As Dennis Perrin notes, Democrats can’t seem to get enough of Barack Obama‘s Iowa victory speech.
We have been a nation adrift too long. We have been without leadership too long. We have had divided and deadlocked government too long. We have been governed by veto too long. We have suffered enough at the hands of a tired and worn-out administration without new ideas, without youth or vitality, without vision and without the confidence of the American people. There is a fear that our best years are behind us. But I say to you that our nations best is still ahead.
Our country has lived through a time of torment. It is now a time for healing. We want to have faith again. We want to be proud again. We just want the truth again.
It is time for the people to run the government, and not the other way around.
It is the time to honor and strengthen our families and our neighborhoods and our diverse cultures and customs.
We need a Democratic President and a Congress to work in harmony for a change, with mutual respect for a change. And next year we are going to have that new leadership. You can depend on it!
It is time for America to move and to speak not with boasting and belligerence but with a quiet strength, to depend in world affairs not merely on the size of an arsenal but on the nobility of ideas, and to govern at home not by confusion and crisis but with grace and imagination and common sense.
…
It is time for us to take a new look at our own government, to strip away the secrecy, to expose the unwarranted pressure of lobbyists, to eliminate waste, to release our civil servants from bureaucratic chaos, to provide tough management, and always to remember that in any town or city the mayor, the governor, and the President represent exactly the same constituents.
Barack Obama? Or Jimmy Carter?
Speeches aren’t enough. They’re important in the election phase, but as with Kennedy and Carter, they aren’t necessarily an indicator of how someone will actually govern or the kinds of policies they’ll pursue.
I’d vote for Obama in a heartbeat over Clinton, but whoever takes over next year is going to have a tough job rolling back the 15 years of “legacy” the Republicans have piled up since they took the House in ’94. It’s going to take a lot of partisanship to do that, and I worry that — as happened with Carter in the post-Watergate era — that will go by the wayside and a few years down the road we’ll end up with something equivalent to the Reagan Revolution.