This man will lead us into the future

DENVER — He's going to win.

It's true that watching a historic speech with 84,000 joyous people on a beautiful Colorado night is bound to sway a person. Not to mention that I got to meet Susan Sarandon.

But that was my gut impression during Barack Obama's acceptance of the Democratic nomination Thursday night. It doesn't matter that he's young, inexperienced and has that foreign-sounding name.

He's going to be the next president anyway.

It's not that his speech was spectacular and soaring — it wasn't, and I was grateful for that. It didn't match, for spine-tingling inspiration, the "we're not blue states or red states, we're the United States" speech he gave at the 2004 convention in Boston.

That one was a balm for a beat-up nation. This one was tougher. Pugilistic. "Workmanlike," as he had said it would be.

He gave a few specifics about what he wants to do — a move that brought a cheer from a crowd that knows he can be maddeningly vague. It was a bold liberal vision, perhaps too liberal for America.

"This is not the time for small plans," he said.

But the reason I think Obama's going to win is that his uprising has always been fueled by something far more primal than any government policy or program. It's the same stuff Ronald Reagan bottled in the 1980s.

Is this election about the future, or the past?

"It time for them to own their failure," he said of the Republicans, calling the GOP's ideas stale, their tactics divisive, their programs and policies broken.

It's time for the rest of us, he said, to look to a "better place around the bend."

That's irresistible in our frontier-minded country. It's the big picture of what this election is about. It's the reason Obama overcame a gifted politician of the 1990s in the primaries. No matter how hard Hillary Clinton tried, she couldn't shake that she was past, he is future.

That's John McCain's Achilles' heel, too, and Obama knows it. He hammered on this point. Fresh vs. stale. Change vs. same-old.

He also put to rest the notion that he's a wet noodle. He seemed angry at times. He took the personal smears about him being unpatriotic or a vapid celebrity and shoved them right back. He also looked the camera in the eye and promised he wouldn't stoop that low.

Most disappointing were little moments of slickness. He promised to cut taxes on the middle class, but conveniently never mentioned he would raise them on wealthier people.

He still never quite says how he would fix the "broken politics" in Washington, either. When he brought it up, I thought: Isn't this convention of yours, with all its lobbyist-funded partying, Exhibit A of the problem?

These are perennials in politics, though. There are larger, newer forces at work this year, from the desire to end the war to the sense that the nation has lost a step or two. That's what Obama called for last night. Nation building. Only here at home.

Of course we haven't heard from the Republicans yet. I'll get a chance to revise this prediction next week when I get to hear McCain's side of the story at the GOP convention.

So long Denver, St. Paul here we come.

Danny Westneat: 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.