Ages ago, it seems now, I described Sen. Barack Obama as using


rhetoric vapid enough to impress John Edwards.


But I was wrong. According to The News & Observer,


As for Obama, [Edwards] says: “Sometimes I want to see more substance under the rhetoric.”


“Sometimes.” I suppose he could be impressed the other times, but there’s no good in grasping at straws; I must admit I was wrong.

Gracious, if even that font of vapidity is wishing in vain for substance behind Obama’s rhetoric, then maybe Edwards is as annoyed as I am with Obama’s cloying advertisements about “changing our politics,” his heavy reliance on clich?s, his ability to sell nothing as if it were really something, to speak forth


an elevated nothing … a visionary nothing … a nothing rarefied in the elixir of our hopes and distilled with our zest for change. It is as intoxicating a nothing as ever there was. Obama pours out potent nothing, and each listener gives it his own special something.