I was pretty damned impressed with Senator Obama’s speech last night. I will say that I noticed a smoothing, a streamlining, of his fierce and powerful voice and rhetoric, until we came to 35 minutes into the speech, and Obama said this:

The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America.

So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.

That moved me; the truth of it was strong in his voice and his delivery. I hope, more importantly, it moved people who weren’t already Democrats to their core.

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