Obama's convention message, did it work?

By MICHAEL HALEY

The whole world weighed in Thursday night on Barack Obama’s speech — along with the Democratic convention — so here’s mine, let me know yours.

Two days ago I was all set to write that Hillary and Bill Clinton were destroying the Democratic chances with their unending victimhood and self absorption. Obama threw Hillary under the bus? Uh, no, she lost the primary election. You know, Hillary, votes?

Then they managed to turn it around the third day with a brilliant move by Hillary to forgo the roll call vote and accede the nomination to Obama, and Bill’s brilliant speech which was really the best of the week. But do nut worry, the victims will be back, they just know how to punt when they have to.

Thursday night we saw the most important speech and in the end the one that will matter in this election, Obama’s. One has to be impressed, first of all, that he is able to get 85,000 people to show up in person for a speech. According to the media, neither Bill or Hillary or John McCain could pull that off.

The reactions were an interesting mix of two basic opinions. Juan Williams, Democrat, started off saying that it was a good speech but, it was a basically a boilerplate Democrat speech. Bill Kristol, Republican, said Obama met all expectations and then some. Interesting.

My wife was in the Kristol camp, and she is more conservative than I and a McCain supporter, and I was more in the Williams camp. The more I have thought about it and looked at some of my notes, the more I was impressed with certain things.

First of all, as we have all come to expect from Democratic speeches they often devolve into a laundry list of promises to various groups. College for all students, tax credits, off foreign oil in 10 years, health insurance for the uninsured, lower health premiums for the rest, whiskey for your men, beer for your horses.

O.K. We have heard that before.

What was interesting was his tax plan. He is going to reduce taxes for 95 percent of working families, he says. That’s a tax cut, he is only going to raise taxes on households making above $250,000. And he said he was going to go line by line through the budget to make cuts to pay for it. On top of that, he says “you do nut raise taxes in a recession.” Wow, he sounded like a Republican. Or at least Republicans before Bush.

He mentioned not hiring illegal workers, said do not tell me Democrats can’t defend this country, and was even nice to McCain.

And he sounded like he meant it all. He really came across as sincere, and in the end I have to conclude that he did what he needed to do. He came off like a Commander in Chief, supremely confident and tough. He put out enough specifics in his plans to give a sense of what he would do, and he maintained the high road in his political campaign against McCain.

I do not agree with a lot of his economic plan, but I like his foreign policy stance better than McCain’s. McCain now has a tall order ahead of him next week.

What was your reaction?

Note: Starting next week I am going to start a Daily Napablogger where I will be posting shorter thoughts and ideas on a daily basis, as well as more links to articles related to our discussions here. You know, like a real blog. I am going to continue with the weekly articles, but I am hoping we can react to the daily news with some discussion that is timely for the day. Hope to see you over there.

Michael Haley’s Napablogger column — and the Daily Napablogger — appear online at napavalleyregister.com. Haley is president of the Napa Valley Taxpayers Alliance. He can be reached at napaeagle@hughes.net, or post a comment here.

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