Political Orbits: the Good Ship Obama

I’ve been wanting to highlight Barack Obama since I read that wonderful piece on him in The New Yorker about a month ago.

What was I waiting for? This may sound a little silly, but I’ve been holding out, hoping that his campaign would post a video clip on his campaign site that didn’t just play on the Windows Media Player. Of course, they’ve have a campaign ad up that runs in both worlds. I was just hoping for something more dynamic and unfiltered. I wanted a stump speech.

The last Political Orbit I did had to do with Arnold’s convention breakthrough. With the announcement that Obama will be giving the keynote at the Democratic convention, however, we now have something much more exciting: the breakthrough of someone with real qualifications.

The political universe has been frustratingly static for some time. (What kind of excitement is there in the rise of cardboard Bill Frist? the “coming out” of Zell Miller? even the delayed demise of DeLay?) All of a sudden, though, the conventions have unhinged the galaxies. As such, beware the conventional wisdom. For, as easy as it is to speculate on “new order” gravitational dynamics such as those between John 2 and Clinton 2, more meteoric happenings can as easily come to pass.

The Obama campaign ad in: Windows Media 56K, DSL; Real Media DSL/Cable; Quicktime
Campaign media page: here
Campaign home, here.