I'll have more to say about Obama's speech later this week for HuffPost. But I can say right now that this was the most important speech of his political career, and quite probably his best. Historians will be writing about it for a long time.

This was not a conventional convention speech rallying the troops. It was a long meditation on the meaning of America that contrasts quite sharply with the mainstream liberal / left intellectual discourse of the moment.

Obama's story is very different from both the narrative @nhannahjones presented in The 1619 Project and the argument that my fellow critics of neoliberalism have been honing for the past decade or so. In many respects it is a conservative narrative.

Obama presented America as a democratic ideal -- one far from perfect at its inception that has been sharpened and improved by decades of collective struggle among people from every imaginable background. More Ken Burns than W.E.B. DuBois or Howard Zinn.

It's a speech in which Joe Biden is essentially a bystander and the 2020 primary is an afterthought. The protagonists are protesters, not politicians, and the battle is for democracy, not health care policy.

It is also, I think, a clear demonstration of the gulf between Democratic voters and democratic intellectuals.

Charisma alone has not sustained Obama as the most popular Democrat in the country for a decade. The way Obama talks about the country is the way most Democrats think about America, and the way most Democrats *want* to think about it.

That presents an intellectual challenge for those like myself who see the Obama presidency as a missed opportunity. We have to fit a call for political transformation into a narrative in which America is not a succession of corrupt cruelties, but an idea worth saving and serving.

That is not an easy project. It is not the program that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren presented in their convention speeches. But I see no other way forward.