EXTRA: Trying hard to be quotable?

“America is not about what can be done for us. It is about what can be accomplished by us” – President Barack Obama, victory speech at the McCormick Place.

  -0-



BIDEN: A new and lasting nickname?

It struck me that Barack Obama was trying to speak for the ages, just like there are times when I try writing a commentary out of the misguided notion that I’m writing a piece of copy that has the potential to be read for ages.

It usually results in some overblown copy that reads more pompous than anything else.

WHICH IS WHAT I kind of thought of the victory speech Obama gave early Wednesday at the McCormick Place.

That particular line he spoke struck me as an attempt to remind us of the famed John F. Kennedy line about “asking not” what we can get from our country, but what we can do for it.

Yet somehow, Kennedy comes off as more eloquent.

Obama even managed to try to steal from himself – specifically from that speech he gave at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston which was the moment when most people in this country first heard of the then-state senator from the Hyde Park neighborhood.

OR DO YOU think his line “We remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and forevermore will be, the United States of America” was something we’ve never heard before?

If anything, the moment of originality may well have come from Obama’s labeling of Vice President Joe Biden as the “happy warrior.” Will Biden ever live down that label?

Then again, maybe I’m being too harsh on Obama. Inspirational rhetoric doesn’t come along every day.

Just as we also ought to consider the concession speech given by Mitt Romney – which I have largely already forgotten. At least he didn’t say something stupid that we’d forever remember him for!

  -30-