Barack Obama four years ago and today

Four years ago, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. Here's what I wrote then. I'm not sure why I never published it.

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Let me be the next in a long line to jump, wholeheartedly, onto the Barack Obama bandwagon (for a sampling of others, see Pandagon and Daily Kos). While I'm too young to make any sweeping claims about where his speech ranks on the All-Time Greatest Speeches List, I can say without hesitation that it was, by far, the best speech I have ever seen. It's not even fair to compare it to the Kerry speech I saw earlier this evening.

Here's the best comparison I can think of: there's only one crowd I've ever seen that energized, and that was at a James Brown concert... everyone simply mesmerized by the talent up on stage. The style of the two, of course, is vastly different, but what they have in common is self-assurance. As my dad pointed out right away, Obama positively exudes poise.

All the self-assurance in the world doesn't do you any good, of course, unless you have something worthwhile to say. And did he ever. The best passage in an altogether sparkling speech:

Don't get me wrong.

The people I meet – in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks – they don't expect government to solve all their problems.

They know they have to work hard to get ahead – and they want to.

Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don't want their tax money wasted, by a welfare agency or the Pentagon.

Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn – they know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.

No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems.

But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all.

Yes. God yes.

It is exactly this message that the Democratic Party should be articulating. The government has a positive role to play in people's lives. It can't solve all of society's problems, but that doesn't mean it can't contribute to helping solve some of them. Americans want a chance to succeed, and at the moment, many Americans are being denied that chance.

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Four years ago, nearly everyone agreed that Obama would run for president some day. I didn't expect it to be so soon. After last night's speech, it's hard to imagine anyone else carrying the Democratic banner this November.

Was Austria-Hungary an empire?

Pieter Judson's answer is no. Instead, he argues that the Austrian component of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy was characterized by an "institutionalized pluralism" in which the state guaranteed the rights of its various linguistic minorities. Those minorities, far from forming nascent nations yearning for their own states, were actually quite loyal to the monarchy. That Austria had eleven distinct language-groups within its borders does mean that it ruled over eleven distinct nations. To assume so is to accept the nationalist fantasy that everyone is a member of a nation on the basis of the language that they speak. The presence of so many bilingual peasants in Austria belied nationalists' claims that nations were well-defined groups.

In short, the history of Austro-Hungary in the nineteenth century should not be seen as a struggle of a multitude of nations yearning for independence from the Viennese yoke.

(Swarthmore College has made Judson's lecture available online as part of a growing collection of faculty lectures. He's in the process of a writing a new book on Hapsburg Central Europe from 1780 to 1948.)

Bernini in LA

It's not often that I wish I lived in Los Angeles, but I would love to be able to see the Bernini portrait sculpture exhibition at the Getty (reviewed in the New York Times here). As my high school art history teacher once said, if it weren't for Michelangelo, Bernini would be the Italian artist that everyone knows. He wasn't much of a painter, but his sculptural and architectural masterpieces (often one and the same) are simply stunning. The vitality of his Apollo and Daphne and David surpass every other sculpture I've seen, with the possible exception of the Laocoon group. In Apollo and Daphne, he somehow captured the transformation from flesh to tree in marble.

Even Ottawa is a bit too far to travel for an art exhibition, but I'll be sorely tempted...