When the president-elect announced that he'd be making a weekly YouTube addresses, we prepared ourselves for the dulcet tones of Barack's voice soothing us through America's economic crisis. In today's address, Obama channels all the gravitas he can muster as he lectures us on "the survival of the American dream." Talk of "our darkest hour" echoes Winston Churchill, conveniently the only politician who Obama hasn't yet been compared to. In any case, he promises an apocalyptic "new beginning" on January 20th. Click for the clip and promise not to get scared.
For a YouTube address, it reaches relatively deeply into what's going on, even channeling Langston Hughes' most famous poem at one point. I don't think Bush had a State of a Union this eloquent. Incredibly, Obama is actually the distant, distant relative of Winston Churchill. If he's going to break out the intense rhetoric of the wartime British prime minister, he'd better have Winston's sense of humor as well. Churchill famously said upon first meeting Violet Bonham Carter in 1906: "We are all worms. But I really think I am a glow worm."
