Obama's Acceptance Speech

The Senator proved again that he is pretty good on rhetoric - and indeed, some of the speech was a significant change from standard democratic lines. I thought the best line was "Change does not come from Washington, we bring change to Washington." Unfortunately, the rhetoric and the reality of Mr. Obama's proposals significantly diverge. Two examples, among many, should illustrate the point. Every expert who has looked at it argues that the Social Security system is unsound from an actuarial perspective but Obama's proposal is to add to the tax burden of the system by creating a new level of taxes for people who make (by most descriptions of his plan) more than $250,000 in wages. There are two problems with that approach. First, it further complicates an already complicated tax system. Second, despite the rhetoric of his economic advisors, it raises rates significantly for this group of taxpayers.


A second example comes in student loans. Since the Clinton administration there have been two types of student loans. The first are called the Family Federal Education Loans (FFEL). FFELs are offered through banks with a federal subsidy. The second type is called the Direct Student Loan Program (DSLP). Direct loans are funded and administered directly (as the name implies) from the federal government to institutions. The federal government, as has been amply demonstrated in other activities like this (think Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) has not proven especially adept at managing these kinds of transactions. But Senator Obama proposes to rely exclusively on the DSLP.

I did not get to see the speech, I was at Stanford's opening football game (quite a good game where the Cardinal thrashed Oregon State) and the reports of the speech were that the camera angles were well done so that the "temple Obama" images were not a factor and that most of the imaging was like Obama was in a soft window - that is probably good. Mrs. Mikey tried to defend Temple Obama by pointing out that a) GWB had similar backdrops for his acceptance speech and b) that the set was attempting to recreate the back drop of Dr. King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Pardon me but from my relatively untrained eye the set from which Senator Obama spoke looks a lot more like the 2005 Inaugural Platform than the Lincoln Memorial.



Ultimately, all of this imaging stuff looks a lot to me like what Lennie Riefenstahl tried to create in Triumph des Willens and in her work on the 1936 Olympics. Riefenstahl was a master at imaging who claimed to be apolitical. Since she first created those images, every politician (not just Obama) has tried to build a heroic image visually. In my opinion that helps to create a separation in American politics which is troubling. Part of the "rock star" criticism that the McCain people have leveled against Senator Obama is valid (although let's wait until next week to see if Senator McCain falls into the same trap). The danger of all this heroic stuff is that it establishes a distance between the elected official and the constituents. That ultimately creates an "us against them" feeling which I believe is unhealthy in the long term. For me the strongest part of Obama's speech were the passages that recognized those splits - I was especially impressed with his comments about the divides on abortion and gay rights - both issues have been painted in stylized yammering which is divisive (by both sides by the way). But as I noted at the start, the set from which he worked and the substance of Senator Obama's speech/proposals did not confirm his elegant discussions of a number of policies where the American people are clearly ahead of the politicians.