Obama, Romney learned that silence isn't golden

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mitt Romney were supposed to leave New Hampshire on Wednesday as the prohibitive favorites to win their parties' presidential nominations. It didn't happen that way.

Romney has now lost twice, and Clinton, who ran third in Iowa, found New Hampshire a lot tougher than anyone could have anticipated. Some substantial part of the explanation for their difficulties might be called a tale of two speeches.

One was the address Barack Obama delivered, and the other was the one Romney should have given — but didn't.

Obama's, obviously, was the stunning victory speech after last week's Iowa caucuses; he's been riding a wave of enthusiasm ever since. Even the sort of seasoned political analysts inclined to cynicism recognized that the junior senator from Illinois had delivered the sort of soul-stirring, landscape-altering address that deserves to be reckoned in a rhetorical lineage that includes, most recently, memorable public speeches by John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan.

(Just for the sake of historical perspective, it's worth keeping in mind that eloquence guarantees nothing on Election Day; William Jennings Bryan's masterful "Cross of Gold" speech will be studied as long as there are American politics. Nevertheless, American voters rejected Bryan's presidential candidacy in three elections.)

There were two things about Obama's speech that remain as remarkable as the campaign heads toward Tsunami Tuesday on Feb. 5 as they were in the moment of delivery. The first is that it was, at bottom, a discussion of race in which race never was mentioned.

The second is that both red and blue America seem to have heard the same thing — something worth noting in this bitterly partisan era. Thus, even a reflexively Republican commentator such as Bill Bennett praised the speech for appealing "to the better angels of our nature."

Race is America's perennially unfinished business, but what Obama did in Iowa was to offer a new way of talking about it, and it is that — more than any policy he yet has advanced — that marked him as a candidate of change.