Democratic party's "happy warrior" tradition. Worst of all, though, was Obama's statement that "not every problem can be remedied with another government program or dictate from Washington." It combined an opportunistic (and probably insincere) echo of Bill Clintons irritating pronouncement in 1996 that "the era of big government is over" (which wasn't even true) with a hint of Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech assertion that the country's crisis of confidence was too big a problem for a president to solve on his own. Even when it's true that the fault lies in our selves, not in our stars, who wants to hear it from the country's biggest star?

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