Clinton, McCain Could Pick Up Some Pointers From Obama

Add conservative columnist—and speechwriter of note—Peggy Noonan to the list of pundits impressed by Barack Obama’s address on race. “It was a speech to think to, not clap to,” Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal . And it holds a lesson for Clinton and McCain: Say "something interesting"—speak in paragraphs instead of soundbites—and you, too, might get more than an 8-second snippet of your speech on the news.

"The speech assumed the audience was intelligent," Noonan writes. "This was a compliment, and I suspect was received as a gift." But the ex-Reagan speechwriter chides Obama for pandering to Democrats using bleak depictions of America: “Most people didn’t experience the past 25 years that way. Because it wasn’t that way. Do the Obamas know it?” (More Barack Obama stories.)