Obama’s speech was the only part of the convention my first-week-of-classes self could manage to watch live. It was not quite what I expected, but probably better. Democratic candidates since JFK and RFK have had a tendency to go for the soaring Ted Sorensen rhetoric that never seems to sound right coming out of non-Kennedy-accented, educated-after-the-1940s mouths. Unsurprisingly, most of these Kennedy wannabees did not pan out as national candidates. In a high-flown speech, Obama could never have matched the expectations for ultra-eloquence he has engendered, and he would have fed into the “show horse” meme pushed by the Clinton and McCain forces and the Baby Boomer-dominated media. Instead he came across as very direct and grounded, making the Rovian semi-smears and coded slurs of the past month seem as stupid and counter-productive as they were.

Once again, I found my response to Obama was very personal. His name may not be common in Kansas, but he does sound like a guy from there, and seems to represent the best aspects of the state where I grew up. Perhaps it will not come as a surprise that I tend to identify more with the Free State side of the Kansas tradition — the anti-slavery, pro-education, progressive side — rather than the anti-evolution, homophobic, paleo-Christian side that has been more on display in recent years. Then there’s the generational aspect: my Mom had an early 70s young mother dress just like the one Barack’s mom wears in one of the pictures in the biographical video that was shown; watching the moon landing as a small boy was one of my strong early memories, too; and one of his best lines against McCain was a crappy 70s TV reference. On a more serious level, we finally get a candidate whose outlook was not shaped by the whole coonskin cap to Woodstock to Weather Underground arc that we are all so very tired of hearing about.

I could live without the tax cut bidding war aspect of Obama’s economic plans, featured in the speech and heavily featured in the commercials that have been running during the Cardinals games lately. Yet, as typically New Democrat centrist as the speech was in some ways, it was, as Andrew Sullivan writes, “unashamedly liberal” in others. Obama actually spoke contemptuously of the idea that the market would solve all problems. He copped to the belief that corporations could not necessarily be trusted to work for the good of all without the government placing some limits on their behavior. And now that I think about it, that middle-class tax cut, combined with other proposals, sounds suspiciously like what they used to call a “transfer payment,” down the economic scale for once. Go transfer payments!