Excuse Me, Is That Your Blog?

The Good:

Overall I think he did an excellent job. My main reservation about Obama has been my impression that he’s all talk, all pomp and circumstance, and little substance. Last night he delivered an address that was policy-specific, insightful, thorough, and inspirational. He underscored McCain’s weaknesses without sounding rancorous, and drew a sharp contrast between his vision and a potential McCain presidency. He was eloquent (except for a few flubs, but nobody is perfect) but not bombastic. He was genuine and down to earth, and convinced me that he would be a compassionate and competent president. I was drinking Blue Moon, but it tasted like Kool Aid. I’m one of them. I love Obama.

Here are some other highlights, and random observations:

• The shout out to Hillary was a nice gesture, especially right at the beginning of his speech. Hopefully he was able to mollify even the most bitter of Hillary holdouts.
• He used “her” as a pronoun when discussing the challenge of sending kids to school.
• Sasha Obama is so kidnapably cute!
• He wants to cut government programs that don’t work and streamline bureaucracy – a libertarian wet dream! I love that he has the balls to not make a typical knee-jerk liberal, blanket defense of every public service program.
• Tax cuts! Yay! More fodder for me and my fellow libertarians.
• End our oil addiction – real solutions, not band-aids. We need oil rehab, not oil enablers like John McCain. And incentivizing alternative energy production is totally in keeping with the market system we all love and cherish as Americans.
• He spoke of having the “temperament” and judgment to conduct foreign policy. Not only did that brilliantly take the focus away from experience and onto pure competence, it was a subtle double entendre. READ: McCain has a temper, and is a bat-shit crazy curmudgeon.
• Vets, vets, and more vets. I love vets, not just because the VA pays roughly 1/3 of my salary, but because they are the one group in America that clearly deserve appreciation from our government but are woefully underserved.
• “Patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so does John McCain, and so do you!” Oh yeah, we’re gonna have a 300 million-way with America.

The Bad:

• When it comes to health care, Barack seems to think that healthcare companies arbitrarily “discriminate” against the ill. Truthfully, any company is going to want to protect itself from adverse selection by having a diverse mix of patients, so that the healthy can pay for the sick. That’s how health insurance works – just like care insurance. When employers provide health care, the risk is automatically pooled because they have a mix of people brought together on random factors other than health status. A typical workplace will have adequate risk spread to keep premiums low, and the power to negotiate with insurers. The problem is that not all employers offer health insurance, and unemployment is on the rise. Then we get into the individual market, where it’s essentially a free-for-all. Companies have an incentive to keep out sick patients so they don’t go out of business, while relatively healthy people (especially young people) choose not to purchase insurance, because they think they’re invincible. There aren’t “healthy” people to pay for the “sick”. So Obama can’t forcibly “end healthcare discrimination”, without having mandates in place to force the healthy people to enter the risk pool, and thus far he hasn’t explicitly supported an individual mandate. Furthermore, we must continue to support tax breaks for employers offering insurance since this is the most sensible means of providing insurance. I heard nothing about this in Obama’s Plan. Finally, he said little, and his plans says little about reducing health care costs, which are primarily driven by technology. If we keep adopting new procedures, machines, and medicines, with little therapeutic improvement over previous treatments, we’re not going to get a good return on investment. The trick is to find a way to place stricter standards on technology adaptation while still encouraging innovation in the market. I don’t purport to have all the answers, but I think the president ought to. Nonetheless, I have more confidence in Obama’s ability and willingness to tackle this problem constructively.
• “I stood up and opposed this war (In Iraq).” From where, your living room couch? You weren’t IN the Senate yet and didn’t have a vote. I can picture the situation:
  Barack (knocking over a ball of popcorn as he rises from the couch): I oppose this war!
  Michelle: That’s nice honey. Can you take out the trash
• Producer to Cameraman, Producer to Cameraman, show more white people! (it’s the exact opposite of the conversations that go on between the two at the GOP convention.

The Cheesy:

• The Music. U2? Add them to Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp as intolerable artists for politics. It’s not that I don’t like these artists (except Mellencamp – he sucks) – I have every U2 album, and a significant percentage of Bruce’s library as well. It’s just that their music deserves better than becoming the hackneyed entrance and exit music for pandering politicians. Are there seriously NO people on your staff than can pick something more original? I saw Obama’s favorite song list, and it included Nina Simone and The Fugees. Either of those selections would have been refreshing. What the shit was that country song they played after Obama finished? It was so anticlimactic, not to mention CHEESY!!! AND FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, WHEN ARE PEOPLE GOING TO REALIZE THAT BORN IN THE USA IS NOT A PATRIOTIC TRIBUTE TO AMERICA BUT A STINGING CRITICISM OF THE WAR IN VIETNAM?!?! LISTEN TO THE GODDAMN LYRICS OF THE SONGS YOU CHOOSE TO PLAY!!! Here are a few selections that would have been more inspirational, appropriate, or at least humorously corny:

1. The Times, They Are A Changin’ – Bob Dylan (would have fit nicely with the WHOLE FUCKING THEME OF OBAMA’S CAMPAIGN as well)
2. Work That – Mary J. Blige
3. Live To Win – Paul Stanley
4. You’ve Got the Touch, from the Transformers Soundtrack (the 80s cartoon, not the crap ass action flick with Shia LaDouche)
5. Pretty much anything from the Top Gun Soundtrack
6. Ditto for Karate Kid
7. Ditto Rocky
8. Flashdance…What a Feeling – Irena Cara

• Is it just me, or is Joe Biden actually made of cheese? He’s got that pig-in-shit-eating grin that frankly creeps me out.
• Did the Obama women really color coordinate? I love pink, but to quote Sally Field’s character from Steel Magnolias, “It looks like the whole place was doused in Pepto Bismal.”
• The “grand finale” was just awkward. At least balloons would have masked some of the uncomfortable moments, like when all of a sudden there were toilet-paper-esque streamers on the back stage, and all of a sudden the music went from country to something sounding like the theme from Jaws. Should Obama and Biden hug? Will that seem too gay? Michelle and Jill were holding hands pretty tightly, as if they don’t know what else to do. Wave to the audience. Wait we’re out of family order. Okay bring in the Biden family. Wait there’s too many. Okay you know what, let’s just do Barack, Michelle, Joe, and Jill. Okay. Now let’s, um, pray, yeah, prayer is awesome, everyone loves prayer! Of course I realize that no convention can be perfect. But maybe if Obama had picked his VP earlier they would have worked out the awkward body language. Maybe if there were some more hip staff, the music wouldn’t have sounded so corny.

The most important thing is, Obama nailed it, and McCain has his work cut out for him next week. He gave us a nice indication of what he has in store by a) trying to steal Obama's thunder and pick his VP the day after Obama's rousing speech, and b) pick a woman, assuming that Hillary supporters are willing to forgo freedom of choice and economic opportunity and hop on his boring bandwagon, which probably serves cinnamon tea instead of Kool-Aid. I can't wait to see how much these asshats make me vomit and/or throw pillows at the television next week.