Discours de Barack Obama du 19 avril. Bon dieu que ce type a le verbe aisé et la verve habile.

J’apprécie particulièrement son choix d’oser transgresser les tabous car finalement, qu’attendre de plus d’un leader qu’il mette son talent de communicateur pour dessiner un horizon commun de justice, de respect et de vérité ?

Face au cynisme de Clinton, Obama prouve chaque jour son talent d’orateur et ses capacités de rassembleurs, citoyens américains, donnez lui l’occasion de prouver ses talents de décideur. Offrez au monde l’espoir d’une alternative aux communautarismes et à l’affrontement des civilisations.

Personne ne sait si Obama « will deliver ». Mais il a une vision. Et elle est utopique et positiviste. J’achète.

Ou comme Chris Satullo (the Philadelphia Enquirer) le formule:

(…)In January, talking to a Nevada newspaper, Obama observed that Ronald Reagan « changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, in a way that Bill Clinton did not . . . because the country was ready for it. »

The Clinton camp, ever Pavlovian, began howling. Reagan better than Bill Clinton? Heresy! This willful mangling of Obama’s meaning churned up so much dust that it obscured what his words implied about his aims.

What Obama said is the stone truth. Ronald Reagan’s great accomplishment was to rewrite the underlying narrative upon which Americans rely to explain the world. Whoever frames this narrative will win most debates; anyone else is working uphill.

Today, we still live in Dutch’s Wonderland. His narrative still defines the terrain of American politics: It’s not the government’s money; it’s your money. America is the shining city on the hill, the beacon to all nations (thus entitled to protect its interests in any way it chooses). Government isn’t the solution; it’s part of the problem.

Bill Clinton didn’t supplant Reagan’s narrative. In his first term, he was reduced to fighting a savvy rear-guard action. In his second term, he might have crafted a new centrist narrative, but squandered the opportunity.

Now, eight appalling years later, the conservative narrative stands exposed, betrayed and exhausted.

Hillary Clinton, however, takes the Reagan terrain as a given. She assumes national politics must forever be the trench warfare, the nasty game of fragile victories measured in inches, that she knew during her husband’s administration. She trumpets her superior experience at that game. But experience can scar as well as teach.

Obama, meanwhile, seeks to create a whole new landscape. He feels the political earth moving. He wants to master the tectonics. He wants to shape the narrative that will replace Reagan’s crumbling fairy tale.

Clinton assumes a world where one must work tirelessly to cobble together 51 percent support for a few, long-held goals. Obama envisions a movement that – by unleashing the idealistic, inspiring the apathetic, and summoning the voiceless to the table – will create a 60 percent majority that can make old goals unstoppable and new ones possible.

Can Obama pull this off? Is he The One who can heal divisions, enable dreams, yet head off real threats? Or is he just a grandiose novice, who will wilt amid the inevitable cross fire?

I don’t know. Neither do you. But I’d rather risk finding out than settle for more years of barbed wire and pointless carnage on Ronald Reagan’s exhausted terrain.