Democrats of the Future

I’ve been TiVo-ing the Democrats’ convention speeches and scanning them for content. It’s been an unrewarding exercise, as the speeches have obviously been so heavily censored they put you to sleep. The Obama speech has so far been the only exception, apart from Teddy Kennedy’s claim that Republicans are a greater danger to America than Al Qaida and Al Sharpton’s appeal to the lynch mob.

Obama knows the score:

Now let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated.

And he knows that we’re all in this together. Republicans appreciate this kind of talk; Rich Lowry praised it as did Jonah Goldberg, who summed-up the Obama Monologue for USA Today:

…it was Obama’s speech that captured the imagination. But what was great about his speech would have been more appropriate at a Republican convention. He spoke of the debt we owe to the nation’s founders and to the documents they left us. He spoke of “E Pluribus Unum” and didn’t make nakedly racial appeals.

If Obama ? son of an African immigrant and a white woman from Kansas, raised in Hawaii ? were a Republican and talked this way, he’d be called an “Uncle Tom.” Nonetheless, it’s certainly progress when liberal “rising stars” reject the poisonous identity politics of past Democratic conventions.

Let’s discount for a moment the notion that Obama was pandering to centrist voters yearning for a reason to vote against Bush and assume that he’s making a serious attempt to move the Democrats beyond the fracturous mix of identity-based victimhood and special interest service that’s made prison guards and trial lawyers wealthy and two generations of school children illiterate; what’s he up against?

Contrasting audience reactions to Obama’s speech, stressing patriotism and national unity and downplaying diversity and internationalism, with Al Sharpton’s traditional whining and complaining tells us a lot. The Democrats were respectful and attentive to Obama, but not excited; but Sharpton had the crowd roaring on its feet, foaming at the mouth, ready to lynch the first Republican they could find. Obama stressed family, faith, and responsiblity, and drew polite applause, but Sharpton demanded reparations for slavery and got a standing ovation. Obama is a novelty, an articulate Democrat with a serious nature, a keen intellect, and a sense of grace, but Sharpton is the kind of crude thug who really appeals, in an emotional way, the party elite, the people who come to conventions, work precincts, and carry people to the polls. There are thousand Sharptons for every Obama in the party today.

Men like Obama are the future of the Democratic Party, if it is to have one, but I rather suspect that his time is 20 years away, if not 50. In order to ascend to the top of the party he has to placate or neutralize the unions, the trial lawyers, and the identity groups, and he has to have somebody on his side with money and power. Clinton won over the Gods of Wall St., so that might be a good place to start. And even if he makes no mistakes, it’s going to be a hard slog.

Obama would do better as a Republican, and that’s one party that can get excited about the things he says in his speeches. Somebody should fill the dude in about his real political home, and the Illinois Republicans should give him their US Senate nomination.