Snapshots from the screen

Television coverage on primary night turned out some interesting moments.

Sen. John McCain came out early with his victory speech and may have found a new campaign slogan. On the goal of making America safe, McCain wound it up with this: “We can, we must….and when I’m president, we WILL.” Seems to be a sustainable counter to Obama’s “we CAN.”

Hillary Clinton came out on stage in Youngstown, Ohio and started a speech without even mentioning Wisconsin, which she’s done before when she lost. But she started slow, and seemed adrift, and searched for words to prompt applause and shore up….herself, I think. She seemed weary. The text doesn’t quite convey the weariness.

“We can’t just have speeches. We’ve got to have solutions and we need those solutions for America. We’ve got to get America back in the solutions business.” 

And as she was talking, Fox suddenly went to a split screen, with Clinton on the left and the Obama rally on the right, with the senator just entering the Texas arena where his fans were cheering exuberantly. Interesting moment…..what will the network do now? Stay with Clinton’s speech, or go to Obama’s?

They went to Obama’s. And that interesting moment turned into about 45 minutes….had to be the longest candidate ‘victory’ speech on a primary night….ever. It seemed endless. Not that it wasn’t inspiring as usual. But it’s just so usual now, and so prolonged a version of the usual (did anybody count the number of times he said the word “change”?), that it almost sounded cliche.

But the cable networks stayed with all 45 minutes of it, giving Obama some valuable free broadcast time to campaign. Here’s a snip:

“It is going to take more than big rallies. It is going to require more than rousing speeches … it is going to require something more because the problem that we face in America today is not the lack of good ideas. It’s that Washington has become a place where good ideas go to die,” he said.

Just a reminder. Sen. Obama is part of Washington. In fact, all three senators running right now are part of what’s not working in Washington, namely Congress.

Sooner or later, we’re going to have to get to the issues. Please.