Soaring rhetoric?  I don't think so.  It sounded like every State  of the Union Speech you've ever heard, except the 2002 speech.  "We will get rid of government programs that don't work."  I've never heard that before.  The real challenge for Barack is to name one.  The whole speech, except for the part about his parents, sounded exactly like Al Gore's convention speech in 2000, without the "lock box."  I started getting all nostalgic.

Then he started talking about his patriotism, and all Democrat's patriotism.  "We all love our country."   That's when the cognitive disconnect started.  His adorable wife calls America a "mean" country.  She only started feeling proud of her country when her husband started winning primaries.  William Ayers, Obama's long-time political crony, is an unrepentant terrorist who enjoys having his picture taken standing on a crumpled American flag.  So the picture of every delegate waving little flags, and all of the "To Make It Look More Like the White House" flags on the set just looked like overcompensation for the whole "flag pin" flap that was more revealing than anyone really knew at the time.

And then there is the phony-baloney myth manufacture about his "story."  "Four years ago, I told you my story...[and you fell for it hook, line and sinker.]  "...a brief union [after they met at the march on Selma] between a young woman from Kansas and a man from Kenya...who shared a dream that in America, their son could achieve whatever he set his mind to [which is why my dad went back to Kenya and my mother married another foreign national and left the country as soon as she could.]  And Grandma, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management and gave up so much so that Barack could go to a good (private) school, because that's what typical white women do.  The lesson from that: no vouchers, no school choice, government pays for college because my wife can't stop bitching about her student loans.

There was one part that almost had me going to the dark side: Barack's vision of health insurance is, if you can't get any through your work, you are entitled to the same health care plan that members of Congress vote  themselves.  Wow.  I turned to my husband and said, "So, its agreed: instead of moving to France if Obama is elected, we stay here and you quit your job."  Wooohoooo!