Barack Obama’s star-turn  speech at the 2004 Democratic  National Convention in Boston sounds just as good now as it did eight years  ago. It was hours before that performance that Obama told a reporter, “I’m  LeBron, baby!” The boast is considered sheer hubris by his detractors, but it  wasn’t such a bad self-assessment. The background noise of Obama’s 2004 speech  is the low rumble of a political rocket about to slip the surly bonds of  earth.

In the C-SPAN footage, Jesse Jackson stands and applauds, not realizing how  thoroughly he would be eclipsed by the young African-American politician from  Illinois. Hillary Clinton brims with joy, having no idea that she would be  beaten by the newcomer for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. “OH-BAH-MAH!” chants fill the arena — the first time most of the nation hears  the name that will soon enough become iconic.

“Political genius,” Otto von Bismarck once said, “consists of hearing the  distant hoofbeat of the horse of history and then leaping to catch the passing  horseman by the coattails.” Obama’s speech in Boston was the first sign that he  was about to grab hold for a hell of a ride.

But 2004 was a beautiful mirage. Very little that was distinctive or stirring  from the convention speech survived first contact with the reality of Barack  Obama. Back then, he lambasted “the negative-ad peddlers who embrace the  politics of ‘anything goes.’” Now his campaign is a demolition machine with no  regard for the truth. Then, he said, “There is not a black America and a white  America and a Latino America.” Now he wants to squeeze as many votes as possible  out of a few key demographic groups. Then, he lamented how pundits “like to  slice and dice our country into red states and blue states.” Now he presides  over an electorate that is profoundly polarized by him.

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