I posted this diary back in April. It didn't get much play then and it probably won't tonight, but what I saw tonight was absolutely the Art of Aikido and I thought it might be an appropriate description of what we witnessed tonight.
Many of us have been screaming for Obama to give us some "red meat", to punch McCain silly. Well, tonight he took all of McCain's attacks and turned them around masterfully and used them against McCain, WITHOUT getting down in the mud.
Andrew Sullivan's words from tonight:
What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again ... and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.
emphasis mine
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