With the background of a massive neoclassical set that the staging supervisor for Britney Spears said was designed to evoke the White House and the Lincoln Memorial not the Acropolis, but that the McCain campaign called the “Temple of Obama,”  Barack Obama, the first black American, accepted the Democratic nomination for President and said hello to Hollywood.

Back in 1952 Billy Wilder told a reporter in Berlin that “When they begin copying Hollywood, it’s all over.”

Barack tried to copy Hollywood and recreate his recent speech in Berlin last night before some 85,000 Democrats on his mission to define change among a host of Hollywood celebrities including Stevie Wonder on stage and Oprah Winfrey, Obama’s most influential celebrity booster in the audience.

Oh, the celebrities were there, Ben Affleck, Spike Lee, Charlize Theron, Josh Brolin, Annette Bening, Susan Sarandon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gwyneth Paltrow Richard Dryfuss and Sean Penn.  Entertainers performing include Kanye West, the Black Eyed Peas, Sheryl Crow, Melissa Etheridge, Cyndi Lauper and of course Stevie Wonder.

Long before this Convention, the McCain camp painted Obama as a lightweight celebrity on the level of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, and Obama proved their point this evening.

And the Hollywood surprises were fulfilled when Joe Biden, the pit bull of the Obama campaign, stepped up to the podium to warm up the audience before Obama took the stage.

Obama was introduced by an elaborate, Hollywood production video tape projecting the biographical and human side of the candidate and thereafter to tumultuous applause he stepped into a circle of lights symbolic of the oval office, where he accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

It was a dramatic scene when he walked to the podium, with a somewhat smug arrogant presence.

His speech was generic with the usual democratic pap which failed to present his case for leadership. 

He often came off like Elmer Gantry promising things he could never deliver, such as taking the homeless off the streets.

It was a speech filled with generalizations with few specifics as to what he will do to create the change to the issues he outlined.

Obama delivered a speech with worn-out ideas, prose and poetry, but with no catch phrase.  It was the typical laundry list of liberal democratic ideas.  There really wasn’t anything new but the drama, the same drama that we saw when he was in Berlin and the same drama that we saw in another politician in Berlin prior to World War II.

Fireworks, dramatic music large crowds rhetoric on critical issues that no politician could ever deliver, and he wants us to believe that it was change that brought him to us and that he is all about change, without the specifics as to how he would effect the change for the better.

This was the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s, “I have a Dream” speech and he made all but a passing reference to the anniversary.  Interesting, in light of the fact that Obama wouldn’t have been standing at that podium this evening if it were not for Dr. King.

As Billy Wilder said a long time ago, “When they begin copying Hollywood, it’s all over.”  I found the drama, the speech, the music, the fireworks, the crowd, the set and most of all Obama to be a scary candidate for President of the United States.