TV reporters gush, give speech a rock star buildup
Talk about tall orders. With his acceptance speech in a Denver football stadium, on the anniversary of a civil rights milestone, Barack Obama had to live up to the legacies of two men: Martin Luther King Jr. and Elvis.
Those comparisons, though, suggest a particular sort of stage presence - a soaring preacher's cadence, a glitzy swagger - and while Obama is a gifted speaker, he is not exactly either type. His skill is more conservative: the ability to sound conversational, even in the presence of a Teleprompter; to make his voice rise and fall at the right emotional moments.
In a sense, that's a tougher skill - charisma without flash - and Denver's Invesco Field posed some particular challenges. It was not a matter of the address itself, so much as the lead-up. All day, TV anchors and reporters were breathless, no matter where you turned. At 7 p.m., Fox News Channel's Shepard Smith was gushing about the historic nature of the date, 45 years after King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
At 9:30, as Sean Hannity was criticizing Obama's foreign policy credentials, a "Fox Alert" flashed across the screen: "Senator Barack Obama Has Arrived at Invesco Field." About the same time, CNN was flipping among shots of people gathered in Obama-viewing parties across the country, as Wolf Blitzer intoned: "This is one of those moments that people will always remember and look back on."
And as the speech drew closer, the reporting sounded more and more like the prelude to a Springsteen show at Fenway Park. Fox reported that people stood in line for hours to enter the stadium and called out an Oprah Winfrey sighting; apparently, she was wearing sunglasses studded with diamonds that spelled "Obama."
Fox noted, as well, that the set was built by the company that has designed backdrops for Britney Spears's tours. It looked expensive, to be sure. The Republican National Committee got hyped up over the faux-Greek columns, and from afar, the row of make-believe windows looked like the colonnade along the West Wing of the White House. There were glimpses, at the start, of the video screens on either side of the podium, Obama's head and torso framed as if in doorways.
But in close shots, as a backdrop behind Obama's head, the set was more reminiscent of French doors in a well-heeled living room, lighted from behind with a soft peach glow. With his red striped tie and perfectly tailored suit, Obama looked absolutely un-radical.
All in all, the images seemed designed to look bipartisan and universal, as did the stagecraft details, large and small. For the shots of the crowd, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow pointed out admiringly, the campaign had handed out, not Obama-for-president posters, but small American flags.
And while Obama did not shy away from criticizing rival John McCain, even his many attacks were not angry so much as direct, peppered with lines like "We love this country too much to make the next four years look like the last eight" and "I'm not ready to take a 10 percent chance on change."
Obama's supporters were loud in the beginning, eager to cheer, and a lot more enthusiastic than, say, the politicians who applaud at a State of the Union address. But despite the rock-star buildup, they did not seem like Elvis worshipers. They were more like cheerful flag-wavers, even a bit self-congratulatory. One of Obama's more crowd-pleasing lines was this one: "This election has never been about me. It's about you."
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com 