Man, they really must have practiced for this speech. Obama's got a new kind of power to his delivery.
I saw some papers waved around peripherally when he was speaking, but he is clearly an
orator, not a mere speech-reader like Bush and so many other petty politicians. That was the best speech he could give, and he gave it well, considering his win is a huge triumph that vindicates literally generations of African-Americans, but alongside that triumph is the, probably insurmountable, problems that face the US.... Bringing the US "back to prominence" is not going to happen anytime soon. They will be too busy trying to pay down their trillion-dollar debt and fighting useless wars externally then to be able to heal the innerworkings of their own country. If Obama can institute social programs in the US (free medical care and half decent publicly funded schools) which in itself is practically an impossibility because the idea of paying taxes to help someone worse off is highly offensive to the average american.
Not only that, but there's the economic/environmental side, if Obama really can see long-term (which clearly he can) he will know that the US's reliance on oil is not a viable economic driver any more. And also not the way of the future (he was insinuating this in his speech when he eloquently referred to the 106 year old black woman voter). If he can transplant the fading manufacturing jobs from car-makers to wind-turbinemakers, and shift the dependence from oil as a source of fuel to combinations of other diversified sources, somehow...If Obama can institute country-wide mandatory recycling, composting etc....but they HATE national programs - they are scared of them,
they freely paint 'community organizers' as 'terrorists'. Obama knows that without a literal
paradigm shift in american thinking, a regeneration of their country will be impossible.
Everything in the US revolves around doing
whatever it takes to make money, money is the key to happiness, americans see rampant consumerism as a freedom not a privilege, the freedom to BUY, the freedom to borrow way way more then you have. The freedom to gorge yourself your entire life on McDonalds and be proudly morbidly obese (1 in 4 over there) and the freedom to be too stupid to feed yourself nutriciously, the freedom to carry automatic weapons so they can kill each other at whim. Let's not forget to mention their avaricious attitude towards the resources of other nations! Water, they'll want to drain the Great Lakes in our lifetime, pollution? Just dump it up north or down south or on their own people and make them play golf on a nuclear waste dumpsite, the US'll bomb a country to hell and harass OTHER countries to clean up their mess!!.....Hell - even the very US elections and the federal reserve are private enterprise! We have 'Elections Canada' and CBC, and free universal health care and good public schooling that'll get you into a university, even being the richest country in the world - the US has nothing of the sort.