I think it's an incredible line. I read way too much about the election and could probably bore you with policy arguments and votes each candidate has taken and so forth. In that "pick your candidate" quiz at the start of this thread Obama was like 90% of my ideal. I very much know what I'm getting into, and I'm not generally moved by empty emotional appeals, but when I was watching that speech, that line in particular made me say "Holy shit, that's a brilliant line" and others I spoke to who watched the speech had the same reaction. It's empowering and incisive -- it's all too easy to wait for someone else (like Obama, even) to come along and fix our problems, but that abdicates a portion of our own will and potential.

He has well-formed policy proposals, a health-care plan that the Wall Street Journal has deemed superior to Clinton's (as has Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor), an economic stimulus plan that media and experts have praised, a consistent record of opposing Bush's Middle East foreign policy (e.g. opposing the Kyl-Lieberman authorization of force in Iran, which Clinton voted FOR, despite her admission that she didn't realize in voting for the Iraq resolution at the time that Bush would misuse that delegation of authority), etc. He has plenty of substance.

But for all the talk about how "inspiration" and "hope" and "change" are vacuous, they are a valid end in and of themselves. There are millions of disaffected cynics who have given up on our political system, and as much as selling himself as a candidate, Obama is selling the idea that mass concerted action can change that -- that people who feel left out by politics as they stand today do have a voice if they choose to use it. The way you effect real change in Washington is with a sweeping popular mandate. GWB claimed he had one in 2000 and everyone laughed. He was lucky to even be in the White House at all. Reagan in 1984, however, had a real mandate. That was a crushing victory, and it enabled him to push his tax cuts and budgets and so forth through a heavily Democratic Congress, because politicians were loath to go against the tide.

If Clinton is the nominee, and Clinton wins the presidency, she isn't going to win 35 states. She isn't going to win 58% of the popular vote. She'll win Ohio and a couple of other states, and come in with a weak majority. She sure as hell isn't going to get her mandate-based health care plan through Congress, and Senate filibusters and opposition from Blue-Dog Democrats within her party will tie her hands on a number of policy initiatives. That's where a 50%+1 approach gets you. Obama recognizes an opportunity for a real paradigm shift instead of another round of "ok, now it's the Democrats' turn to screw things up," and the foundation for that change lies in reaching out to ordinary citizens and inspiring them to believe that Washington politics need not be mired in the same endless cycle.

That's not a cult of personality -- the whole point is that it's not about Obama, but rather about all of us, as citizens -- and I think anyone who dismisses it as vacuous is falling victim to cynicism: perhaps it's all a "fairy tale," to borrow a phrase, perhaps it's youthful nonsense to imagine that moneyed interests and entrenched partisan divisions could ever be dislodged, perhaps it's all a quixotic endeavor. Can millions of ordinary citizens crying out in unison really change our political system? That's what "yes we can" is all about -- let's find out.