This was a brilliant speech, one of the best speeches made by anyone in decades, but it didn’t help him at all, because in modern politics, hardly anyone listens to or reads speeches; they get somebody else’s summary of them instead. And unlike you and me, the people who produce these things were not impressed; they slotted it into a preexisting story. If you get sound-bite coverage or a secondhand description of it from a news report it comes across as completely different: the coverage is about how Obama has been mortally wounded by the Jeremiah Wright flap and this is just his desperate attempt to spin it. His poll numbers are still down.

I don’t know what he can do to get around that.

As Atrios says, just kill me.

Sweet.

Our discourse is SO STUPID.

Also I lived in L.A. to personally observe the Bradley effect in action. But yeah, it’s small. It’s getting smaller. And people have real things to be scared about this year rather than just their inner insularity. I really do think the margin will be big enough to overcome both the Bradley effect and the Repub election stealing activities.

* It doesn’t actually matter in her case since she lives in New York, but as an example, not what I wanted to hear.

I can’t believe that the country will go from George “Pretzels” Bush straight to Barack “And you thought Lincoln was good” Obama in the White House.

Meh. Lincoln was good when it counted, but when he wasn’t making speeches, he wasn’t really a good orator.

It’s as of the country is the guy who got laid off one day and who wins the lottery the next.

And isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?