I'm still freaking weepy and afraid to be optimistic. The idea that all this was happening within a few miles of me has added a surreal edge to watching his speech on tv.

I am laughing like a loooooon because Pat Freaking Buchanan is GUSHING over Obama. HA!

Also, Obama didn't say that within 10 years, we'd not need foreign oil; he specified the mideast.

Which made me, of course, laugh and say to myself, "yeah, we'll just buddy up with Hugo Chavez".

Please Vishnu.

Sorry, Vishnu's a PUMA.

Blasphemer!

Yeah I agree it is a great speech and that Obama and the Democrats will be light years better than the Republicans.

Most of the things I don't like he probably had to do. The one thing I don't think was absolutely necessary and wish had not been done was the "only in America" bit. There are wonderful things about our country, but we can love those things without pretending other nations don't have them too. The U.S. is NOT unique in offering opportunities to for poor and middle class people to grow up and become rich or powerful. Why the hell does loving America have to include putting down everyone else?

I kind of assumed that he got caught.

David, David, David.

Okay, I've been out of the loop all week because of the whole ER thing, but I just went into the video archives to watch a few of this week's speeches. Biden hit it out of the park! I wasn't sure about that choice last week when I first heard it, but I'd forgotten how inspirational he can be. Put him up against anyone in the VP debate, and I think he's going to shine. And Obama vs. McCain? Please.

I'm feeling excited for the first time in four years. I'm daring to hope.

After that speech no one will call him Obambi again. Man is not only a great orator: he can throw a punch.

Andrew Sullivan (an Obama supporter) was gushing:

It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety. It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism - in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.

What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again ... and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

[link]

Apparently McCain's unprecedented ad is a positive ad congratulating Obama for his legitmately historic achievement as a solid Presidential candidate who is also black. Would that we could see that kind of class on a regular basis.