Credit crunches can be romantic too

In the back of my head, I was sure that I had written something about speeches before, but I looked back on my blog and found that I hadn’t, and was a bit confused. Then I remembered that I had commented on one of Castles in the Sand’s posts. So I just want to give credit to CITS for inspiration for the theme “SPEECHES” – respect! (Although respect is diminishing as his last post was Monday, September 8th 2008).

So Obama’s speech.

It certainly wasn’t a Martin Luther King “Dream” speech, however I maintain the opinion (from the CITS comment) that it is more difficult to write a moving speech that will go down in history about climbing out of a credit crunch, than it is to write one about people coexisting in harmony. I believe he corrected the guy reading the oath – I love that!

I thought Naomi Wolf’s comments on the speech were pertinent:

“I thought Obama did three things impressively. Firstly, he sounded a note of our dire circumstances that was in line with a reality that many have been in denial about. That is technically ­brilliant, because he's inheriting a mess, and he's telling people, "We're not going to dig ourselves out of this easily." But also, "Don't blame me for it all."

The second was that he reasserted the primacy of the constitution and the rule of law. With Bush sitting behind him, that was like showtime at the OK Corral. I have written in the past that it is going to take a grassroots movement to support him in reasserting the rule of law, because there are so many vested interests that stand opposed to it. But that was a shot across the bows.

Thirdly, most amazingly, I feel that he dialled down the threat level of the US with just a few sentences. He reached out a hand to the Muslim world. For Obama to say, "I'm not going to demonise you" – that is extraordinarily stabilising.”

For the full article go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/21/obama-inauguration-no-more-fake-optimism (still haven’t worked out that whole URL thing).

As a follow up to my post on 20th October 2008, have a look at this http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/01/19/sources-obama-may-use-executive-order-reverse-abortion-policy/

Word of the day “OBAMA”.