A few thoughts about Sen. Obama’s speech last, mainly from the perspective, as usual, for what it means for workers and labor. I was at Invesco Field last night. It was an amazing night, something you can say thirty years from now that you witnessed. One of the hardest things to do at a moment of great historical significance is to cut through the emotions and try to sift through the rhetoric and tease out some reality.

  I’m not going to repeat the usual, positive stuff–that would just bore the heck out of you. So, here were two of the thoughts I had last night at the time so they weren’t just the result of sober reflection the next morning.

  First, Obama didn’t use the word "union" even once–he did talk about raising teachers’ pay and there was a reference to people walking on the picket lines. And these lines were important:

We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma.  We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was President – when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.

We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job – an economy that honors the dignity of work.

   And…

Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

   Cool. But, where was the connection between what he correctly detailed as economic pain and crisis to the decline of the labor movement and the inability to organize? We heard the pro-union rhetoric a lot on the campaign trail. But, it troubles me that there was not, in a national appeal for "change" in America, an explicit connection drawn for an audience of millions between the lack of power they have at work and the attack on unions.

   Second, and I acknowledge this is a minority opinion and perhaps picky, but I’m not a big fan of American exceptionalism. Obama says:

And I will restore our moral standing, so that America is once again that last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom, who long for lives of peace, and who yearn for a better future.

 There are lots of things to love about the country we live in–unions that bring together people in communities to struggle for a common goal, for example. But, personally, I think we end up lording ourselves over the rest of the world with too much soaring references to the "American spirit" and the idea that one country is the "best hope" for anything.