Dan Balz of the Washington Post is one of the most experienced and thoughtful writers on politics in the United States. He is curious enough that he was at the first Yearly Kos in Las Vegas early enough to be present for the training sessions before the conference even started.
In what may have been the single most important day for speeches this year, given how this campaign has unfolded, he has just put up a remarkable piece titled Two speeches in two hours crystallize the state of Campaign 2016, which I assure you is worth your time to read.
Let me offer the first three paragraphs:
Two speeches. Two Americas. A pair of apocalyptic arguments and one call to burn down the house. That’s the summation from just two remarkable hours Thursday that crystallized the final month of Campaign 2016.
In back-to-back appearances, in what might be the two most compelling hours of the entire election, Michelle Obama in New Hampshire and Donald Trump in Florida delivered the fiercest, most provocative and hardest-hitting speeches of an election cycle that has been without precedent in hot rhetoric.
The presidential campaign has been building toward all this. Day after day after day, the rhetoric has intensified, the charges and countercharges have escalated, the issues have been reduced to asterisks and the gulf between the Trump and Clinton coalitions has widened. Sunday’s debate in St. Louis foreshadowed what was to come. Now there will be no turning back.
He goes through both speeches, how it played out (the empty box in the corner while Obama was speaking, in which I can note you could see Giuliani making introductory remarks), noting that Fox did NOT carry the speech by the First Lady.
His reportage of the two speeches is fair and accurate. But accurate reportage is not what makes a great reporter. It is also the ability to draw the reader into the scene and event being reported. You can see that in the three paragraphs above.
You will see it again in his close, which is the only other thing I will quote:
In two hours Thursday, the lines were drawn as never before. Michelle Obama delivered a case against Trump’s personal and moral fitness with a forcefulness that Hillary Clinton cannot match, given the past charges against her husband. Meanwhile, Trump has embraced fully the blow-it-up argument that will rattle Republican leaders but which animates those Americans who are most alienated from the country’s establishment. Those are the parameters of the political debate as it stands today — and the choice that will be settled on Election Day.
Go read the entire thing.