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Obama's Closing ArgumentWatching Obama try to convince Pennsylvanians.

By John Dickerson
Posted Monday, April 21, 2008, at 9:14 AM ET

Read Part 1 of John Dickerson's travels with Sen. Barack Obama over the weekend.

(Continued from page 1)

George Bush won't be on the ticket: If anyone in the crowd has stopped being excited, this passage offers a chance for everyone in the audience to blow out whatever remains of their vocal chords.

But McCain will be on the ballot: Boos. "I respect his service," says Obama. Applause. In Scranton late Sunday night, Obama asked: "You know what John McCain's problem is?" An audience member yelled, "He's too old." Obama responded immediately: "No, no, that's not the problem. There are a lot of wise people. …" That's another assist for McCain—and also classy. Obama could have let that slide.

There is a choice in the primary: This is the Hillary-bashing section of the speech. Clinton is captive to the lobbyists whom she defends. Obama then runs through how her various evasions on NAFTA, Mark Penn and Colombia, and the Iraq war represent typical Washington cynicism. She will do and say anything to get elected, he charges. This long section bends (and sometimes breaks) his high-minded new politics message. Sensing this contradiction in Reading, he said, "Our campaign is not perfect, but you get elbowed enough, and you start to elbow back."

Obama will tell people hard truths (unlike Hillary): 94.3 percent of the time Obama never really tells the audiences anything uncomfortable though he boasts that he will 100 percent of the time. What he promises them instead is to tell people they don't like (auto executives and Wall Street fat cats) what those groups don't want to hear. In Reading, however, Obama was a truth-teller. A local activist stood and asked what he would do to end the zero-tolerance policies for those who deal and use drugs in public housing. Obama could have wiggled around the question. Why tick off a local activist before election time? Instead he told the woman, "I'm sympathetic [to those who are evicted] but not that sympathetic." If you want a break on public housing, you can't mess with drugs, Obama told her. The audience loved it.

History of hope: As he concludes, Obama answers the criticism that his message of hope is naive with a tour through American history, citing the achievements—from ending slavery to equality for women—brought about by hope. "If those colonists had listened to the naysayers who say you can't defeat the British, where would we be?" he asked the crowd in Scranton. Pointing to Caroline Kennedy, who introduced him in Scranton, he said, "When Caroline Kennedy's father looked up at the moon, he didn't say, 'Oh that's too far.' "

The Obama pitch has been remarkably consistent over the months. Without notes, he can now produce it with very little deviation from stop to stop. Depending on how he does in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, he may finally get a chance to write a new speech.

Posted Monday, April 21, at 9:15 a.m.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at .
Photograph of Barack Obama by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.
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Comments from the Fray

The optimal course for this election to take, for the McCain camp, is for Obama to drum up a lot of emotional enthusiasm, but remain relatively unexamined/untested. Then they've got all this character-destroying ammunition, see, that they can undermine his campaign with through shock value and repetition. What he needs is to be challenged on these issues now, to inoculate the electorate against them later. And frankly, if he's got a glass jaw, better he break it now in the primary. If you're asking me who has the more compelling argument, I'd argue in return you're being naive. Look at their policy positions. Hillary's the more progressive of the two. But you'd never know it by the coverage. Odd, that.

--Fielding Bandolier

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