Chris Matthews always gets excited over speeches. He also thought Al Gore’s concession speech was fabulous and drooled over it. I thought it was fabulous too but for different reasons.
Speeches do move people and John McCain has a long way to go to start giving some effecive or moving speeches that even come close to Obama’s.
I also can listen to Obama’s speeches and realize they are crowd-pleasing but at the same time not agree with anything he says.
The charge has been levelled here in this thread that his speeches are all atmosphere and essentially content-free. Theme music to excite the faithful of the Marxian Meme.
I listened carefully to Obama and Hillary debating (CNN put their debate up three or four times, weekend before last, and since I was in a hospital rack with nothing better to do, I paid attention), and they did talk substance on health care. Hillary and Obama tried to out-wonk each other on that one, because it's one of the few areas where they have substantive differences, but it's key that they were preaching to the choir, the faithful of the Left who are committed to Soviet medicine (and indeed a sovietized society).
How their discourse would sound in debate with a knowledgeable, briefed-up Republican who knows how to defend an idea is a very interesting proposition. Unfortunately for the Lords Ordainers of the GOP, McCain isn't that guy. He's an old fighter pilot, an airdale, not an idea guy either in general or at retail. Challenge him and he'll just get huffy and try to stare the other guy down. Either of the Democrats could make him look really bad in debate. I don't think they could do that to Huckabee, or for that matter to Duncan Hunter or Fred Thompson. Fred cut his teeth on bull-steerers during Watergate; unfortunately, he couldn't do it again when the Dems loaded his committee with people like Richard Ben-Veniste and Jamie "Chinese Wall" Gorelick*.
*Ronald Kessler of NewsMax (and sometime contributor to National Review Online), in his new WoT book, says that the "Chinese Wall" concept actually started within the FBI as a means of protecting criminal convictions that could be thrown out if it eventuated in open court that wiretap/intercept data had been obtained by a FISA warrant aimed at foreign intelligence targets (rather than enjoying the more legally-antiseptic protections of criminal law). This of course was bent by the Bent One's DoJ (Reno Justice strikes again) with threats of career damage if anyone screwed up, so all the intel and criminal investigators just wound up refusing to look at one another's files. What Jamie Gorelick had to do with this, I guess we'd have to read Kessler's book to find out.