Obama’s challenge: Win over America
Acceptance speech must accomplish much
DENVER – A triumphant Barack Obama will claim his piece of American history tonight, becoming the first African-American to win a major-party presidential nomination. As he celebrates that milestone, he must begin his more challenging courtship of the rest of America beyond the Democratic Party.
Obama will deliver his much-anticipated speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination before about 75,000 cheering fans at Invesco Field at Mile High in Denver and to millions more watching on television.
Despite his history of rousing speeches, Obama has worked to downplay expectations. Earlier this week, he said that tonight’s address will differ a lot from his breakthrough keynote speech at the Democratic convention in 2004.
“This speech is different. … I think they’re much more interested in what am I going to do to help them in their lives, and so in that sense I think this is going to be a more workmanlike speech. I’m not aiming for a lot of high rhetoric,” he said Monday.
The stakes are enormous, and Obama will have to strike several chords to emerge from the four-day convention with the kind of growing support he’ll need in a close contest with rival John McCain.
First, he has to start fleshing out his soaring rhetoric and bumper-sticker slogan of change by saying specifically how he’d change people’s lives for the better. Even some Obama supporters are starting to ask the question that 1984 presidential candidate Walter Mondale once asked of rival Gary Hart: Where’s the beef?
Second, Obama has to make working-class voters feel more at ease with him, more eager to, as they say, have a beer with him. They may want a president who’s smarter than they are or more capable, but not one who thinks he’s better than they are.
Third, he has to make the broader country comfortable with the idea of a 46-year-old man with little experience, dark skin and, as he puts it, a funny-sounding name in the Oval Office.
“Obama keeps talking about change. But any change is a gamble,” said Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Drake University in Iowa. “It means stepping into the unknown. And if the argument is being made by somebody who’s not that well-known, there’s even more apprehension about the unknown.”
Indeed, tonight’s speech will have almost a split-screen element: the adoring Democrats at Invesco Field, and the unseen, skeptical voters watching at home.
Obama faces a country that’s apparently ready to elect a Democrat.
In the battleground state of Florida, for example, a Quinnipiac University poll this week found voters saying that they want a Democrat in the White House by 44 percent to 39 percent. In Pennsylvania, the pro-Democrat margin was even greater, 50 percent to 32 percent.
Yet Obama trails McCain in Florida, and his lead in Pennsylvania is less than half the lead for an unnamed, generic Democrat.
“The American people want a Democratic president. They’re just not sure they want this Democrat,” said Peter Brown, the assistant director of the Polling Institute at Quinnipiac.