Only a moral cretin could fail to be inspired when the speech rolled around, in its closing moments, to Martin Luther King Jr. But that inspirational moment was just a moment, and I think that the pundits and advisers who urged Barack Obama to temper his soaring rhetoric and produce a more workmanlike, down-to-earth speech did him a disservice: The speech had good lines and good sections, but for the most part it felt surprisingly banal and jury-rigged, and it suffered throughout from a failure