« on: September 15, 2008, 06:46:36 PM »
The “hopemonger†is gone.
Barack Obama sounds more like a man trying to shake a rain cloud these days, dispensing a teeth-clenching, I-get-your-pain stump speech in town after town that offers only snippets of the unbridled optimism that long permeated his campaign pitch.
Beginning in the days before his party's convention, the inspirational has given way to the traditional: attacks on John McCain, a register of policy prescriptions and partisan language with the sting of a needle.
Over the summer, Obama would often simply say that he and McCain “fundamentally disagree†on key issues. In New Hampshire on Saturday, Obama said the Arizona senator “doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know what is going on your lives. He is out of touch with the American people.â€
The poetic defenses of hope, the playful jokes about being a distant relative of Vice President Cheney and the glancing attention to policy have been replaced by an emphasis on economic fears — an issue-by-issue argument of why the American dream is slipping away and the Republican ticket has no plan to rescue it. He furrows his brow, wags his finger and broadcasts exasperation at the idea that a 26-year veteran of Washington is co-opting his mantra of change.
The Obama campaign has even replaced the wistful slogan, “Change We Can Believe In,†with the more imperative “Change We Need.â€
If stump speeches, and their changes over time, are windows into the state of a race and the mind of a candidate, Obama is trying to rhetorically shake sense into voters who have been slipping away from him. When speaking of his opponent, he sometimes ends sentences with “heh!†as if to say, “Can you believe this?â€
SNIP
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13434.html 
Logged
I can see November 2 from my house!!!
Spread my work ethic, not my wealth.
Forget change, bring back common sense.
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No, my friends, there’s only one really progressive idea. And that is the idea of legally limiting the power of the government. That one genuinely liberal, genuinely progressive idea — the Why in 1776, the How in 1787 — is what needs to be conserved. We need to conserve that fundamentally liberal idea. That is why we are conservatives. --Bill Whittle
