My favorite comment about Obama's eye-opening speech....

Paul Begala, Democratic strategist: "I was struck. It seemed to me at over 30 minutes, it was an extraordinarily long speech for these sorts of situations. Ronald Reagan's Challenger speech was four and a half minutes. Bill Clinton's speech in Oklahoma was nine minutes. This was over 30..."
Why the length? A possible answer: Obama's speech drew directly from the sermonic tradition of the black American church. In this tradition, sermons tend to be long and open-ended. Indeed, the first time I attended a white American church (somewhere near Sharptown, Maryland), I was shocked by the brevity of the sermon. Not only was the sermon short, the service was done in about the same amount of time a sermon in a black church lasts. This is my theory: A little black church was going on at the University of Arizona.