When I read that Barack Obama was going to give his speech from a faux Greek temple I thought it was a joke.
After Obama’s Berlin speech, his numbers went down. Obama is overexposed, and turning his nomination speech into a kind of coronation is the exact sort of thing that has been causing Obama to hemorrhage support for the last few weeks. People don’t want to turn their politicians into secular messiahs—and that’s exactly what the Obama campaign has been trying to do.
The McCain camp is saying that Obama will get a 15 point bounce from the convention—trying to set expectations to unlikely highs. At this rate, I’m not so sure that Obama will get any bounce at all. He’s already got adulatory coverage for months on end—what more can he get from the media? When you’re already the media’s darling and MSNBC is at outreach of your campaign, there’s nowhere to go but down.
Obama will probably get some bump, but it won’t be 15 points, and it may not last long. I don’t see the Hillary supporters coming home this time, even with Hillary’s tepid praise for Obama last night.
Pride goes before a fall. Given the stratospheric heights to which Obama has been lofted, he should be more circumspect about how he runs his campaign. He wants to be the next Jack Kennedy—but he could end up an Adlai Stevenson.
UPDATE: After watching this video of the set, it looks like Sen. Obama is invoking the Markets of Trajan rather than a Greek temple. Then again, Trajan had military and executive experience, while Obama most assuredly has neither.
