The fashionable thing to expect from Obama's speech tonight seems to be a "filling out" of his positions. Even liberal commentators have jumped on the bandwagon to call for a more detailed version of Obama's vision. Conservatives bring it up more often than John McCain brings up his POW status - and without the shame that you'd expect from people who revere Ronald Regan and George W. Bush, neither of whom were exactly what you'd call brainiacs. Neither seem to remember that Al Gore and John Kerry were lambasted for being overly loquacious about their policies while W smirked and stammered his way to victory.
While I wish we lived in a society that was more interested in the nuances of...well, anything...we don't. We live in a society than needs everything bottled up into thirty-second sound bytes, lest we distract anyone from Grey's Anatomy or the MLB penant race for too long. The second Barack Obama starts to rattle off a litany of specific proposals, all of which can be found at his website, Americans will stop paying attention and either revert back to the political positions they inherited at birth or, more probably, regress into apathy.
What Barack Obama offers us - what is embodied in the eloquent speeches and the mantras of "Hope" and "Change"- is a return to government for the people, by the people; a rational and compassionate way out of the mess we've gotten ourselves into; the wisdom and vision of a man who sees the world as a whole, rather than as a galaxy in which every speck of dust revolves around the United States of America; the assurance that decisions regarding our future will not be made in an intellectually homogeneous vacuum, or by small gangs of men whose sole concern is squeezing every penny out of those decisions.
Change and Hope are not just generic words, as some have charged, designed to capitalize on the abysmal approval ratings of Republicans across the country. Change is the promise of the opposite of the last eight years. Hope is the promise of an optimism that we can scarcely remember having felt. In the current zeitgeist, these two words contain worlds of information for anyone listening with an open mind.
I, for one, hope that Barack continues to inspire us with these promises. Reasonable people know that there will be successes and failures, that we will disagree with President Obama from time to time, that some people will do everything in their power to tear him down from the moment he is elected. We're content to know that a good and brilliant man will be sitting in our Oval Office, upholding the honor and integrity of our Constitution.
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