Obama Starts Hitting Notes the Base Wants to Hear

[illinoisprogressive]

With that in mind, I was impressed with yesterday’s Obama’s speech at DePaul, on both substantive and stylistic grounds. The main policy headline from the remarks emphasized nuclear proliferation, but I was also struck by the senator’s comments about the media and the DC establishment.

“he conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002. This is the conventional thinking that measures experience only by the years you’ve been in Washington, not by your time spent serving in the wider world.

“This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place — the outdated assumptions and the refusal to talk openly to the American people.

“Well I’m not running for President to conform to Washington’s conventional thinking — I’m running to challenge it. I’m not running to join the kind of Washington groupthink that led us to war in Iraq – I’m running to change our politics and our policy so we can leave the world a better place than our generation has found it. <…>

“I want to be straight with you. If you want conventional Washington thinking, I’m not your man. If you want rigid ideology, I’m not your man. If you think that fundamental change can wait, I’m definitely not your man. But if you want to bring this country together, if you want experience that’s broader than just learning the ways of Washington, if you think that the global challenges we face are too urgent to wait, and if you think that America must offer the world a new and hopeful face, then I offer a different choice in this race and a different vision for our future.”

He used the word “conventional” eight times in the speech, all of them in the context of criticism.
Obama generally avoids picking fights with the press, so this was certainly welcome:

“, the American people weren’t just failed by a President – they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. <…>

“The fact that violence today is only as horrific as in 2006 is held up as progress. Washington politicians and pundits trip over each other to debate a newspaper advertisement while our troops fight and die in Iraq.”

That’s good stuff. Indeed, while most Dems want to avoid talk about MoveOn and the “Betray Us” ad, here’s Obama embracing it as an example of what’s gone wrong with the political discourse in DC.

As Greg Sargent explained in a terrific post, “What’s striking about these lines is how tightly they’re in sync with the liberal blogospheric critique of the Beltway media. All these points hit on by Obama here — the frequent pundit assertion that Dems will look weak if they don’t walk in lockstep behind the GOP; the uncritical acceptance of administration spin; the punditry and media’s willingness to parrot the GOP line on stories such as the MoveOn ad flap — are central pillars in that media critique…. ere you have Obama saying things about the Beltway press and punditry that could have been written by Atrios or Glenn Greenwald.”

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/13093.html