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Mark Warner: Ambassador from the future. Here he is in Second Life, which is where we'll all live in the future.
"He's a bad choice," I said to an older, wiser journalist today. "Mark Warner's going to go up there and salute bipartisanship and ignore McCain." This journalist, as I mentioned, is older and wiser, and he said I was wrong. Warner's a tech guy, he said. Tonight, he's going to act as "ambassador from the future."We were both right. Warner's speech was exquisitely framed. "This is the most important contest of our lives," he said. "Not the presidential election. The race for the future." The future. "It won't be won with yesterday's ideas, or a president stuck in the past. We need a president who understands the world of today. We need Barack Obama."But poor Warner. What a day to be struck with aphasia. Up there on that stage, before tens of thousands of eager Democrats, he forgot John McCain's name! So attendees and viewers alike heard a lot about the importance of the future, and parsed a lot of vague allusions to "outdated thinking" and politicians "stuck in the past." What they didn't hear was that John McCain is the politician of the past. While Warner spoke of the dream of an "administration that believes in science," he didn't see the need to mention that Obama is running against a politician who thinks tax cuts raise revenues. When Warner encouraged delegates to dream of a world in which "all children have access to health care," he forgot to mention that John McCain had voted against expanding S-CHIP.This is, as Mark Warner says, an important contest. It's an important election. Much too important to forget the name of Obama's opponent or refuse to take what your speech is saying and say it clearly. Name names. Draw contrasts. If Warner believes John McCain is a politician of the past and Barack Obama is oriented towards the future, he should say so. Otherwise, he's delivering a great speech but forgetting its central ingredient: A subject. Image used under a Creative Commons license from Pathfinder Linden.