Long standing ovation as he got to the podium. Lots of flashes from cameras. People holding up digital cameras and cell phones. Give him this: he’s got starpower and can give a speech. He’s a kind of walking poem. He refers to all the press and pundits arrayed before him and someone yells, “WE LOVE YOU!” You could be forgiven for thinking it was one of the pundits yelling. Obama says sometimes it’s almost like it’s a realty TV show, like “American Idol, Survivor, wondering if you’re going to go to Hollywood or get voted off the island.” But it’s “not a game, not a contest for the TV cameras.” Now it gets real quiet, the hush when a speaker really has a crowd. He says that in this campaign “our rivals are not one another, not even the other party; it’s going to be cynicism.” He says that “too often this cynicism makes us afraid to say what we believe.” “We don’t trust the truth,” and that leads us to be “small, timid, calculating, and cautious.” This surely is a veiled shot at Hillary, the same way Hillary takes a veiled shot at Obama whenever she talks of experience. “We edit ourselves, we censor our best instincts,” and on it goes, until he says (with apologies to Jesse Ventura), “we don’t have time to be cynical, we don’t have time”–repeating himself as he sometimes does, giving him the intonation of a preacher.

He then talks about substance, which is about what you would expect: health care for all, energy independence (“we don’t have to send our young people to fight, as long as we make sacrifices here at home”), and opposition to the war. He says everyone has to have a plan to end the war. “It was enough to run against George Bush [last fall], it’s not enough now.”

He then winds up by saying for every gaffe, etc. that the press focuses on, there’s a real person who needs help in America. He’s very much running against the process (that, it must be said, is responsible for throwing him up as a candidate in the first place). He rhetorically opposes doubt and possibility, despair and faith, cynicism and hope. Now he’s back to hope again, and I have to say I’m getting a little tired of hearing about hope. He says Democrats have had a “shortage of hope,” and finishes, “I’m calling you to hope.” People are on their feet, loving it.

Obama very well may end up flaming out in the primaries, but you can understand why he is enjoying the extraordinary burst of press and good feeling that has rocketed him to the front tier of candidates.