President-Elect Barack Obama doesn't just deliver perfect speeches; over time, he's become perfect at modulating the tone, the balance between substance and inspiration, and the intensity of his speeches to the moment. The legendary victory speeches of the first caucuses and primaries, where phrases like "Yes, We Can" first acquired their now unforgettable rhythm, soared almost too high, and then he brought it down, to better touch the fundamental material lives of people who needed more than words. And in the last weeks, he had ramped it back up. Tonight's speech was elegant, very concise, and at this point so many of Obama's references and phrases are familiar that it could serve almost like the couplet at the end of a sonnet, the concise and graceful endpoint of this astonishing campaign, a campaign that, like the speeches, managed to be disciplined and brilliant and inspiring and beautiful at the same time. But what Obama did tonight was new: he took himself out of the speech, for real. Usually when a politician says, "it's not about me, it's about you," well, it's about them. But Obama took it further. As Adam Serwer notes in his brilliant short essay, "we may not get there in one year or even one term," is a sad and joyful echo of Dr. King's, "I may not get there with you." But it is also an essential call to patience and to a sense of national purpose, a willful denial of the idea that a strong president can achieve anything. There is no hundred days, no mandate for obvious solutions. There is just the long "block by block" process of rebuilding a country whose politics, whose national identity, whose economy, and whose role in the world have been torn asunder by one of the strangest episodes of political mania in our history. Patience has been the hallmark of the Obama campaign since the day in January when David Plouffe, who did indeed assemble the best campaign in American history, decided to look months ahead and assemble a majority of delegates one by one instead of trying to steamroll Hillary Clinton. For a solid year, they have maintained that discipline and foresight without ever losing the inspiration and sense of wonder. If we (not Barack Obama) can bring that same spirit to the act of governing this country and saving its future, then perhaps it can be done in one term. --Mark Schmitt
