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Obama's Talking Points

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Amy Bulgrin and Katie Marquardt, sisters in their 40s whose grandfather was speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives in the late 1970s, also had concrete concerns for supporting Obama, despite gold-star credentials in what was once assumed would be a pro-Clinton political establishment.

"My company just got bought, and I lost my job," Marquardt said. "The middle class has been so eroded for seven years, I'm ready for a change, and I see Hillary as part of the old school."

"My husband worked on the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992, and he's still leaning toward Hillary," Bulgrin said, and then smiled. "But he's the one who got us the tickets to this."

As the time for speeches approached, the crowd reached about 8,000, according to the Columbus Dispatch -- fairly modest for Obama, who has filled 20,000-seat stadiums elsewhere. But then again, it was mid-morning in mid-week, with wind chills around 0 degrees and four inches of overnight snow on the ground. And that was still more than five times the crowd John McCain drew to the same location during the 2000 campaign, which the newspaper then described as "huge."

I had read where organizers at these rallies tried to pump up the crowd's enthusiasm before Obama appeared, but I saw very little of that this time. Miss Ohio sang the national anthem, and there was a feeble attempt at a "wave," which never really petered in and petered out entirely by the third time around the building. The crowd mostly just sat and talked and waited for the bus from Cleveland to arrive while listening to the Pickerington Central High School band play "Hang on Sloopy" and other local favorites.

When the time came, former Ohio State Heisman Trophy winner Eddie George led the crowd in just two rounds of the Buckeyes' favorite football chant -- "O-H-I-O" -- and Mayor Coleman took no more than two minutes in introducing the candidate. "This election is about who we are as a people and as a country."

But prepped or not, when Obama came on, the audience erupted in a deafening roar, an almost organic force of nature emitting a sound that crescendoed and receded in spontaneous waves, like surf pounding on a beach, before settling into a chant of "O-Ba-Ma, O-Ba-Ma."

Even then, Obama didn't milk the moment, but quickly quieted the crowd and launched into his speech.

"I'd like to take all the credit for (that reception), but I know I can't," he said, preparing for his biggest applause line. "Because we all know, no matter what happens, George W. Bush's name is not going to be on the ballot this November."

For me, the speech was surprisingly devoid of lofty rhetoric. He made some specific policy proposals -- get out of Iraq, close Guantanamo and restore habeas corpus, eliminate tax breaks for companies outsourcing jobs and give them to companies creating jobs in America, raise the minimum wage and then index it to rise automatically with inflation. There were also more general goals -- "I not only want to end this war. I want to end the mindset that got us into this war. I want to end the politics of fear." And some platitudes -- "Every child is our child."

Most of all, he spoke the way any effective leader speaks, talking neither up at nor down to his audience, but using direct, forceful language, appealing to their better natures and offering a bargain that asked as much from them as it promised to them.

"Working as a community organizer was the best education I ever had, because I learned ordinary people can do extraordinary things, and change always happens from the bottom up," he said. "So we can change the world, but I need your help.

"Hope is not blind optimism. Hope is not ignorance of the challenges we face. Change is not easy, and these things take time. But nothing worthwhile ever happened unless somebody somewhere was willing to hope. Hope is imagining and then fighting for what didn't seem possible before."

So is the criticism valid, that the Obama campaign lacks substance behind the talk? It seemed to me that he talked specifics about as much as the next guy, and if his supporters, with the exception of the war issue, seemed more moved by gut-level reactions to his rhetoric and personality than position paper policies, has it ever been otherwise? Not in my lifetime. And when was the last time you got into a conversation with a Clinton supporter that ended in a discussion of the nitty-gritty of healthcare policy?

But the day after the speech, there appeared in the Dispatch a full-page, small-print ad laying out Obama's proposals on the economy -- trade policy, tax policy, clean energy, infrastructure, pension security, small businesses, home ownership -- in mind-numbing detail. And, the ad promised, this was just the first of five such ads to run daily through election day. It was hard to take it as anything but an in-your-face response to the criticism that the Obama campaign lacks substance, and it would be interesting to know, though probably impossible to find out, how many of those critics actually read these ads.

And people who portray Obama as a candidate whose success is based entirely on a rare gift of gab also either ignore or miss the remarkable organizing acumen of his campaign -- a leave-no-voter-behind approach that seems to think of everything right down to programming the St. John's scoreboards to read "Barack Obama 2008", and that takes full advantage of the enthusiasm the candidate generates to reach and persuade potential supporters on a personal level not seen since the days of the big city machines, which only had jobs to give out.

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Gregg Gordon is a writer, musician, activist, and otherwise ne'er-do-well in Columbus, Ohio. "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little." - Edmund Burke
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