Obama's speech

Obama's acceptance speech tonight at Invesco Field prompts two important questions:

1. Is it going to rain? (Luckily—and more than a few PR folks are going to be breathing a sigh of relief—no.)
2. Is it going to come off the way Obama wants it to? (A much more difficult question.)

As the New York Times reports, Obama wants the address to follow the example of John F. Kennedy's 1960 acceptance speech, which was also given outdoors at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (home of the USC Trojan football team). That address invited Americans to embark on a "New Frontier," a metaphor that defined his candidacy and the early 1960s.

Peter Gage, one of the Obama planners, said he studied photographs of Kennedy’s speech at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the only other such address to be held in an outdoor stadium in the modern television era.

Mr. Gage said the circular stage in Denver was inspired by Kennedy’s. A Sky Cam above the field will provide bird’s-eye views. Mr. Obama’s family will sit on seats on the floor before him, along with voters from swing states. The goal is to highlight ordinary people, and then mobilize them to work for the campaign.

Now that rain is out of the forecast, Obama's aides are buzzing about the technical details of the speech: Will it make Obama look elitist? Will the "Temple of Obama" backdrop constructed by party staffers to make him look "presidential" make him look narcissistic instead? Will he sound like he is talking out of a tin can? Will the strategy of having all of the people in the stadium send text messages—a tactic that seems too cute by half—crash the cell phone system?

The concern here is that the speech risks becoming a technical event instead of a rhetorical one. Is the Obama campaign as worried about what he will say in his speech as they are about packaging its scene? Certainly, the tone and presentation of the address are going to be essential to its reception—and a gaffe here would no doubt be serious and repeated throughout the campaign—but few remember what JFK looked like when he spoke. They remember what he said, how he captured the imagination of an uncertain, post-war America with a vision of a new possibilities, and how his speech transformed a presidency into Camelot.