Supporters of Obama sometimes are prone to sweeping, majestic verdicts. We’ve heard that Iraq is the worst (fill in the blanks) in our history; that his race speech was comparable to the Gettysburg Address, that Bush’s Knesset speech on appeasement (in which Obama was never mentioned by name) was a historic new low in political history, etc. Yet in this entire campaign I can’t think of much of anything that any candidate of either party or their supporters have said or done that is particularly novel or unusual in the annals of election history.
That said, the only truly amazing event, one that I never thought I would see in my lifetime (to borrow the language of hyperbole), was Barack Obama’s erstwhile pastor addressing a packed NAACP conference, where he outlined genetic differences in the brains of blacks and whites that affect relative learning acquisition—a speech that won a standing ovation from the crowd and silence from Mr. Obama himself. Now that really was unprecedented.