Americans last night got their closest look yet at Barack Obama, the shooting star bidding to be our next President. His speech before 85,000 at Invesco Field was as much coronation as nomination. Yet for someone who is so close to being the most powerful man in the world, the remarkable fact is that Americans still know very little about either his political philosophy or what he wants to accomplish.
This is not unusual for the modern Democratic Party. As we’ve often noted, the party has tended to nominate relative unknowns ever since its animating liberalism fell out of public favor in the 1970s. Sometimes the voters have gone along with the leap of faith (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) and sometimes they haven’t (Michael Dukakis). But in either case the voters learned sooner or later that they were sold something more than the “change” they imagined.