[gugi]

I guess I had to see the speech. As expected, Mr. Obama performed quite well. All candidates have always had staffers write their speeches (at least the ones who actually plan to get elected), some are better at delivering them than others and from what I understand Mr. Obama has been a lot more involved with the speech writing than it's the norm in this business. Which is good - he is a politician and his primary job is to convince people to vote for him (and as far as I understand that's something he has learned to do in recent years as his first speaches are reported to be a rather unimpressive).
Apparently Mr. McCain has some ground to gain as far as show goes. As far as public speaking goes he seems to be somewhat behind, but at least he's followed the advice to loose the sarkasm - rather european trait which tends to backfire in frong of big crowds.

Good speeches of course don't imply good leaders, but good motivational speeches certainly don't hurt one's prospects to get a leadership position in the first place. As far as what he was saying in that speech - well as expected he is saying what his audience would like to hear - that the former US policy of "we're doing what we think is right and don't really care what you think" is probably going to change if he gets elected. To what extent it will happen is a whole other question. To his credit he did mention immigration, which is not all that popular point in Europe.

Interestingly he tried to make a compelling case to support Afganistan, but somehow the Iraqi people didn't qualify for the same. Of course, the Iraqis don't have to fight the oppression of the Taliban and poverty and oh, their poppy production has somehow been lagging in recent years - better step it up if they want to qualify for the joint American-European help.

Yes it's just words, but the "we shall fight on the beaches" and "I have a dream..." were just words as well. From what I've seen from (mostly US) elections, policies don't really matter that much - what matters is how much people 'like' the candidate. So if those are the rules, a smart politician will just play by them - secure as much money as they can (cerainly more than the opposition), then buy as much and as good ads and media exposure as they can, and certainly make sure that they are likeable....

And no I'm not blaming America - in my country things are even worse than that. I'm just noting that the world we live in isn't necessarily what our ideal world would be. So what's that got to do with the speech of Obama - ah yeah the poll. Well, I don't vote, not in US elections, but if I were to vote his speeches wouldn't be enough.