Fierce Urgency

Someone should invite Barack Obama to give an explanation of particle physics while wrestling a gator. Short of that, I don't what could make him give a flat or faltering speech. The oratorical challenges that life has thrown at him over the last four years—the 2004 convention, the race speech, Berlin—have given chance after chance to flop, but the man seems incapable of doing so. Thursday night's challenge was one of the tallest: bringing the Democratic National Convention to a crescendo without providing fodder for those who think him a preening, grandiose celebrity. So he took his inside voice with him to the cavernous Invesco Field, and used it to deliver what might be the most intimate talk ever offered to a crowd of 80,000.

Obama described the speech as "workmanlike." That's true, in the sense that it didn't have the rhetorical flights of some of his previous talks. But it also implies a level of strain, of visible effort, nowhere in evidence. (It sounded workmanlike only in the way that Tiger Woods going eight under for the round is workmanlike.)

He needed all his gifts for this one, beginning with the agile, dynamic voice—an instrument that lets him, like a singer with a four-octave range, hit notes and make tonal shifts unavailable to the rest of us. "What the naysayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me," he said, using a pianissimo note to draw people closer, before booming: "It's about you." There's also the sheer quality of the writing, not just the arc and the rhythmic drive of the overall speech, but little flecks of language, as when he described the promise of a democracy "where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort." Grace, the unexpectedly delicate word, recasts the whole sentence, makes you listen anew.

The good news for the Democrats is that Obama did what they needed him to do; the bad news is how much they needed him to do. Aside from Michelle Obama's speech, they hadn't done an especially compelling job telling his story this week. That's less of a concern after the heartfelt video that introduced him last night, and the sharp rebuttal he made to the Republicans' celebrity charge by citing his own difficult upbringing. Except for John Kerry's improbably ferocious speech, the Democrats also failed to land most of the many punches they threw at John McCain this week. Obama fixed that, not least by saying he "doesn't get it" and calling him weak—a man "who won't even go to the cave where [bin Laden] lives." (After this, the candidates' foreign policy debate is going to rule.)

That attempt to get to the right of a war hero helped address the second-biggest missed opportunity of the convention: Where national security is concerned, the Democrats still look, by and large, like the party of Snoopy in the tank. This isn't a substantive problem, it's a presentation problem, but it's a vulnerability all the same. Few speakers mustered arguments strong enough to repair the party's feeble image on defense issues. It fell to Obama to offer a reminder that had gone largely missing all week: "We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country." He was wise, too, to save his best-known rhetorical construction until he described the troops, men and women who fight and sometimes die together "under the same proud flag": "They have not served a Red America or a Blue America—they have served the United States of America."

The Democrats leave the convention with more work to do on that score, and on the convention's biggest missed opportunity: They didn't articulate a liberal case, using a liberal's vocabulary, for a 21st-century patriotism. The Democrats have to know that the Republicans, brandishing the slogan "Country First," are going to depict them as selfish jihadi-loving traitors this fall. If they had availed themselves of the chance to offer a week of specific, original and forceful testimonials on why they love the country—and why everybody else should, too—it would have been a little harder for the GOP to make that slander stick. But with the exception of the crowds during Bill Clinton's and Obama's speeches, there weren't even all that many flags around, certainly not compared to what the Republicans will be waving next week in the Twin Cities.