In her August 28 OpinionJournal.com column, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan asserted that Sen. Barack Obama's Democratic National Convention speech at Denver's Invesco Field “has every possibility of looking like a Nuremberg rally.” Noonan wrote: "[T]he change of venue Thursday night to Invesco Field, and the huge, open air Obama acceptance speech is ... one of the biggest and possibly craziest gambles of this or any other presidential campaign of the modern era" [ellipses in original]. She continued: “Everyone can define what can go wrong, and no one can quite define what 'great move' would look like. It has every possibility of looking like a Nuremberg rally; it has too many variables to guarantee a good tv picture; the set, the Athenian columns, looks hokey; big crowds can get in the way of subtle oratory.”

Media Matters for America has previously documented other instances of conservative pundits making references to Nazis when talking about Obama, including when discussing Obama's speeches in particular. For example, on the February 11 broadcast of his Fox News Radio show, Tom Sullivan aired what he called a "side-by side comparison" of an Adolf Hitler speech and an Obama speech.

From Noonan's August 28 Wall Street Journal column:

The general thinking among thinking journalists, as opposed to journalists who merely follow the journalistic line of the day, is that the change of venue Thursday night to Invesco Field, and the huge, open air Obama acceptance speech is...one of the biggest and possibly craziest gambles of this or any other presidential campaign of the modern era. Everyone can define what can go wrong, and no one can quite define what “great move” would look like. It has every possibility of looking like a Nuremberg rally; it has too many variables to guarantee a good tv picture; the set, the Athenian columns, looks hokey; big crowds can get in the way of subtle oratory. My own added thought is that speeches are delicate; they're words in the air, and when you've got a ceiling the words can sort of go up to that ceiling and come back down again. But words said into an open air stadium ... can just get lost in echoes, and misheard phrases. People working the technical end of the event are talking about poor coordination, unclear planning, and a Democratic National Committee that just doesn't seem capable of decisive and sophisticated thinking. So: this all does seem very much a gamble. At a Time magazine event Wednesday afternoon, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe suggested the power of the stadium event is in this: it's meant to be a metaphor for the openness and inclusiveness that has marked the Obama campaign. Open stadium, 60,000 people -- “we're opening this up to average Americans.” We'll see. In my experience when political professionals start talking metaphors there's usually good reason to get nervous. (Questions: how many of the 60,000 will be Coloradans? Are a lot of the tickets going to out of staters? Are they paying for tickets? Is the Mile High event actually a fundraiser? What's the top ticket going for?)