Obama's rhetoric

Times Higher Education published this letter from me in its 9 April issue:

In his interesting article on rhetoric, Tom Palaima suggests that the title of Barack Obama's book The Audacity of Hope (2006) was inspired by Martin Luther King ("Tools of the trade", 2 April).

In fact, Obama had a more direct and personal source of influence. In his earlier book, Dreams From My Father (1995), he recounted the profound impact on him of a sermon by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, titled "The Audacity of Hope".

Obama used the phrase in his 2004 Democratic Convention speech. After Wright's explosive, racially tinged sermons came to light last year, Obama adapted it again in the landmark speech that addressed the race issue and distanced him from his former pastor.

Wright's mistake, he argued, was not that he had talked about racism, but that he spoke as if no progress had been made. "What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow." Obama used Wright's own phrase to rebut his negative conclusions about the state of US society.

The New Liberalism is big in Japan!

Last month I visited Japan and gave two papers at Kyushu University in Fukuoka. One was on Churchill's so-called 'Gestapo' speech of 1945, and the other was on Gordon Brown and the Credit Crunch in Historical Perspective. A version of this has just been published on the History & Policy website. My visit was in connection with a major Japanese project tracking changes in British economic thinking 'From New Liberalism to New Labour'. (For details, see the homepage of Prof. Gentaro Seki).

Here are some photos of my trip:













I wasn't quite sure what to make of this:



In fact it was a bit of a

US election humour

It's time for a round-up of the best election humour so far. Stepping back to pre-Convention days, this flow-chart gives a useful look inside the mind of Dick Cheney. This SNL sketch is quite amusing; I like the idea of the Republican ad voiceover man whose voice drips with sarcasm even in normal conversation. Jon Stewart skewers some GOP hypocrisy in this clip. And here you can watch David Letterman blasting McCain's no-show on his programme. (Surely McCain's 'suspension' of his campaign will backfire?)

And finally, to demonstrate this blog's entirely non-partisan nature, here is some gentle ribbing of Barack Obama's rhetoric, courtesy of The Onion, under the headline Obama Modifies 'Yes We Can' Message To Exclude Area Loser.

Tory posters online

I'm more happy than I can say that the Conservative Party Archive poster collection has now been digitised. What a brilliant resource! The poster above is from 1929. And to think that they still managed to lose the election ...

Free Our Bills!

Here's a link to an important campaign to get Parliament to update the way it makes information on legislation available to the public. That may not sound awfully thrilling, but they do make an interesting and amusing case for it.

Gordon Brown's nightmare

Some words I never thought I'd type: here is a genuinely funny performance from William Hague in the House of Commons.