The oration from the temple

So what did you think about Barack Obama’s speech? This take sees two different–and clashing–motifs:

Listen closely to the 46-minute address, however, and you heard two speeches crushed somewhat jarringly together.

The first half, one suspects, was the speech that Obama felt he had to give: a traditional partisan appeal that, for all his sonorous cadences, read like it could have been stitched together randomly from speeches delivered on any given day from rank-and-file Democrats on the floor of the House of Representatives.

There were denuciations of outsourced manufacturing jobs and promises to save Security Security and frequent baiting of John McCain for being the candidate of the rich and a weakling against Osama bin Laden.

The second half sounded like the speech Obama wanted to give: a plea for a new brand of politics, one in which politicians don’t attack each other’s motives or character, and Washington calls a ceasefire in such drearily familiar fights as abortion and gun control.

Obama did not acknowledge the two halves of his address—the partisan top and the post-partisan close—much less try to reconcile them.