Okay, no more photos of stuffed elephants -- let's get serious here in the Twin Cities! The National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union, has released a statement saying they are "pleasantly surprised" by John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Why? Palin is on the record as opposing private school vouchers in Alaska. She has said that if government is paying to send children to private and parochial schools, that infringes upon those schools' rights to craft their curricula free of government interference. Not only does Palin believe vouchers are unconstitutional under her state's current laws, she has also cautioned against amending the Alaska constitution to allow vouchers. "I would caution those who are huge proponents of vouchers to remind them, a lot of the purpose of private schooling and home schooling is for less government intervention,” Palin said on Alaska radio in 2006, during her gubernatorial run.
The strange thing is, just two months earlier, Palin had answered an Alaska Family Council survey saying that she supported vouchers. She later claimed checking the "yes" box for vouchers on that survey was a "clerical error." That means Palin stands in opposition to one of the main components of her running mate's education plan.
With delegates and journalists wondering whether Hurricane Gustav will delay the proceedings here in the Twin Cities, we're all doing what any sane person would when bored in Minnesota -- going to the Mall of America, which is filled with all kinds of GOP-themed stuff.
Here is probably the only Republican who can accurately be called cuddly.
Here I am in Nickelodeon Universe, an entire theme park within the mall, complete with two roller coasters and dozens of other full-size rides. Those are too scary for me, though.
Politico media reporter Michael Calderone is elated to meet his old childhood friend, Giant Blue Lego (TM) Dinosaur.
Here is the gift box presented to me by the RNC welcome team upon my arrival at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport this afternoon. Corn subsidies, anyone?
The blogosphere has been awash in suggestions that Sarah Palin will be widely viewed as politically inexperienced, a lightweight beauty queen, and even a bad mother. But today polling is out, and it shows Palin has made a great first impression on the American public; she is viewed favorably by 78 percent of Republicans, 26 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of unaffiliated voters. Compare that to a roll-out favorability rating of just 43 percent for Joe Biden. Women seem to be more skeptical of Palin than men, but that is to be expected; on average, women are more skeptical of all conservative politicians and policies than men are.
I hope these numbers serve as a wake-up call for both the national media and the liberal blogosphere. Independent pro-choice women won't be taken in by McCain's pandering choice, but that doesn't mean the American public will respond kindly to the vilification of this woman. She is attractive, and a working mom doing one of the most difficult jobs in the world -- raising a child with a disability. Yes, she is a former beauty queen who made it in politics. Most Americans will say, "Good for her," not, "OMG WTF!!! She's not qualified!" They will see themselves and people they know in Palin, her family, and their story.
It is especially silly to suggest (à la one of Andrew Sullivan's readers) that conservatives will be appalled by a woman with five kids running for high office, believing she won't have enough time for mothering. Conservatives have always approved of their own women as working moms. Who do you think was taking care of Phyllis Schlafly's kids while she traveled the country decrying the ERA? Last year I wrote a profile of conservative sweetheart Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state. She got married later in life -- because, as she says herself, she was devoted to her career -- and also has a son with Down Syndrome. Her husband, a retired admiral, stays home with baby! Here's McMorris Rodgers describing the arrangement:
I quite honestly am guilty of putting most of my time and energy into career for most of my life. A key factor for me is that I have a wonderful husband. He's retired and he's at home right now with Cole. He's looking forward to being a caretaker.
Movement types adore this woman! And Palin has a similar story.
Of course, the hypocrisy is very deep. Liberal feminists are not allowed to discuss women's choices and struggles with work-life balance without being painted as radical whiners. But these are issues for professional conservative women, too. Their base knows it, and generally approves of these female politicians' decisions and sacrifices, which they see as serving a greater cause. The Obama campaign and its supporters won't win very many hearts and minds attacking Palin for her personal life or even lack of political experience -- she's simply too compelling of a figure. So let's stick to the issues when discussing Palin: her denial of human causes of global warming, her opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and evidence of her possible corruption. There's more than enough there without descending into the attacks that are only all too common when it comes to female politicians.
In my earlier post, I wrote that Father Frank Pavone, president of the militantly anti-choice Priests for Life, said that Sarah Palin is a more genuine Catholic than Joe Biden because she is pro-life and he is pro-choice.
Turns out Sarah Palin isn't Catholic.
Rob Schenck, head of the National Clergy Council, sent one of the first of many press releases from religious right figures today praising Palin. Schenck's release said that that Palin is Catholic. Later in the day, he issued a correction (which actually needs another correction), "Sarah Putin [sic] is not a Catholic as stated in previous release."
But Pavone had insisted in a conference call with the media this morning that Palin was a better Catholic than Biden. I asked him to repeat it, because I had heard that she is not Catholic but an evangelical:
Q: I just wanted to clarify what Fr. Pavone was saying earlier in the call. Gov. Palin is Catholic, you were saying, and you were contrasting her Catholicism with Sen. Biden’s Catholicism?
PAVONE: Yes.
Q: So you were saying because she’s pro-life and he’s pro-choice she’s a more genuine Catholic than he is?
PAVONE: Well, he’s a Catholic who is contradicting one of the key tenets of Catholicism and claiming that he’s practicing when that’s simply not true. You can’t practice the faith when you deny it.
It shouldn't matter, obviously, what religion Palin is. Pavone might have been confused about whether Palin is a Catholic or not. But the fact that he turned out to be wrong about that made his claim that she's a better Catholic than Biden seem even more ridiculous.
Tim Fernholz on why McCain's pick of Palin is a gamble:
John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin is a gimmick, a desperation pick. It's a last-ditch attempt for McCain to be a maverick again and recapture his reformist credentials. Despite her image, Palin has ethics problems of her own, and she and McCain share George W. Bush's conservative politics. Worst of all, though, her lack of experience raises serious concerns about her basic fitness for office, and McCain's willingness to put his campaign before the good of the country.
Palin does bring a few advantages to McCain's campaign. She reinforces McCain's standing with his conservative base. She is a member of the Christian right who is strongly anti-choice and a favorite of opinion-makers like Rush Limbaugh. Like most Alaskan politicians, her commitment to drilling for oil jibes nicely with McCain's "drill now, drill here" mentality; she even goes a step further than McCain to advocate drilling in Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. And there's the electoral bonus: Palin's popularity in Alaska could move the state, which was slipping towards Obama, back into the GOP column.
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Sarah Palin may have campaigned for Pat Buchanan in 1999, but Buchanan was apparently not initially thrilled with her as a VP choice, describing her as "not ready to be commander-in-chief."
--A. Serwer
Ann Friedman explains why women should be insulted that John McCain thinks all he has to do to win their votes is put a woman on the ticket:
Last month, Bill Kristol was predicting that McCain would choose Palin because "Republicans are much more open to strong women." (He also decried the "horrible sexism and misogyny" Hillary Clinton faced in the Democratic primary, but somehow failed to mention his own comment during the primary that, "white women are a problem, that's, you know -- we all live with that.") As recently as last week he was railing against the "Democrats' glass ceiling." And today, FOX News was already crowing, "Looks like the glass ceiling hasn't been broken by Hillary Clinton, but by Senator McCain."
Palin's addition to the ticket takes Republican faux-feminism to a whole new level. As Adam Serwer pointed out on TAPPED, this is in fact a condescending move by the GOP. It plays to the assumption that disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters did not care about her politics -- only her gender. In picking Palin, Republicans are lending credence the sexist assumption that women voters are too stupid to investigate or care about the issues, and merely want to vote for someone who looks like them. As Serwer noted, it's akin to choosing Alan Keyes in an attempt to compete with Obama for votes from black Americans.
I can't help but be, oh, a little bit skeptical of Republican's sudden interest in the glass ceiling. After all, this is the party that threw women like Lilly Ledbetter under the bus, in favor of businesses that practice wage discrimination. The party that stymied the Equal Rights Amendment. The party that not only wants to force women here and abroad to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, but also wants to deny them access to a range of contraception options.
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Obama's speech -- and much, though not all, of the convention -- was intended to normalize him in the eyes of swing voters to whom he seems alien, to draw a populist contrast between the two parties and their candidates, and to go after McCain's weak points -- and strong points.
Obama has long since motivated his base, and his speech and the convention were not for them. Instead, he was wooing both working-class white voters and fence-sitting Hillary supporters. For the latter, Obama and other speakers stressed such themes as equal pay for equal work. But his speech was chiefly directed at those swing voters of the Rust Belt who turned to Republicans on social issues but who may come back to the Democrats on economics. This was clear not only in the issues that Obama raised in his speech but in those he didn't.
Obama's speech -- and much, though not all, of the convention -- was intended to normalize him in the eyes of swing voters to whom he seems alien, to draw a populist contrast between the two parties and their candidates, and to go after McCain's weak points -- and strong points.
Obama has long since motivated his base, and his speech and the convention were not for them. Instead, he was wooing both working-class white voters and fence-sitting Hillary supporters. For the latter, Obama and other speakers stressed such themes as equal pay for equal work. But his speech was chiefly directed at those swing voters of the Rust Belt who turned to Republicans on social issues but who may come back to the Democrats on economics. This was clear not only in the issues that Obama raised in his speech but in those he didn't.
Brad Plumerhas more on the fact that Palin is pretty much lying when she says she opposed the bridge to nowhere:
So she was very much for the bridge and seemed to be saying that Alaska had to act quickly -- Ted Stevens and Don Young might not be in the majority much longer to secure pork for the state. By that point, though, the bridge was endangered for reasons that had nothing to do with Palin -- it had become a national laughingstock, Congress had stripped away the offending earmark, and future federal funding seemed unlikely. Now, true, after Palin was sworn into office that fall, her first state budget didn't contain any money for the bridge. But when the Daily News asked on December 16, 2006, if she now opposed the project, Palin demurred and said she was simply trying to figure out where the project fit on the state's list of priorities, given the lack of federal support. Finally, on September 19, 2007, she redirected funds away from the bridge with this sorry-sounding statement:
Only the governor of moron-land would support building a vastly expensive bridge to a barely-populated island if her state had to actually front the funds -- killing the bridge once federal funds are gone is a foregone conclusion.What's more, Palin claimed in Dayton, untruthfully, that she actually rejected an offer of federal funds:
In fact, I told Congress -- I told Congress, "Thanks, but no thanks," on that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said we'd build it ourselves.
Very quickly. Remember when Pat Buchanan ran a number of hard-right, fringe campaigns for president in the late 1980s, 1990s and 2000? Well, guess who was supporting him:
From an AP report in 1999:
"Pat Buchanan brought his conservative message of a smaller government and an America First foreign policy to Fairbanks and Wasilla on Friday as he continued a campaign swing through Alaska. Buchanan's strong message championing states rights resonated with the roughly 85 people gathered for an Interior Republican luncheon in Fairbanks. … Among those sporting Buchanan buttons were Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin and state Sen. Jerry Ward, R-Anchorage."
Keep in mind, Buchanan ran a third-party campaign attack the Republican party (mostly) from the right:
Buchanan proposed U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations and expelling the U.N. out of New York, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Housing and Urban Development, taxes on inheritance and capital gains, and affirmative action programs.
And all that in just one speech! Plus, Buchanan had and has an extreme aversion to the sort of imperial adventures McCain is so fond of. It's starting to seem like Palin wasn't vetted all that carefully.
It seems to be totally untrue that, as Sarah Palin claimed in her speech in Dayton earlier today, she opposed the "Bridge to Nowhere." Rather, after federal funding was cut off, she decided not to replace it with state funds. There's no indication that she opposed the federal earmark. Her final statement was, "Much of the public's attitude toward Alaska bridges is based on inaccurate portrayals of the projects here [...] But we need to focus on what we can do, rather than fight over what has happened."
I have a very high threshold for cynicism in politics. A politician has to go pretty far to appall me with his cynicism. But what a cynical choice John McCain just made!
McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate is a triumph of Republican identity politics. Palin is, quite obviously, a two-fer: a women, and a candidate with not only working-class roots but a working-class husband (a member of the Steelworkers, no less). That doesn’t mean she champions the cause of workers and women, however. She’s part of a ticket that wants to extend the Bush tax cuts to the rich and opposes the Obama tax cuts to the middle class. And if Palin issued a condemnation of the Supreme Court decision in the Ledbetter case, which denied women the right to sue for back pay denied them as a result of gender bias, I sure didn’t hear it.
Barack Obama made clear in his acceptance speech last night, and in his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate, that he sees the election as a battle for the white working class. Clearly, McCain does as well. A McCain-Romney ticket would have given the Democrats an irresistible target -- two candidates, 12 homes. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty would have brought working-class roots to the GOP ticket as well, but Palin has assets he lacks: her gender, and her identification with the cause of drill-till-we-drop.
If McCain were in his 50s, or even his 60s, or weren’t a cancer survivor, Palin would be a more understandable pick. But given his age and his medical history, picking the single least qualified candidate in the modern history of the presidency and vice-presidency is simply a dangerous decision for the nation, and Palin did nothing in her coming-out statement to disspell that impression. We can only assume that McCain dismissed this concern in his need to shake up the race, and that he hopes that women and working class voters will like Palin for her demographics and overlook her actual beliefs. The rank cynicism of this choice is overwhelming.
Reform language notwithstanding, it seems like Palin's abuse of power scandal back home followed the same-old politician pattern: Denials and dissembling. Via TPM:
Matt Yglesias emails the following thoughts on Sarah Palin:
Most initial critical commentary on Sarah Palin has focused on her unfitness for the presidency. This is an important point, but an equally important point is her unfitness for the vice presidency. Barack Obama picked a running mate who can help him govern. The president's job is far too big for any one person to do on his own, so Obama took the first step toward building a first-rate team. John McCain engaged in a cynical stunt aimed at winning the news cycle. It's an incredibly arrogant decision that calls into question whether he really understands the nature of the job he's running for.
J. Lester Feder, author of a piece on the politics of country music for the Prospect, called us this morning to explain the story behind Barack Obama's use of the song "Only in America" by country music duo Brooks and Dunn.
Nashville songwriter Don Cook was amused when a song he co-wrote with the duo Brooks and Dunn followed Barack Obama's acceptance speech last night. "I can imagine blood pouring out of the ashes of my Republican friends, mainly the two co-writers of the song," he said in between chuckles in a phone interview. Cook's longtime partnership with Brooks and Dunn in some ways exemplifies the "purple America" Obama described in his speech last night: Cook is a founder of the Music Row Democrats, while Ronnie Dunn is known to be a staunch Republican.
While conservative front-men like Dunn are the familiar face of country music, there are a good many Democrats working behind the scene in Nashville. Cook founded the Music Row Democrats in 2004 in part to help these Democrats come out of the closet at a time when they felt especially under siege. But the city's political climate has cooled in the past couple of years, Cook says, so much so that the Music Row Democrats are no longer a necessary support group. Republicans have lost their swagger, Cook explains. "It's just hard to champion an administration that has created such negative change," adding, "I'm sorry that it takes something like that in our culture to lower the level of anger."
Within hours of hearing he'd provided the soundtrack for the Democrats' exuberant political spectacle, Dunn fired off an e-mail to Cook saying, "You framed me." The shoe once was on the other foot. President Bush used to use "Only in America" for his own political events, much to Cook's chagrin. The songwriter relayed a message to the president that he was giving his royalty money to the Democratic Party. This prompted an uncharacteristically bipartisan response from Bush, who wrote Cook a note saying he liked the song and would continue to use it anyway.
A conference call with conservative-movement leaders this morning was a roadmap for what the McCain-Palin campaign rhetoric is going to look like. But while they're trying to portray her as a typical mom in touch with the lives of American women, she's no maverick: She is perfectly aligned with the far right.
She's Reagan with a vagina: In a nutshell, all sectors of the conservative base are thrilled: the anti-choicers, the gun lobby, the anti-taxers (although no one weighed in on her most obvious weakness, her complete lack of foreign-policy and national-security experience). "She's the whole package," gushed Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which describes itself as the pro-life Emily's List. "She just could not be a better pick. She represents all three legs of Reagan's stool," said Dannenfelser, and "is truly in sync with the way American women think."
She's a real Catholic, and Joe Biden isn't:Frank Pavone, president of Priests for Life, highlighted her anti-choice record and her fifth child, whom she had at age 44, who has Down's syndrome. Pavone put himself in charge of deciding who is a genuine Catholic -- Palin is and the pro-choice Biden is not, said Pavone, who added about Biden, "You can't practice the faith when you deny it."
She likes non-elitist food: Sandra Froman, NRA immediate past president, asked, "How can you go wrong with a mooseburger-eating, fishing governor?"
Can being loved by Grover Norquist be a positive thing? Grover Norquist, leader of Americans for Tax Reform praised her as "a star at the state level."
She has more executive experience than Obama and is closer to regular people: Absurdly, Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state who served as the vice chair of the GOP platform writing committee, kept hammering at how, because she's been a mayor and a governor, Palin has more executive experience than Obama. (Doesn't she then have more executive experience than McCain?) Blackwell said, "John McCain couldn't have made a better choice. ... He chose someone who represents the next generation and brings more executive experience than the top of the opposition's ticket." What's more, Blackwell added, having served as mayor she's closer to regular people than the, uh community organizer. Blackwell was making no sense today.
Did I mention the baby with Down syndrome? Dannefelser said, "There could not be a more beautiful contrast" between the two tickets, and several participants on the call promised that her baby would be persistently contrasted with Obama's supposed support for infanticide.
The fifty-state challenge: No more Southern strategy. Blackwell said, "She represents the values and the lifestyle that plays across all fifty states, but especially west of the Mississippi."
Finally, soccer moms are out. Hockey moms are in.
--Sarah Posner
Update: And the conservative-movement elites at the Council for National Policy gave her a standing ovation.
The CNP was behind trying to take down the Clintons. PUMAs might want to think about that before pulling the lever for McCain.
I don't know Dan Quayle. But I hope that whatever golf course he's on, he's duly offended by the day's frequent comparisons between John McCain's frantic selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate and his own selection in 1988. Let's look at the record:
Quayle: Two terms in the U.S. House, eight years in the U.S. Senate, representing a state of 6.5 million people.
Palin: City council member and mayor of a town of 8,500 people, 20 months as governor of a state of 650,000 people.
No, Governor Palin, you're no Dan Quayle. Maybe in a few years.
The Palin choice could also reopen some of the grievance Clinton supporters felt toward Obama and the media. It's always tricky, in American politics, for a male politician to attack a female one, though Obama certainly did so in the primary.
So in a campaign where the candidate on the top of the ticket has contended that he is immune to criticism on the basis that he was a POW, the we can expect Republicans to argue that the Veep pick should be immune to criticism because she is a woman.
The pick of Palin is dripping with transparent condescension, the notion that the enthusiasm behind Hillary was simply the result of her being a woman, that it had nothing to do with what she actually stood for, and in that sense it's equally sexist. Palin is essentially a hard-right ideologue, and therefore nothing like Hillary as far as substance is concerned. It's not very different from running Alan Keyes against Barack Obama in 2004. The conservative media reaction has already engaged in paternalistic language, with FOX News reporting on television that "McCain broke the glass ceiling," implying in fact, that the pick had nothing to do with Palin or her qualifications, but merely her gender. It's fitting that the party positing affirmative action as a program that picks people exclusively based on race or gender rather than qualification should do something similar given an opportunity for political advancement. While Obama is promising change through policy, not simply through the circumstances of his birth, the McCain campaign thinks his appeal is simply visual and demographic, and therefore something they can exploit.
This is a pick primed to take advantage of the ongoing media narrative around gender, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had the predicted effect. But it lends more credence to the argument that the McCain campaign is a war room masquerading as a campaign. They're not thinking about governing--they're thinking about winning.
At the same time, on a fundamental level, it's a good thing to have more women in politics, and more women in high places in the Republican Party. It's good for the American people to get used to the idea of a woman being president. I really can't argue with that.
Warren Smith, conservative evangelical activist and journalist, is at the Council for National Policy meeting in Minneapolis today and tells me that he just spoke with James Dobson, who says he will be issuing a "positive" statement about McCain picking Sarah Palin as his running mate.
The AP offers another in a long list of terrible angles on Barack Obama's speech last night, the notion that he "avoided race" in his speech. Tavis Smiley and Cornel West are cited as chief witnesses to this terrible transgression.
"It looks like he's running from history," Dr. Cornel West, a professor of African-American studies and religion at Princeton University, said after the speech. "He couldn't mention Martin, he couldn't mention the civil rights movement, he couldn't mention those who sacrificed and gave so much. It's very, very difficult to actually create a new world if you don't acknowledge the world from which you are emerging."
Talk show host Tavis Smiley said that the deeper significance of King's "Dream" speech and life's work, which included aggressive demands to end poverty, inequality and the Vietnam War, had been pulled out of context.
"If we were being true to King's dream, we'd be talking about poverty, how to eradicate it, and the long list of things that mattered to him," Smiley said. "I just fear that his legacy will get glossed over."
First off, the idea that Obama didn't mention MLK or "inequality" and the notion that he did so "racelessly" are equally incorrect. Let's revisit the emotional ending to Obama's speech, in which King is alluded to as "the young preacher from Georgia," as he describes "America's Promise."
And it is that promise that 45 years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a mall in Washington, before Lincoln's memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.
The men and women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord. They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.
But what the people heard instead - people of every creed and colour, from every walk of life - is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.
"We cannot walk alone," the preacher cried. "And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."
I can't think of another presidential candidate who has referred to Langston Hughes in times past, as Barack Obama does with the phrase "so many dreams deferred." In doing so he also invokes Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun, a play, based on the experience her family had attempting to integrate a white neighborhood in Obama's home state of Illinois when she was a child, that borrows from Hughes' poem for its title. In real life the subsequent litigation outlawed racially restrictive covenants in neighborhoods. The phrase "dream deferred" has become a shorthand for black frustration with persistent inequality -- so popular that Talib Kweliuses it.
Now I know everyone didn't hear all that. But I know that Cornel West, author of several books and rap albums specifically devoted to race, must have. I simply don't believe that people capable of carefully parsing the racial subtexts of American life would be completely blind to such subtlety when it is invoked in the name of unity rather than ignorance or hatred.
Obama's nameless invocation of MLK is at once both intimate and in keeping with the theme of his campaign, that heroes are "ordinary people doing extraordinary things." To have invoked St. Martin, the Martin of Michael Gershon Op-Eds and thinly veiled racist screeds at The Corner, the Martin who is used to sell everything from fast food to cellphones, would have not done justice to what he did because Martin was merely a man. Obama's point is that, without the courage of black folks in the '60s, MLK would have just been another preacher and, without the American people, Barack Obama would be a skinny lawyer from Chicago.
It is MLK's vision which Obama then refers to, that "people of every creed and color, from every walk of life," are "inextricably linked." It is no accident that this vision has become the central theme of Obama's policy vision, that he says we should approach "black problems" as American problems. Whether this will work or not is subject to discussion, but the idea that it "runs from history" or "doesn't acknowledge" MLK or the Civil Rights Movement is just plain wrong.
Next, Carey asked about teaching alternatives to evolution - such as creationism and intelligent design - in public schools. […]
Palin: “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information.
Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.
And, you know, I say this, too, as the daughter of a science teacher. Growing up with being so privileged and blessed to be given a lot of information on, on both sides of the subject — creationism and evolution.
It’s been a healthy foundation for me. But don’t be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides.”
Well, it looks likeMcCain chose Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. I'll have a full-size piece on the choice later in the day, but some fast facts for now:
A conservative Christian -- anti-Choice, pro-Gun -- with reformist credentials, she's gone after some of her corrupt colleagues in the Alaska GOP -- sort of.
She's young at 44, and prior to her time as governor (which began in December 2006) she was the mayor of a town with the population of 8,000.
As a woman, she's expected to attract attention from moderates and Clinton die-hards, and perpetuate the fascinating narrative of women in politics that began with Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential run.
She's mired in an investigation by the Alaska Legislature for improperly firing a state official; the story has a weird personal back story connecting to Palin's family.
I was going to give it a rest with the AP-bashing, but over at Language Log, the Web's best linguistics blog (or at least the only one I read), Mark Liberman has a great post taking apart the psuedo-scientific analysis of Hillary Clinton's speech performed by the AP's Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier:
I think it's turning into a trend -- journalists are becoming linguists. Really bad linguists, but any sort of interest in the analysis of language and communication ought to be a good thing for the field, right? Unfortunately, in this case, it's a bad thing for the nation.
Liberman is unhappy with Fournier's claim that by counting the number of times Hillary Clinton used the word "I" in her speech on Tuesday he can discern whether she really wanted to support Obama:
As Media Matters pointed out, Mr. Fournier counted wrong: there were actually 21 instances of "I", not 17. (And neither Fournier nor Media Matters seems to have counted "me", "my", "mine" — but never mind). Media Matters argues that "contrary to Fournier's suggestion, Clinton's focus in most of those instances was not on herself, but on Obama and the election".
I only have a few minutes for blogging this morning, which is not enough time to evaluate their arguments. Instead, I'll offer the simplest Breakfast Experiment™ ever.
Hillary Clinton's DNC speech used "I" 21 times in 2269 words, for a rate of 9.26 nominative ego-references per thousand words.
Joe Biden's DNC speech used "I" 42 times in 2404 words, for a rate of 17.5 nominative ego-references per thousand words.
And Mr. Fournier's point was … Sorry, I forgot. Was it something about how delivering a speech with an unusually large number of self-references was Senator Clinton's "price" for endorsing Senator Obama?
Yes, yes it was:
The bill came due Tuesday. The crowd. The applause. The promise of a vote Wednesday, and a speech laced 17 times by some variation of the pronoun "I."
This is, of course, only the latest of manyinstances of Fournier's AP finding truly ridiculous things to attack Democrats for.
The best convention coverage here at the Prospect and elsewhere:
How good was Barack Obama's speech last night? Pat Buchanan insisted on reading his favorite part out loud afterward. Ezra Klein's take here. Ross Douthat however, was unimpressed. Joe Klein was.
Mark Schmittexplains why Obama may have been wise to avoid going after McCain's flip-flops.
David Cornexplains why Gore's speech was good too.
The National Black Republican Association wants you to know, on the day of Obama's speech, that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican. Which he wasn't.
Kevin Drum thought Obama's attacks were effective. Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute comments on Ron Fournier, McCain's man at AP. Meanwhile, the AP issues another McCain campaign press release. Matthew Yglesias explains why John Kerry was such a G Wednesday night. Thought he could hijack the press focus from Obama's speech by doing his best impression of THE CLAW from Inspector Gadget?
I'm sure I'll comment more on this later, but Tavis Smiley and Cornel West need to get over themselves. In the meantime, Ta-Nehisi has the right quote: "Barack Obama is running for president of the United States, not president of the Urban League." --A. Serwer
In light of my earlier thoughts about the Democrats' anti-McCain strategy, the most provocative (as opposed to inspirational and affirmative) passage of the speech was this:
But what I will not do is suggest that the Senator takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism.
This might seem a bit of unnecessary high-mindedness lending support to Obama's new approach to politics. And it might seem to rule out the kind of attack that John Kerry leveled on Wednesday, separating "Senator McCain" from the positions that "candidate McCain" had taken for political purposes, or even the speech Bill Richardson gave moments earlier referring to McCain's expensive loafers and his flip-flops. It is, indeed, a wholly different way of designing the narrative that critiques McCain's policies while leaving his character unchallenged.
One downside to the "flip-flop" line of attack is that it leaves an opening for people who are inclined to like McCain to maintain a belief that he'll be on their side in the end. They give him a pass on the things that he "has to" say while running, and trust that he'll return to the occasional sensible position he took at one point or another. The real McCain will return when all this craziness is over.
Obama's approach tries to close that escape route. McCain's policies today are McCain's policies. There is no other, "real" McCain. Treat him, as he would expect you to, as operating in pure good faith, and this is what it is. Positions that he might have taken before, or that he might take in the future, or some general asessment of his character, are irrelevant.
That's a much different way of talking about McCain, but potentially much more powerful than the stale old "flip-flop" charge, which really is a charge about character. We don't need to doubt McCain's character -- here's what he says he would do, and what he will do.
In other respects, there's not much to add about the speech that hasn't been said already, at least without letting it sink in overnight. For months I'd been hoping for Obama to tone down his speeches, to rely less on inspirational visions and more on the potential eloquence of substantive policies. He certainly did that, and much, much else, tonight.
Obama's speech was remarkable, a synthesis of ideas and particular policy proposals. The AP, however, seems to have been watching some other guys talk as Keith Olbermann just pointed out:
But instead of dwelling on specifics, he laced the crowning speech
of his long campaign with the type of rhetorical flourishes that
Republicans mock and the attacks on John McCain that Democrats cheer.
The country saw a candidate confident in his existing campaign formula:
tie McCain tightly to President Bush, and remind voters why they are
unhappy with the incumbent.
Mostly, however, he touched on major issues quickly and lightly. It's an approach that may intrigue and satisfy millions of viewers just starting to tune in to the campaign seriously. The crowd at Invesco Field cheered deliriously, but Republicans almost surely will decry the lack of specifics.
And then the story goes on to highlight places Obama ... talked about details. Then it says this:
Even if Obama had talked for three hours, of course, he could not have detailed enough proposals to quiet all his critics. But that's not the strategy.
Allies such as Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano will doubtlessly defend his approach. A few hours before the speech, she said: "What he should not do is what he will be criticized for not doing: Give a detailed policy speech. This is not the place for that."
She said Republicans will criticize him no matter what. They will argue that his lofty speeches lack substance and details, she said, and a detailed speech that scrimps on soaring rhetoric will prove "he has lost his gift."
"They will try to Catch-22 his speech," Napolitano said.
To summarize: Obama's critics say he doesn't talk about details. He gave a speech in which he mentioned some details but didn't get to others ("He said he would 'cut taxes for 95 percent of all working families,' but did not say how" -- does the guy want a bracket-by-bracket breakdown?). Even if he'd talked for longer (Olbermann pointed out he understates the length of the speech by at least 7 minutes) he couldn't have gotten in all the detail. Republicans will criticize him anyway.
What?! The entire "analysis" is completely nonsensical, but seems designed to leave a casual reader with an impression that Obama lacked substance. It admits he provided details, but then ignores its own admission. And, of course, this is only the latest in a long series of egregiously biased pieces of "analysis" form the AP.
Yesterday's widely shared anxiety about the Democratic convention speakers going soft on McCain -- compared to the Republicans who will "strip the bark off" Obama as they did John Kerry at their 2004 convention -- seems to have lifted this morning, especially after John Kerry's and Joe Biden's speeches.
But the strategy against McCain, let's be clear, is still limited, nuanced -- and will one day seem either brilliant or stupid. Where the Republicans went directly at Kerry's character, and will do the same with Obama, the Democrats have decided to accept McCain's character as a given -- "served this country honorably." Even Kerry, whose speech was the toughest and most specific critique of McCain, drew the line between "Senator McCain" -- still an honorable man -- and "candidate McCain."
Now, I can make a strong case that there's nothing honorable about John McCain, without challenging his military service or POW experience or getting into his personal life. I can make the case that he's opportunistic, corrupt, no kind of reformer, etc.
Plainly, the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign have made the judgment, probably well-informed by polling, that McCain's wholly undeserved reputation for integrity, independence, and personal decency is so firmly established that it's not worth the effort and money to dismantle it.
That requires a very nuanced message, separating "Senator McCain" from the conservative Republican agenda that as candidate he has no choice but to accept as its candidate. If it works, it's briliant because it is the strategy that Greg Anrig has been urging for months: a full and unhesitating critique of conservatism as an ideology that has now been put to the test and failed absolutely. President Clinton's speech last night came straight from the Anrig playbook:
He still embraces the extreme philosophy which has defined his party for more than 25 years, a philosophy we never had a real chance to see in action until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and Congress. Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades were implemented.
But people still do vote on the basis of personal character, and that's not an unreasonable choice -- after all, we elect a president to deal with the problems and crises we don't know about as well as the ones we do. Letting the Republicans go after Obama in all the ways we know they will, while leaving McCain's persona unchallenged is a huge risk. It calls on voters to make a fairly nuanced distinction between the candidate and the agenda.
But there's another lesson in George W. Bush's 2004 victory over Kerry by demolishing Kerry's personal reputation: It left Kerry'sagenda untouched. As Bush discovered from the day after his 2005 inauguration, he had no mandate for conservative policies such as Social Security privatization because he had not run on them.
But if it succeeds, it will have the effect of giving the next president exactly what George W. Bush didn't have: A mandate. The voters will have rejected not just McCain, but the entire economic and foreign-policy agenda of conservatism. And that's as important as winning the election, perhaps more important. (If McCain picks Mitt Romney, who is basically an automaton with the Republican platform loaded into him in Cobol, the campaign-against-conservatism will be even more likely to be effective.)
Seeing Harry Shearer around the convention is a reminder of the important insight that "there's a thin line between brilliant and stupid." Here's hoping the Democrats are on the right side of that line.
Wow, Obama started with some good shots at McCain but he's now transitioning into a full-blown critique of conservatism as an ideology (full transcript here):
"John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time. Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time? I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to take a ten percent chance on change.
Now, I don’t believe that Senator McCain doesn’t care what’s going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn’t know.
In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is – you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps – even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own."
Barack Obama has taken the stage. I worried that it would be divisive for Hillary and Bill not to be here tonight -- and they certainly aren't, as Obama just hailed Clinton, but no shot of her face was shown on the jumbo screens. Yet somehow, it feels appropriate, and much less distracting. The past three days at the Pepsi Center felt a lot like the Clinton Show. Tonight it's Obama Time, in Obama's space.
I've been thinking all day about the Republican effort to make Obama cripple himself by avoiding what he does best -- give a fantastic speech linking seemingly discrete elements of the American experience -- by linking his talent to "celebrity" the way someone might suggest Duke Ellington simply had rhythm.
But John McCain can't do what he does. Bill Clinton can't even do what he does. So he should do it well. Because whether the barrier is ideology, class, or simply racism, excellence and eloquence will be a better case for the Obama candidacy than any trembling poll-tested fear could ever be.
It is the populist hour, at long last, at the Democratic convention. Indiana factory worker Barney Smith, whose job was shipped abroad, just told delegates we need "a president who will put Barney Smith ahead of Smith Barney." (The Obama staffer who thought of that one gets a high-five.) The real people who just testified to the convention were, with one exception, white working class (the other was a Latina). No yuppies, no professionals, no African Americans. The campaign surely has a clear idea of their target audience. Of course, the only network that covered these folks was C-SPAN.
How long do you think they had to search to find a guy named Barney Smith who could say we need to "put Barney Smith ahead of Smith Barney." And the crowd loves it -- they're chanting "Barney! Barney!"
The whole series of speeches by ordinary folks from swing states about why they like Obama is pretty great -- almost every one is incredibly charming. "I'm Pam ... and wait till you hear what happened to me!"
A Detroit unionist just addressed the convention, assuring listeners that Obama will back fair, not free, trade. He's a Teamster -- an interesting choice. The Teamsters, I suppose, are the union that can best convey toughness and grit to the white workers whose votes Obama is seeking. That view of the Teamsters is a stereotype, of course -- but the Obama campaign is in no position to shun stereotypes.
"When we talked about an open convention this is what Democrats meant." -- A nice way to push back against the idea that the fact that a bunch of people want to see Obama talk suggests he's somehow suspect. Other than that it's a largely unremarkable introduction for a series of speeches by people hurt by Bush's economic policies. But I do like the "love ya!" at the end.
So it has fallen to Susan Eisenhower, of all people, to contrast McCain's choleric and Obama's contemplative temperaments. "Impulsive action has replaced measured and thoughtful response," she lamented. And Obama, she continued, has the temperament to run the country. Never before have the Democrats invoked Ike's slowness to respond as a positive attribute, and in truth, sometimes it was indeed good (his refusal to send troops to Vietnam after the French were driven out) and sometimes not so good (his refusal to publicly condemn Joe McCarthy and to send troops to Little Rock, though, of course, he eventually did). But if Obama can don the mantle of Ike -- and remember, Obama has particular trouble with older voters -- he'll do well.
Gore'sspeech did a nice job of making the case that Obama's experience is actually just what is needed in the country right now. It's a rare example in this campaign of a Democrat trying to turn a weakness into a strength -- mostly the speeches have, like they did in 2004, focused on Obama's strengths and McCain's weaknesses.
"The carbon-based interests, oil and coal, have a 50-year lease on the Republican Party -- and they're drilling it for everything it's worth."
"Some of the best marketers have the worst products, and this is certainly true of today's Republican Party."
You know, Al Gore is the first major speaker this week to say very, very clearly that McCain will "end a woman's right to choose" by packing the Supreme Court with anti-Roe judges.
Bill Richardson has just dissed free trade and said it's time to put American workers first and to support the right of unions to organize. The reality of the American economy has finally broken through to Democratic elites. Not a moment too soon.
Richardson, in fact, is giving a plus-perfect convention speech -- cataloging every horror of the Bush years past and the McCain years to come, should he win.
Is apparently folk-rock, funk, and songs Mark Schmitt danced to at his high school prom.
The sun has finally receded from beating down directly on my back, so I'm beginning to enjoy this. Sheryl Crow is currently performing. I wonder if the fact that she's a Democrat and Lance Armstrong is a Republican was a factor in their break-up. Deep thoughts.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has picked up my friend Matt Kennard's Columbia J-School graduate thesis, an investigative report on racist extremists infiltrating the Armed Forces and the absence of any real effort to prevent them from joining. Two years ago, members of Congress urged former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to do more to prevent such people from gaining access to military training, but according to the SPLC, neither he nor replacement Robert Gates has given much attention to the matter. Kennard notes that extremist groups have been taking advantage of relaxed recruiting standards to gain the kind of training they believe they need to bring about a "race war."
The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is explicitly interested in using the military to gain training. “We do encourage them to sign up for the military,” says Lt. Charles Wilson, spokesman for the NSM. “We can use the training to secure the resistance to our government.”
Lt. Wilson says the party has 190 members currently serving in the military. “Every one of them takes a pact of secrecy,” he says. “Our military doesn’t agree with our political beliefs, they are not supposed to be in the military, but they’re there, in ever greater numbers.”
The frightening thing is that it isn't being an extremist that disqualifies one from serving in the military but rather "public display[s] of allegiance" that are barred, such as tattoos. And extremists should be excluded, not out of political correctness, but because they have in the past used military training to devastating effect. As David Holthouse of the SPLC points out, years ago Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby noted in an open letter to Rumsfeld that “[w]e witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today’s racist extremist may become tomorrow’s domestic terrorist.”
McCain adviser John Goodman argues that America has already achieved universal health care:
Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain's health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)
As Steve Benen points out, this means that people are actually treated at the taxpayers' expense (high expense, I might add). And McCain's "Emergency Room Healthcare Plan" doesn't actually work for people who have serious long-term ailments like cancer or HIV. If you show up bleeding from a gunshot wound, they'll treat you -- but they're not going to give you chemotherapy or put you on expensive anti-retroviral drugs. In any case, what McCain's "universal health-care plan" as described by Goodman amounts to is:
[T]he most inefficient system of socialized medicine ever devised.
As well as far more expensive to the taxpayer than Obama's plan would be. But that's OK, because Goodman has another innovative solution:
"The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American -- even illegal aliens -- as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.
"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."
That's right, the McCain solution to the health-care crisis is to make up new terms for people who don't have health care. This way, McCain doesn't have to give up his tax cut.
So John McCain's ad tonight is ... going to congratulate Senator Obama. Classy, I suppose, but what's the goal? (After all of the chicanery of the last few months, I don't take anything for granted from this crew.)
Is his campaign trying to blunt any criticism that Obama will bring to bear on him tonight? Is his campaign worried that the constant negativity of his campaign is hurting him among, well, any non-conservative base voters he hoped to steal from Obama? Or, as one Democratic operative who doesn't work for Obama just suggested to me, Steve Schmidt is just trying to screw with everybody's heads.
One other possibility: The McCain campaign feels like it's done the job of driving up Obama's negatives over the summer, and now thinks it's time to pivot back to portraying the candidate as a positive maverick in time for fall. But that requires a pick like Lieberman that will hurt him with conservatives, and the spring may have proved that McCain can't out maverick (really, out reform) Obama.
Obama is said to be in a rhetorical pickle. If he talks a language of hope and inspiration, it’s too general and ethereal. On the other hand, if he gets too specific, he sounds like a policy wonk. And if he goes for McCain’s throat, he risks being portrayed as too angry.
To this observer, these formulations, repeated over and over by the usual talking heads, are so much baloney. At various times and in various speeches, Obama has come out with superb rhetorical flights that demonstrate his understanding of the situation of America’s stressed working families, and he has done well at connecting their plight to the Bush administration’s disastrous policies. He just hasn’t done it quite consistently enough. But after the last three nights he must be feeling pretty pumped.
He needs to do just a bit more of what Joe Biden did last night -- speaking personally of what American families worry about around kitchen tables -- and a little more of what John Kerry did, shaming the McCain campaign and contrasting John McCain the senator with John McCain the candidate, the latter being hopelessly out of touch with what working Americans face.
The first nights of the convention teed it up for Barack, in
multiple and reinforcing ways; my favorite being the introduction to
America of Michelle Obama, accurately presenting the Obama family as a
much better rendition of the American dream and American work and
family values then the rather awkward family story of the John McCain
and his beer-heiress current wife. The Biden family only reinforces that image.
If expectations have been lowered by media blarney, so much the
better. There will be shock and awe when he hits it out of that
ballpark tonight. And, senator, it’s okay to a be a little partisan.
This is an election after all.
And at his best, Obama has beautifully combined uplift, detail, partisanship, and connection to regular people. To pick just one example, from one of his very best speeches, his commencement address at Knox College three years ago, portions of which have found their way into other speeches:
How does America find its way in this new, global economy? What will our place in history be?
Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a
choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn’t much
we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give
everyone one big refund on their government—divvy it up by individual
portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage
everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own
retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on.
In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our
past there has been another term for it—Social Darwinism—every man or
woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t
require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose
health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford—tough luck.
It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job—life
isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child who was born into poverty—pull
yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because
each of us believes we will always be the winner in life’s lottery,
that we’re the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we
won’t be the chump who Donald Trump says: “You’re fired!”
But there is a problem. It won’t work. It ignores our history.
It ignores the fact that it’s been government research and investment
that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It’s been
the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and
benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our
economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a
belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of
mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in
the country, that we’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot
at opportunity. That’s what’s produced our unrivaled political
stability.
And so if we do nothing in the face of globalization, more
people will continue to lose their health care. Fewer kids will be able
to afford the diploma you’re about to receive. More companies like
United Airlines won’t be able to provide pensions for their employees.
And those Maytag workers will be joined in the unemployment line by any
worker whose skills can be bought and sold on the global market.
Matt Yglesiasbreaks down how John Kerry threw down last night:
Six years ago, I helped put together the 30th anniversary issue of the student alt-weekly paper I edited, which gave me the opportunity to familiarize myself with our archives. It was a bit startling to see that the coverage of John Kerry's ultimately failed 1972 campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives already depicted Kerry's ultimate goal as the White House.
Kerry's loss in 1972 slowed his political ascent. He went to law school, passed the bar in 1976, and went to work as a prosecutor. In 1982 he became lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. In 1985 he entered the U.S. Senate. By the time he re-emerged on the national stage, in other words, his name had already been bandied about as a potential president for over a decade. In 2004, 32 years after that initial defeat, Kerry ended up both closer and farther than ever, as George W. Bush narrowly secured re-election. Not only did Kerry lose, but he did so in a particularly dispiriting manner, running amid a controversial and failing war without anything resembling a clear message on it. To some extent, he was merely the victim of circumstances, but it was infuriating for liberals to spend months backing a candidate who would neither denounce the decision to begin the war nor call for its end, all in the name of the higher cause of beating Bush, only to see Bush win anyway.
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On the convention floor, I climbed into the D.C. box to catch up with at-large D.C. Councilman Kwame Brown. (By the way, none of the folks in the photo above are Brown; they are activists here to remind delegates that the District remains disenfranchised.) We spoke about voting rights and urban issues, and why Brown is so excited about Joe Biden.
How do you feel about D.C. voting rights not appearing in the Democratic platform this year? The issue did appear in the 2004 platform.
I’m just disappointed that in D.C., we don’t have our voting rights yet. I’m disappointed that so many Democratic senators did not show up for that vote [on D.C. voting rights last September]. They should be voting in favor of something that their kids have and that they have.
The point is that in the U.S. House and Senate, we do not have a vote. We do not have a vote on key issues. And we have a larger population than some states that are here right now. They have a vote and we don’t. Other people judge whether we send our kids to war, and we don’t.
As a councilperson from D.C. what are the urban issues that you feel should be addressed more often by the Democratic Party?
We've been talking a lot about urban issues at this convention. Health care is an urban issue. Education, economic development, and job training. Vocational education and trade. Those are the things that allow people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and participate in society. We need to keep jobs within the United States.
I also just think that domestic violence goes unheard sometimes. If you go to urban areas, domestic violence is high on the list. A huge percentage of 911 calls are domestic-violence related. Joe Biden is very encouraging. He’s done so much for the country on this issue. It’s very exciting.
“The Republicans can’t seem to get a break when it comes to August and when it comes to the weather,” said Rove, a FOX News analyst. “I know this is being thought a lot about in Washington and at the White House and discussed and I suspect they will monitor it carefully and figure out what to do."
Has the man become a parody of himself, or what? But don't worry -- President Bush might perform the selfless act of skipping the convention so he can do a heckuva job in the storm zone instead.
Regarding my optimism, there’s this: Gallup’s latest poll has Obama up seven six points. Keep in mind that these polls were taken before Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Joe Biden spoke yesterday. But also remember we have no idea how soft this bounce is, and how the Republican convention or McCain’s VP pick tomorrow will affect it. Nonetheless, it’s an unambiguously positive sign for the Democrats.
Which potential GOP VP would be a good counter to Biden? Politico has an interesting article assessing each of McCain's vice presidential prospects. The article recognizes the strengths and weaknesses (mainly weaknesses) of Mitt Romney ( too rich -- together Romney and McCain are worth $35 million), Joe Lieberman (too Democratic and he's worked closely with Biden on labor issues and abortion rights), and Tom Ridge (an advocate of abortion rights, and he's got some questionable lobbyist ties). That leaves Tim Pawlenty, who Politico portrays as a walking talking-point -- incapable of doing anything but spouting Bush Administration rhetoric. When you compare that to the others Pawlenty sounds like the best choice.
But he's still a weak candidate -- he's young and inexperienced compared to Biden which undermines the experience contrast Republicans are trying to draw between Obama and McCain. It would seem a little hypocritical to make the opposite argument for the vice president. And in a vice presidential debate Pawlenty -- known to be even more inelegant than Biden when it comes to speaking -- would get ripped to shreds. Remember Biden's best moment running for the nomination was when he picked at Giuliani's argument that he's qualified to be president because of his performance on 9/11. Expect the same types of attacks of unpreparedness from Biden if Pawlenty is McCain's pick.
Pawlenty isn't always good with the words either. On a radioshow he said in reference to his wife "She loves football, she'll go to hockey games and, I jokingly say: Now, if I could only get her to have sex with me." That's not the typical tone of a vice presidential candidate. Further moments like those could make even Biden look on-message and sensible. I get the feeling that it'll probably be Pawlenty just because he doesn't have as many downsides as the rest but he's still a candidate lacking far too much.
There have been conflicting reports about whether John McCain has decided on the running mate he's slated to announce tomorrow, but there seems to be agreement that Mitt Romney and Joe Lieberman -- both of whom would be gifts to the Democrats -- are reportedly still in the running.
The Council for National Policy, the secretive brain trust of the conservative movement, is meeting today in Minneapolis in advance of the Republican National Convention, and the mood there will surely reflect the sentiments of the base about who McCain might choose.
Anyone can see Romney would be a disaster for McCain for so many reasons -- the religious right dislikes him, in spite of a small coterie of evangelical loyalists, and he's richer than McCain. Romney would deflate growing, post-Saddleback enthusiasm for McCain among the religious right, but Lieberman, pro-choice and not even a Republican, would cause a revolt. His sole tie to the religious right is the one figure McCain has tried so hard to run from, John Hagee. Talk about the apocalypse! McCain might be tight with Lieberman but he'd get grief from all directions for picking him.
Minnesota's governor, Tim Pawlenty, an evangelical and son of a truck driver with little name recognition, is reportedly still in the mix. We'll see if any news leaks out over the course of the day, but I wouldn't rule out a surprise pick no one's thinking of. Rich LowrysuggestsMike Huckabee would be just the ticket.
In today's Wall Street Journal piece about the Democrats and abortion, "Tiptoeing to the Right on Abortion", Jim Wallis claims such a rightward shift is required for Democrats to win the election, asking: "Can the Democrats count votes?"
Yes they can. The sidebar graphic to the story shows that 54 percent of the American public believes abortion should be legal. That's 54 percent of the public that agrees with Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party platform, and 54 percent of the public that is opposed to the Republican platform and the stated policies and record of John McCain.
You want to reduce the number of abortions through comprehensive sex education and effective and affordable birth control? You want to support women and their families through progressive economic policy? Great. Enjoy being a member of the Democratic Party -- it's been standing for these values all along.
Ezra Kleinexplains the plainspoken genius of Joe Biden's speech:
Joseph Biden's speech last night accepting the Democratic nomination for the vice presidency was not a great speech. The rhetoric did not take wing and soar, the assembled delegates did not leave the arena slack-jawed and astonished. It was a workmanlike address, a blunt object delivered, at times, with great force. In many ways, it was the opposite of Barack Obama's best speeches. This may be exactly what the Obama campaign needs.
And Harold Meyersonreports on how a fractured labor movement is coming together and dedicating all its resources to electing Barack Obama:
And when the rally ended and the cheering stopped, delegates from four AFL-CIO unions – the Steelworkers, the Communications Workers (CWA), the Auto Workers (UAW) and the far smaller International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees (the IFPTE, which represents, among others, aeronautical engineers at aerospace companies) – gathered for their own reception in a nearby hotel. Over the past few months, the four unions have quietly formed a political-action sub-group, which they call the Alliance, to wage their own political campaign this fall, which they are funding by withholding their payments into the AFL-CIO's political program. This week in Denver, they have been caucusing daily.
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Contra Ezra, I think that if McCain chooses Joe Lieberman as his running mate it would be a disaster. McCain's entire strategy in the last few months, the strategy that has succeeded in moving the polls for him, has been predicated on attacking Obama's character and gathering in supporters on the right.
Why would he try and reclaim his maverick image, which wasn't getting him anywhere? Especially if Lieberman would undermine his standing with the conservative base -- Karl Roveknows whats up. A more prosaic reason, however, is that Lieberman actually hurts McCain's polling numbers in Florida, where he was expected to provide a boost among the state's substantial Jewish population.
Apropos John Kerry's magnificent speech last night (also see this great article on Kerry by Jason Zengerle), there is a real difference between candidate McCain and the McCain of the past, and nothing emphasizes it more than this interview with Time magazine:
There's a theme that recurs in your books and your speeches, both about putting country first but also about honor. I wonder if you could define honor for us?
Read it in my books.
I've read your books.
No, I'm not going to define it.
But honor in politics?
I defined it in five books. Read my books.
[Your] campaign today is more disciplined, more traditional, more aggressive. From your point of view, why the change?
I will do as much as we possibly can do to provide as much access to the press as possible.
But beyond the press, sir, just in terms of ...
I think we're running a fine campaign, and this is where we are.
Do you miss the old way of doing it?
I don't know what you're talking about.
Really? Come on, Senator.
I'll provide as much access as possible ...
In 2000, after the primaries, you went back to South Carolina to talk about what you felt was a mistake you had made on the Confederate flag. Is there anything so far about this campaign that you wish you could take back or you might revisit when it's over?
[Does not answer.]
Do I know you? [Says with a laugh.]
[Long pause.] I'm very happy with the way our campaign has been conducted, and I am very pleased and humbled to have the nomination of the Republican Party.
You do acknowledge there was a change in the campaign, in the way you had run the campaign?
[Shakes his head.]
You don't acknowledge that? O.K., when your aides came to you and you decided, having been attacked by Barack Obama, to run some of those ads, was there a debate?
The campaign responded as planned.
It's sad, really. At one point John McCain was his own man. And now's he just another politician, a puppet of the kill-or-be-killed political operatives he has hired to win this race for him, reduced to shaking his head silently at questions he once would have had the nerve to answer forthrightly.
Despite the best efforts of the morons of mainstream media to depict this week’s Democratic convention as a house divided, I have never attended a Democratic convention -- and this is my ninth -- that is more united. The Clintons have clambered aboard the Obama Express, and Bill’s speech last night reminded me again why I concluded while I was covering him in 1991 that he was the most gifted politician I’d ever seen and likely would ever see. Indeed, his speech, with its depiction of Americans failing to reap the rewards of their work, returned me to the populist themes he sounded in his ’92 campaign. Joe Biden, though his lack of familiarity with teleprompters threw off his cadence and led him to mangle a couple of sentences, continued Clinton’s theme with his quiet depiction of American families struggling with the nation’s and their own economic decline.
Indeed, not only are the intraparty battles between hawks and doves a thing of the past, but the party has even reached a state of provisional unity on economic policy. Alternative energy and green jobs are policies that unite labor, environmentalists, and national-security types, and there is growing recognition in the party’s various wings that Obamanomics is centered on a very serious jobs program for a nation that badly needs one.
This provisional unity was on almost stunning display in the skybox from which I watched last night’s proceedings. The box belonged to a major Democratic donor who is also a longtime critic of free trade and who is close to industrial unions. Leaders of the Steelworkers union watched the convention from the box. So did Jason Furman, Obama’s economic-policy director, whose work on Robert Rubin’s Hamilton Project made him a target of much mistrust from economic progressives -- among them, Bob Kuttner and me. Last night, though, as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden spoke up for jobs and progressive taxation and union rights, Obamanomics (and, for that matter, Clintonomics) never looked better or more progressive.
The best convention coverage here at the Prospect and elsewhere:
No, really. The Democrats just nominated a black man to be President of the United States. Like many others, I can't help but be proud.
According to Dana Goldstein, Josh Marshall, and Ezra Klein, John Kerry was on fire last night. More to come, I'm sure. The nets apparently didn't carry it, because we really needed to hear more "pundits" talking.
Is Karl Rove trying to prevent the plaid hiked-up golf pants ticket from being a reality?
Mark Schmittsays the Democrats have a unity of purpose he's never seen before.
Bubba was in rare form. Even Andrew Sullivanagrees.
AT&T and the Blue Dog Democrats preventedGlenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, and Jane Hamsher from entering a party the company was throwing for those Democrats that protected it from prosecution after it broke the law on behalf of the Bush administration.
The continuing hostility toward Lilly Ledbetter is not helping the whole "Come to Hillary" feminist moment in the conservative ranks seem very sincere. Not that it was very convincing before.
Cheryl Contee appreciated Hillary's speech on Tuesday.
Someone should tell Tom Brokaw that John McCain, Former POWtm can handle a little criticism. I'd suggest Brokaw quit the news business and just join the McCain campaign, but there's a line.
Republicans angry about Obama's decorative choices for his speech tonight weren't outraged when George W. Bush held imperial court back in 2004.
A few weeks ago, Stuart Shepard of Focus on The Family urged members of that organization to pray for rain during Barack Obama's acceptance speech tomorrow night.
"I'm talking 'umbrella-ain't-going-to-help-you rain," the former pastor and television meteorologist said. He explained on the video: "I'm still pro-life, and I'm still in favor of marriage as being between one man and one woman. And I would like the next president who will select justices for the next Supreme Court to agree."
Based on weather predictions, it seems like G-d had better things to do.
[T]omorrow's weather forecast for Denver calls for a high of 82 degrees, with nary a cloud in the sky.
By Focus on The Family's standards, is that considered an endorsement?
It's easy to forget, amid the frustration with his weak-kneed 2004 campaign, that John Kerry is actually a very talented politician. He is offering up exactly what this convention has been missing. Strong linkages between McCain and Bush. Humor. And a great refrain that has become a call and response with the audience. "Who can we trust to keep America safe? Barack Obama!"
Kerry continued, "How pathetic to suggest that those who question a failed policy doubt America itself? How desperate to tell the son of a single mother who chose community service over money and privilege that he doesn't put America first?"
Now a tribute to Obama's (very white!) World War II vet uncle, who liberated a concentration camp and is here at the Pepsi Center tonight.
It's easy to see why so many Democrats believed Kerry's life story as a Vietnam vet who came home to protest the war would be a winner. A shame that it wasn't.
One of the reasons it was so frustrating to hear the Clinton campaign use the "inexperienced" line against Barack Obama so often during the primaries was because of how similar the line was, truly, to attacks against Bill Clinton when he ran for president in 1992. Well, tonight, President Clinton finally undid some of that damage done and, proudly, likened Obama to himself. "He has the intelligence and curiosity every successful president needs," Bill said early in the speech. And then, later: "Together, we prevailed in a campaign in which the Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief. Sound familiar? It didn't work in 1992, because we were on the right side of history. And it won't work in 2008, because Barack Obama is on the right side of history."
I learned in my eight years as president and in the work I’ve done since, in America and across the globe, has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for this job."
I wish I could be less cynical about this, but I don't think "Give Peace a Chance" was a great choice for Melissa Etheridge's folk-song medley here tonight. Dems should not be presenting their delegates as thousands of pacifistic hippies.
It was great fun to hear during the roll call what each state's dignitary, often a governor or senator, wants the public to know about their home. Here's a list of the ones I caught:
Massachusetts: First in the nation for marriage equality.
Nebraska: Be like us, and have a unicameral legislature! Also, Williams Jennings Bryan is awesome!
Nevada: Keep nuclear waste out of Yucca Mountain!
New Hampshire: First primary state to be won by a woman running for president. But they "proudly" cast 100 percent of their votes for Obama, earning the state a round of applause.
New Jersey: We are a leader on family leave. Another unanimous vote for Obama.
New Mexico: We have 22 Native American tribes.
Illinois: Chicago should win the Olympics in 2016. And by the way, Obama is from here.
I've got to admit, I'm having a little trouble maintaining my journalistic objectivity after what I just witnessed here. A super-symbolic moment as Illinois "yields" to New York -- a gesture of respect from Obama's state to Clinton's. After an introduction, Hillary takes the mic. "On behalf of the great state of New York, with appreciation for the spirit and dedication of all who are gathered here, with eyes firmly fixed on the future ... let's declare together in one voice, right here, right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be the next president. I move that Sen. Barack Obama be selected by this convention, by affirmation, as the nominee of the Democratic Party."
Massive cheers and excitement. This was a surprise to pretty much everyone. There could have been no greater show of unity. The roll call stopped and the entire stadium screamed "yay!" to affirm Obama as the nominee. After a live band played "Love Train" (I know, weird), the arena erupted into "Yes we can!"
Lots of excitement. Illinois "passed" when called upon alphabetically so that, symbolically, it can put its home-state senator, Barack Obama, over the top at the very end.
Attention, Republicans everywhere who are scandalized by the stage decorations at Barack Obama's planned speech on Thursday: Your great and powerful leader did it first.
Greek columns and executive overreach characterized by complete disregard for the law? Bush had the whole package back in 2004. I wonder why no one was outraged? ViaBen Smith.
The Prospect tracked down Tom Sheridan, founder and principal of The Sheridan Group, a Washington-based firm that lobbies on behalf of a variety of liberal nonprofit groups.
You've worked with Ted Kennedy a long time. Rate his speech Monday night.
Home run! He is iconic in every way, but Monday you really saw the "Lion of the Senate" as his best. He is seriously ill, as we all know, but his energy and his determination to lead the nation to its best was unmistakable. It was powerful, emotional, and a truly historic moment. That speech will be a last part of an amazing legacy that is still emerging.
Did you think it was a mistake that Kennedy was not featured in the final hour of the convention but Republican Jim Leach was?
From a TV audience standpoint -- maybe. But in the hall it was the most electric moment of the evening. Michelle Obama was outstanding in every way, so I see the power of the evening as bookends -- Kennedy and Obama. Leach was in the middle and did very well.
You represent a few celebrities who are involved in politics, including Bono. Some say athletes, actors, and rock stars should stay out of politics. What are the right and wrong ways for celebrities to get political?
Every American has a responsibility to engage in our democracy and that means politics. I think it's frankly irresponsible for celebrities and athletes to say they aren't engaged. Why kind of message is that sending to their fans, and young people especially? The right way to engage is to use important issues as a barometer for advocacy. Be committed to an issue, stay with it, be credible on its substance -- that's what I recommend to the celebrities I work with. ... It's a bit immodest to say, but I really think Bono has created the new model for celebrity activism. It's not the photo op or fundraising -- it's the commitment and credibility.
You are a strong advocate for gay rights, an issue the Republicans injected into the 2004 campaign. Do you think it will be a factor again this cycle or has its power as a wedge issue faded?
I think it's faded but far from gone. Republicans used it as a wedge issue to drive thousands of right-wing zealots to the polls, and it worked to some extent. But the air has gone out of the balloon. Young evangelicals are voting on poverty and the environment more than on issues like gay marriage. The world didn't end with California and Massachusetts legalizing gay marriage. The straw man they created is now seen for what it was, and most thoughtful voters have moved on. Never underestimate hate and zealots in politics: They have passion and usually can find money. We're a long way from full equality, but we are unmistakably moving forward.
What would you like to see from Joe Biden's speech tonight?
A strong appeal to white working-class voters is vitally important. A challenge to the unarticulated concern that some white voters may have about electing the nation's first African American president is important for Biden to address directly at some point very soon, if not tonight. Finally, he is a strong advocate for America's foreign policy being one that balances security with development and diplomacy, and showing voters this level of depth will be helpful.
Last night, after her speech to the convention, I caught up with Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, whom I profiled for TAP’s July issue. I’m sorry I don’t have a photo, because Napolitano was wearing the most eye-catching outfit of the evening: a hot-pink suit jacket with a military-style collar line. Here’s what she had to say about preparing and delivering her address, which she told me she wrote herself.
What did you see as the goal of your speech tonight?
I really wanted people to take away some of the ideas that Obama has about the economy. People are asking, “So what are his ideas?” I wanted to put his ideas out there.
You hit McCain pretty hard, with that great line about hoping he continues the tradition of Arizona politicians losing in their quests for the presidency.
I really didn’t think I hit him that hard; I wanted to tinge it with a little bit of humor. There are so many differences between McCain and Obama, and they can try to obfuscate all they want, but when you really read and listen to what McCain is saying on health care, on the economy, on tax policy, on energy, it’s really Bush. It’s really Bush. As I said on the podium, we can’t take four more years.
Charles Krauthammer has a bit of fun with the stage decorations set for Obama's Thursday speech, which apparently evoke ancient Greek architecture aesthetic:
[M]aybe he'll just do a Napoleon and coronate himself. By the time Napoleon made himself emperor, he had won the Battles of Lodi, of Arcole, of Rivoli, of the Pyramids and of Marengo. And had promugulated the Napoleonic Code. He had yet to write a single autobiography.
So to reiterate, Krauthammer, who supports an Executive Branch of government that evokes undefined "wartime powers" that include unfettered surveillance powers, complete immunity from laws regarding search and seizure of property, tortures people not convicted of any crime, and claims the right to imprison people indefinitely without trial, has no imperial instincts.
But giving a speech on a stage decorated with classical columns, I mean, that's something Mussolini would do. --A. Serwer
Ezra and Adam touch on some of the anxieties percolating on the left about the Obama campaign: They're not attacking enough, the Clintons are too distracting, the GOP is going to spend the entire time going negative at the convention, and we're seeing today that the press is really willing to let John McCainblatantly distortsensible statements made by Obama. A lot of these issues are real, but a lot of others are part of the pernicious "news cycle" trend, where a few peoples' intuition somehow becomes conventional wisdom. I've tried to take a big picture view, and to my mind there is still no cause for Democrats to panic -- though they should be a little concerned. A few reasons why:
Polling. Yes, Obama is tied with McCain in some averages, but he's also up in most individual polls. Mike Crowleypoints out he still is leading in these polls, especially in key states, even if he has slipped over the summer. Nate Silver also notes that we shouldn't expect a convention bounce to begin until tomorrow.
David Plouffe. Ambinder reports that Plouffe remains confident -- admittedly, he's paid to do so -- but his reasoning is sound, and his focus on key states is reminiscent of the primary campaign's focus on delegates. Remember the criticism of the Obama campaign then? Plouffe notes that "Obama is underperforming only among working class whites over 70 and pointed to a poll showing that Obama is over performing John Kerry with working class white voters under 50" and that Montana, Virginia and Colorado all look good.
Clintons. Hillary's speech was solid, and it will hopefully move more Clinton voters into the Obama fold. Bill's speech tonight promises to be more of the same, and Noam Scheibernotes the intelligence of giving each one a night -- Bill is going to be feeling a lot better about supporting Obama now. They should both realize that Hillary hasn't yet done enough to escape the blame of a potential Obama loss.
Biden. For all the attention over the weekend, tonight is Biden's real introduction. If he nails his speech -- and more importantly, nails McCain -- not only will that be a good psychological boost for worried lefties but also a good indicator that in the weeks to come the campaign will get on the offensive, especially on economic issues.
Obama. He's a closer. His speech Thursday will be huge, and I don't think there's any way he can live up to the expectations setting that has gotten increasingly out of control (explain your policy without explaining your policy!). But he will deliver a good speech that will continue the convention mission of introducing Obama to voters as a positive, trustworthy figure. He had best go after John McCain as well. Whether Obama can seize the anger of white-working class voters without being seen as too angry, as Harold Meyersonasks, is a different story.
Field. Watching the convention last night, another liberal writer responded to this argument by saying that "Field is what people point at while they're losing -- the election isn't decided in caucuses." Maybe. But if things are getting tight, and it looks like they are, a solid field operation that brings in two or three percentage points is what it takes to win.
Perhaps this will be a post I'll regret in two weeks, but I think confidence might be rewarded.
Ann Althouse watched Lily Ledbetter last night at the DNC and claims "what she should say, to be honest, is: 'Our Court declined to rewrite the statute to be fair to me.'" To be honest, this is utter nonsense. It might be fair to say that Ledbetter wanted to "re-write" the statute if she simply claimed that the statute of limitations should just be ignored because it led to an unjust outcome, but of course she argued no such thing. Rather, she argued that since she was still being paid less due to gender discrimination, the discrimination was ongoing and hence her filing was within the 180-day window.
Whether one agrees with this or not, it's at a minimum a reasonable interpretation of the statute. Which is why this interpretation was shared by a federal district court, four justices of the Supreme Court, and -- this is important -- the Equal Employment Opportunity Comission itself. (As Ginsburg noted, "Similarly in line with the real-world characteristics of pay discrimination, the EEOC -- the federal agency responsible for enforcing Title VII -- has interpreted the Act to permit employees to challenge disparate pay each time it is received." This remained its official position until well into the Bush administration.) If Althouse wants to claim that all of these people were advancing an indisputably erroneous interpretation of the statute, she really needs more than bare assertion.
Althouse's sneering about Ledbetter don't get any more coherent:
She goes on to blame the Senate for voting down the amendment that would make it possible to sue if you don't know about the discrimination when it first takes place, but then she says that Barack Obama as President will solve the problem: "As President, he has promised to appoint Justices who will enforce laws that protect everyday people." That doesn't really add up. But she's doing a good job of making us feel that the Democrats will protect the rights of working people.
Of course, what Ledbetter is saying makes perfect sense. Evidently, there are many institutional veto points that were responsible for allowing businesses to evade Title VII protections. A minority in the Senate was able to filibuster an attempt to override the court's interpretation of the statute, and President Bush vetoed another attempt. Ledbetter is therefore right that more politicians who (unlike John McCain) actually support gender equality are needed. But it's also true that this corrective action wouldn't be necessary had a bare majority comprising the court's most conservative members not interpreted an ambiguous statutory provision against Ledbetter.
And in the modern regulatory state, these kinds of disputes matter; statutory provisions are often open to multiple reasonable interpretations, so who is responsible for applying them matters. The reactionary judges Althouse enthusiastically supports (just like John McCain) will tend to resolve such cases in favor of business interests; the kind of judges appointed by Obama are more likely to resolve ambiguities in favor of women's rights. Hence, who appoints judges matters (and who controls the executive branch matters even more), and what Ledbetter is saying is right on all counts.
Dana ponders the meaning of Hillary Clinton's speech:
The suggestion that Hillary Clinton could have been anything less than wildly enthusiastic in her support for Barack Obama last night was always, on its face, ridiculous. Her place in history as the first woman to come within grasp of the presidency will now forever be shadowed by her ability to convince the nation that she fully endorses the quest of the first African American with a chance at achieving the ambition she held so long for herself.
And Paul Waldman considers what kind of speech Obama can and should give tomorrow:
But there's something else worth hoping for in Obama's speech, something that has been glimpsed only occasionally in his presidential campaign: a full-throated defense not just of his candidacy or of the vague ideas of change and progress but of progressivism as an ideology. And while he's at it, he could offer an attack not just on the actual failures of George W. Bush or the potential failures of John McCain but on the failure that is conservatism.
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The New York Times is reporting that the Obama campaign, while raising a great deal of money, has fallen short of its goals, largely because many of Clinton's financial backers are holding out.
When Mr. Obama decided in June to bypass the $84 million in public financing for the general election, campaign officials calculated that to make it worth the additional time he would need to devote off the campaign trail to fund-raising, they needed to raise two to three times the $84 million.
They set out a goal of raising $300 million for the campaign and $180 million for the Democratic Party, several fund-raisers said, or about $100 million a month.
The targets hewed closely with what Obama advisers also cited in interviews as their anticipated budget for the general election, but a spokesman for the campaign insisted on Tuesday that its fund-raising was on target and denied that $100 million a month was ever a real goal, or that the campaign was having problems recruiting Clinton donors.
I'm doubtful about Clinton's speech doing much to assuage dead-end supporters, who sound like they're waiting for her to run again in four years. Equal pay, reproductive choice -- these are apparently minor issues to those who are still holding out. Dana's reporting indicates these people are less prevalent than MSM coverage might imply, but this analysis of recent polling suggests that Obama's flagging numbers are due to the most conservative Democrats in the party defecting. The weak tea at this years' convention is unlikely to get anyone riled up, least likely those who are thinking very seriously about voting for John McCain.
Luckily for Hillary, Gallup's analysis also indicates a substantial number of Democrats want her to run again.
Bob Shrum is reviled as the Democratic consultant who loses presidential races -- but revered as a great presidential speech writer. The Prospect caught up with Shrum outside Pepsi Center an hour or so before Michelle Obama's big speech -- and just three days before her husband's even bigger one.
Do you think the economic message will be the difference ultimately for Barack Obama?
Look, it would be inconceivable that a Democrat under these circumstances with this economy would lose. Every model says that he wins. But the one thing we cannot factor into those models is race, and it’s what we don’t talk much about because we hope it isn’t true. But it’s clearly going to be a factor. JFK lost some votes because he was Catholic and Obama is going to lose some votes because he’s an African American.
What do you make of the Clinton-Obama rift. Is it real?
I don’t think there will be a rift by the end of the convention. I think they’ll make up by the end.
Let’s say David Axelrod goes down and they call Bob Shrum out of the dugout for relief. How would you advise the campaign?
I would say, call David Plouffe.
So you don’t want to armchair quarterback a bit?
Let me tell you something: I really have no patience for some of the stuff I’ve heard from some armchair critics in the last week and people who aren’t inside the campaign. I’ve been through this, with people on the outside saying, “Well, they ought to do this, they ought to do that.” None of that is helpful. These guys did a brilliant job. They took a nomination away from somebody who was a virtual lock to win, and I have nothing critical to say at all. And if I had any suggestions I’d give them directly.
You’ve written some legendary political speeches. What does Obama need to do in his Thursday night acceptance speech?
I think Obama’s great challenge is to combine inspiration and “change we can believe in” with substance we can believe in. The substance is there -- he just has to tell people. This is one of the greatest platforms he’s gonna get. Al Gore in 2000 got one of the biggest bounces out of a convention speech anyone has ever had, something around 13 to 18 points. And it had a lot of substance to it. But it was clothed in human terms, talking about families he met and, for Gore, some inspirational quality. I think Obama will give a superb speech, but it has to have substance in it as well as spirit.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was born 100 years ago today. Besides Franklin Roosevelt, his record as a progressive Democrat is unsurpassed. Thanks to his leadership and passion, Congress enacted Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education, Head Start, the Job Corps, legal services for the poor, and countless other pocketbook measures that helped millions out of poverty and reinforced a secure middle class. And Johnson took immense risks to pass the three landmark civil-rights laws. It is not an exaggeration to say that without Johnson's leadership, Barack Obama would not be accepting the Democratic nomination for president this week.
But here in Denver, where podium time has been found for a mind-numbing array of obscure speakers, the day will pass without ceremony or acknowledgment. Why? In part because for many Democrats, Johnson's greatness on domestic achievements has an asterisk -- the Vietnam War, a divisive debacle too reminiscent of the Iraq War.
Interestingly, the decision to ignore Johnson was made by Barack Obama himself. Sen. Tom Harkin, a huge admirer of Johnson's War on Poverty and the rest of the Great Society, told me that several months ago he contacted the LBJ presidential library in Austin. Harkin arranged to have a short, 11-minute film made about LBJ and the Great Society as a centenary tribute. He pitched it personally to Obama, who was not keen on the idea. They cut the film to seven minutes. Still too long, said the convention planners; and finally to five minutes. It will air, with no fanfare, reportedly during non-prime time Thursday, not even LBJ's actual centenary. No official announcement has yet been made.
What's the problem here, people? Do they not want to be reminded of a truly bold progressive Democratic president? Or is the reminder of the civil-rights struggle not the message this surprisingly bleached-out convention wants to send? Is Michelle Obama's happy memory of the Brady Bunch more comforting to whites than the memory of LBJ and Dr. King, whose "I have Dream" speech was delivered 45 years ago this week? Or just the bad taste of the Vietnam War, which epitomized the Democratic divisiveness that this convention desperately hopes to avoid? Maybe all of the above.
Well, LBJ deserved better, most of all from Barack Obama, who as a president who could be -- and must be -- as brave and bold as Lyndon Johnson.
Senator Ted Stevens pulled out a squeaker yesterday, winning his primary and setting him up to face Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, who also won his primary, in the fall. Begich is up in the polls against Stevens, who has been indicted for corruption. Somewhere in Denver, Chuck Schumer is a happy man.
Meanwhile, another corrupt Alaskan Republican, Rep. Don Young, finds himself in a too-close-to-call situation with Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell. Parnell benefits from his close association with popular Republican Governor Sarah Palin, but it looks like Young is a few hundred votes ahead. Whoever wins will face Democratic State Legislator Ethan Berkowitz, who is currently polling just ahead of Young but might face trouble with Parnell. Having two corrupt Republicans running state-wide would certainly help Barack Obama's fledgling ambitions to win the state, where recent polls have him flirting with a lead over John McCain.
A good friend points me toward former Republican Charles Barkley's convention interview, where the basketball star shows he's ready for his long-rumored run for the Alabama governorship:
CNN.com: What do you think the Democrats need to do here to win the White House?
Barkley: I think they've got to just make sure to get those troops home from Iraq, that's a big deal. But No. 1, we've got to give poor people a chance. America is divided by economics, and we as Americans, we've got to do a better job of supporting poor people. ... We've got to improve the public school system. If you're born in this country poor, whether you're white or black, you're going to be born in a bad neighborhood; you're going to go to a bad school. It's going to be very difficult for poor people to be successful.
The best convention coverage here at the Prospect and elsewhere:
Michael O'Hare really liked Hillary's speech last night. Steve Benensays she "stole the show." Ezra Klein also thought the speech was effective, but Michael Crowleysays differently.
How good was Dennis Kucinich last night? "Wake Up America!"
Matthew Yglesiasnotes that conservatives are pretty absent when it comes to real feminist issues, like the Lilly Ledbetter Act, and when Ledbetter actually spoke yesterday, Jonah Goldberg called her "Tootsie with a Southern accent." It's a good thing Republicans are such non-elitists.
Pam Spauldingblogs about the way bloggers and "traditional" media are being treated differently during the convention.
Dana Goldstein writes about Michelle Obama's appearance at the EMILY's List event, which was considerably different from her Monday night speech. I write about Michelle's night here, Ezra responds here.
Like me, Jesse Taylorwonders why, given the number of apologies Obama has had to issue on behalf of rappers, McCain isn't getting more criticism for embracing Daddy Yankee, and whether the alternative-energy starved United States will ever develop Nubian Cold Fusion. Marc Ambinder adds that apparently DY was shot during an altercation for which he picked up an assault charge. But it's okay because Ludacris wants to eat your babies and McCain was a POW.
I've got an article on the extra burdens Michelle Obama has to bear as a black woman in America.
I'm with Jonathan Stein on last night's speakers. Mark Warner should have spent less of his speech running for that Senate seat.
According to Gina McCauley, Gov. Paterson's entourage was a little rowdy.
Dana talks to Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown about green-collar jobs.
In discussing Obama and McCain's tax plans, CNN lists only the top 5 percent of income earners. When asked why, Wolf Blitzer reportedly shrugged his shoulders and said, "Just keeping it real homie, just keeping it real." (Note: By "reportedly" I mean that didn't actually happen.)
Also, read our latest Party People Q&A here (where you'll also find links to earlier installments) and follow us on twitter and flickr.
Maybe simply ignoring Obama and ripping McCain was the best approach. After all, her hardest core supporters probably aren't going to be convinced that Obama is awesome. And, as an anti-McCain speech, it was great. Plus on purely aesthetic grounds, it was the best speech I've ever seen her give.
It's pretty strong, and that's good for Democrats. But without a strong pro-Obama message it reinforces the sense that Obama is the lesser of two evils that dominates her speech. Sure, that's probably what she thinks, but it hardly seems like the best job she could have done to convince her strongest supporters.
One thing Hillary has been doing in her speeches since she lost the nomination is mentioning gay rights. She did it again tonight, with a cute little eyebrow raise to acknowledge that she's the first person at this convention -- and may leave the last -- to acknowledge that LBGT people exist and don't enjoy some of our most basic rights.
Clinton asks her supporters: "Were you in this campaign just for me" or for "all the people in this country who feel invisible?" It's a good line, but it needs to be followed by a case for Barack Obama. "We need a Democrat" is a weak case, and I can't imagine it'll do anything but fuel the ambivalence of Clinton's strongest supporters. CNN keeps cutting to Michelle who, understandably, looks very unhappy. She mentions Obama occasionally, but it kinda seems like an afterthought.
Tellingly, Clinton is much more forceful and specific when she praises Michelle and Joe Biden.
Most of this speech could have been given a year ago. It has nods to Obama, but it's almost entirely about her. It's not an attack on McCain, it's not a case for electing Obama, it's just nostalgia and platitudes.
"You haven't worked so hard over the last 18 months, or endured the last eight years, to suffer through more failed leadership. No way. No how. No McCain."
A weird visual -- almost as if she were the nominee. The text of the speech was just passed out. Many feminist themes about women's leadership -- shorter section attacking McCain. We'll see how it balances out in delivery.
Those are the signs the DNCC staff has passed out all over the auditorium during Brian Schweitzer's feisty speech. He shoulda been the keynote.
McCain/Same has a great ring to it. It should become a mantra in all of Obama's advertising and appearances. "What is McCain? He's the same! Want the same? Go with McCain!" It takes the misty "change" theme and turns it into an attack.
Tonight is John McCain Is Too Old Night. Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio repeated that McCain is "stuck in the past." The previous speaker, keynoter Mark Warner quoted Thomas Jefferson's letter to John Adams: "I like the dreams of the future better than the histories of the past." The party of the future -- the Democrats -- is promising a green new world. Green jobs have become the party's panacea -- its economic recovery program, its environmental linchpin, its contrast with the Republicans' ongoing obeisance to big oil, its talisman of newness. Can it counter McCain's call for more drilling? Ask me in November.
Update: And McCain is linked to the old energy order, Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana is saying. He voted against solar. He voted against wind. He's arrayed against the elements themselves. Schweitzer is delivering the most blistering attack against McCain so far, and for the Obama campaign, Schweitzer -- who comes across as the Montana rancher he is -- is the right guy to deliver it.
If there were pissed off Hillary Clinton supporters lurking around every corner of this Democratic convention -- as has so obsessively been reported -- you'd think you could find them at an EMILY's List event. After all, EMILY's List is an organization whose entire mission is electing pro-choice women politicians. The group funds grass-roots candidates across the country exactly in the hopes that, someday, not only will women represent 50 percent of all elected officials, but a woman will assume the highest office in the land. EMILY's List's fervor for Clinton was so strong this year that, when NARAL became the first national feminist organization to endorse Barack Obama in May, EMILY's List president Ellen Malcolmcalled the move "tremendously disrespectful to Sen. Clinton."
Yet today, on the morning after Michelle Obama's speech, 2,500 EMILY's List donors and supporters greeted not only Clinton but also Michelle, with absolute, raptourous enthusiasm. As Adam has written, Michelle's feminism and intellectualism were hardly on display last night, when she was expected to give a reassuring, wifely presentation aimed at nervous white folks. But at EMILY's List, Michelle gave a long, meaty policy speech, focusing on equal pay, family-medical leave, universal health care, and education. She joked about the jujitsu she's had to do in her public appearances; "Barack Obama will be an amazing president," she said. "I say this not just as a spouse, but I am speaking as an American -- and I will say this time and time again -- who loves my country."
The crowd -- as racially diverse as the Democratic Party itself -- gave a knowing laugh, fully cognizant of the ridiculous burdens that have been placed on Michelle and the unhinged criticisms she has faced. "If you don't think Barack is going to need you, I am going to need you," Michelle continued. "I mean that. I am going to need you to have my back." Massive cheers.
One thing the event didn't offer was a photo-op of an embrace between Hillary and Michelle. That would have been good politics. Maybe we'll see something like that tonight before Hillary's speech.
Here's Hillary Clinton, speaking at this afternoon's hot ticket, the EMILY's List gala featuring HRC, Michelle Obama, and Nancy Pelosi:
Wasn't Michelle Obama terrific last night? I know a little bit about the way the White House works, and you know if the president is not exactly on your side, call the first lady. And with Michelle Obama we're going to have somebody who answers that phone.
Adam Serwerwrites about the infuriating extra burden Michelle Obama is forced to bear as a black woman:
It is infuriating that this Harvard and Princeton grad is forced to, in some sense, apologize for achieving what every family wants, what all parents work for their children to have, merely because her blackness causes anxiety in the same people who have claimed for years that all black folks need to do is "work hard" to succeed. When women like Michelle Obama do succeed, they're supposed to minimize their accomplishments so that certain people don't feel insulted. The talking heads never ask why, because white anxiety about black self-determination is self-justifying, even in 2008. Meanwhile, John McCain runs solely on his biography, as the press sits in a rapturous silence. "I used to be a POW" will not reverse the housing crisis, it will not bring health care to the uninsured, it will not regulate the credit card industry, it will not prevent the government from taking your laptop or tapping your phone with no evidence of wrongdoing. But you wouldn't know that from watching CNN.
Robert Kuttnerargues that Ted Kennedy's legacy shows liberals can work with conservatives to achieve progressive goals:
So the next time you hear that it is impossible for Barack Obama to be both a bipartisan bridge builder and also a resolute partisan Democrat, just point to the splendid example of Ted Kennedy.
And Tom Schallerobserves blue dogs in their natural habitat:
Smith said he is confident Blue Dogs will be there for Obama because they are practical and want to win. He also believes the group gets an unfair rap from liberals within the party. "My experience with Blue Dogs is that they are basically strong Democrats, but they cut the corporations more slack," he told me. The Blue Dogs are a more business-friendly, fiscally conservative wing of the Democratic Party dominated by members from redder states and overrepresented by Southern members who hail from the kind of districts Democrats lose in presidential elections. The coalition includes some of the members with the most conservative voting records in the Democratic Caucus, including the most conservative, Mississippi's Gene Taylor.
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Via County Fair, Howard Kurtz channels his inner Bill Clinton. After criticism that The Washington Post's "media critic" violated the paper's own rules on anonymous sourcing by allowing an unnamed FOX employee to take a shot at Jon Stewart, Kurtz fires back that it depends on the definition of "source" doesn't it?
Howard Kurtz insists he didn't violate that policy because he let an unnamed network spokesman -- not a source -- attack Jon Stewart. "That, in my book, is different than just quoting some random person who is speaking for himself or herself," he says in the second chat Q-and-A.
A source is anyone (or thing) that gives you information relating to a story. If it gives you information, it's a source; any sophomore who writes for a high school paper can tell you that. I could hardly imagine Kurtz accepting this explanation from a reporter he was covering.
There may be something going on in Denver, but the real action is found in D.C.'s policy shops.
My two front teeth. All Latinos want of the next administration can be found in 58 breezy pages put out on Monday by the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda. Fingers crossed your favorite presidential candidate reads them, because Latinos will cast 9 million votes in November. -- CP
Air Fair. The U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. made a mistake in overturning the Clean Air Interstate Rule that would dramatically improve air-quality standards, writes Center for American Progress' Robert M. Sussman. CAIR caps emissions from power plants, which produce massive amounts of nitrogen oxide. It's hard to see how CAIR is a bad thing; holding down these emissions would bring in between $80 billion and $100 billion in health benefits. -- DS
Brother, can you spare a dime? Two Brookings analysts tackle the challenges of solving global poverty with private philanthropy. While the usual problems of foreign economic intervention -- accountability, corruption, and efficacy -- come to the fore, the authors conclude that, properly executed, private aid is an effective substitute for more bureaucratically hidebound government-aid programs. Private aid also floats above the problems of politically motivated giving and so can be more focused on actual need. Finally, it can also be a transformative force as competition forces higher standards in the global aid "market." -- TF
Count on me.The Census Bureau today released a report on income, poverty, and health insurance. The number of uninsured people has gone down but only because government health-care plans have picked them up. For more analysis, see Matt, Jon, Ezra, and Ezra. --TF
John Sides at The Monkey Cage has an interesting post on the different ways that political journalists and political scientists approach their respective crafts, taking both Matt Bai and Samantha Power to task. Journalists are much more free and easy with their categories and less focused on defining precisely the variables and arguments they make. In part, this comes from the journalist's imperative to write something interesting and readable, an imperative most academics don't share (though the best do). But it also brings to mind something I've thought about while working here at the Prospect or watching TV talking heads -- not much of the electoral side of things relies on actual political science knowledge.
Though journalists reference polls and demographic studies, and try to talk about policy based on studies and reports, much of the electoral-analysis job involves trying to figure out what kind of narrative emotional appeals will best convey a policy message to a hypothetical voter (setting aside the mechanics of Getting Out the Vote). Often this includes deploying slippery historical analogy. For this task, my theology degree is about as useful as my supposed-to-get-me-a-job political science credential. But John's post is a worthwhile reminder for anyone writing about this stuff to do a better job -- as John puts it, "Social scientists must be careful about how they conceive of and define the phenomenon of interest. This imperative doesn’t hold in casual commentary. And it creates problems. As Andy points out, we really don’t know what “danger” and “calm” mean when Powers uses those terms."
CNN television analyst John King took a break from live coverage from the floor of the Pepsi Arena in Denver to talk about the media effects of national party conventions.
People dismiss conventions as pageantry, but the party and candidate that gets the biggest polling bump tends to win. Is it an oversimplification to call them pageants?
It is an oversimplification. It’s obviously not like the old back-room wheeling and dealing, cigar-smoking days. But they are important, and this year I think they’re particularly important. In this hall there’s a bit of dysfunction within the Democratic family. About 40 percent of the people [delegates] on this floor voted for Sen. Clinton and a good deal of them don’t think she’s been treated with respect. ... And that makes Obama’s challenge a significant one.
Last time around Bush had the special stage on the final night, and now you have Barack Obama taking it over to Invesco Field for the final night. Is it overkill or is this just the next stage of maximizing the media value of conventions?
It’s not my job to make judgments but it is certainly an escalation of the drama. They want to show a huge event. They believe there is a new movement in American politics and they want to show it that way. The Republicans are trying to create this narrative of Obama as a celebrity, a rock star, and not a substantive politician. So it feeds into both narratives: The narrative the Obama want to create is that they are bringing new people and young people and others who left the process back into the process again, and Republicans will use it to say “this guy’s all talk and no substance.” So both parties will use that event to feed their narrative, and out in nine weeks we’ll find out who wins.
There are 15,000 credentialed media including unprecedented foreign press. Are you surprised by how much the rest of the world is paying attention to this election?
There’s enormous interest overseas. I’ve travelled a couple of times to overseas countries in the past year, including Iraq and some countries on the way back, interest in this election. ... Because I used to cover the White House I still talk to a lot of the diplomatic corps in Washington, and I still touch base with a lot of people on that beat. There’s an incredible interest in the election overseas, far more than I’ve seen in the past. It’s a hugely consequential election for a whole host of domestic issues, but also for a few, huge international questions -- whether that’s Iraq and Afghanistan, or U.S. relations with our allies in Europe.
We have two conventions, one featuring a candidate from the largest city in the Midwest at a convention in the Southwest, and the other featuring a candidate from the largest city in the Southwest at a convention in the Midwest. And these are the two swing regions. Does it matter where the conventions are held?
I think it helps. Is it decisive? Hard to say. But look, the electoral map is changing. That’s one of the things I play with on my [electronic] wall. ... The Mountain West is a huge battleground, and Democrats want to get regional press as well as national press.
That interactive thing you do on TV is pretty fascinating. How long did it take you to get comfortable with that technology?
I’m still learning every time because it’s an amazing piece of technology. …The first night I did it on television, I only practiced about eight minutes before I went on. It’s very user-friendly and very intuitive. We’ve put some new programs on it based on things I wanted, and Josh Braun, my producer, has done a great job with it. … It’s a great tool for explaining things that are very technical or involve a lot of statistics. I get stopped a lot and people ask me very specific questions about the campaign, and that tells me that the technology is making a difference.
If you're in Denver, head over to the Korbel ballroom (4E-4F) of the Colorado Convention Center for the AFL-CIO / American Prospect "All Boats Rising: Transforming the American Economy" event featuring Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Donna Edwards, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Paul Krugman, Julianne Malveaux, Jorge Mursuli, John Sweeney, and Richard Trumka and moderated by Harold Meyerson and Ezra Klein. Also, check out Dana's interview with Sherrod Brown on the main site:
Dana Goldstein: How should Obama be talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs?
Sherrod Brown: First of all, there's the failure of the last eight years to have any manufacturing policy. That includes energy, taxes, trade, job training, community college, all of that. There has been no federal effort on any of that. Second, I think Barack needs to be more specific on trade policy, on tax policy, on all of that. He's talked about how tax-law incentivizes corporations to outsource jobs. He really has to talk more about job-killing trade agreements, what that has done to us. He needs to make the contrast with McCain on all of these things. [McCain has] gone to both Detroit and Youngstown and basically said, "These jobs are gone, get over it."
Although Montana’s Brian Schweitzer points out that the Democrats' rule states "from Alberta to Mexico” in the Mountain West, Utah remains a persistent, unsurprising exception. Businessman Bob Springmeyer is trying to change that by challenging the state's Republican governor, Jon Huntsman. Although he has not been elected to public office before (he lost a county commissioner’s race by less than 1 percent of the vote), like Huntsman he has deep family roots in Utah politics.
How is Utah changing?
It’s like a lot of the West. There’s a myth that the West is all John Wayne, go-it-alone cowboys. The West was built by cooperators, not wild-eyed cowboys.
You see the myth even in the McCain campaign -- to even talk about renegotiating the Colorado River Compact. [The agreement that governs water in seven states including Utah and Arizona, which McCain recently suggested reopening.] My uncle George Dewey negotiated that agreement as governor of Utah. It took decades. To think you can just throw it out -- that’s not the real West.
The incumbent you’re challenging, Jon Huntsman, has a reputation as pretty moderate. How will you run against him?
We’ve had two recent governors -- Michael Leavitt [now secretary of HHS] and Huntsman who were get-along, go-along governors trying to live up to their fathers. Huntsman won’t stand up to the legislature. His budget is totally irrelevant.
So you’re running against the Republican legislative leadership as much as the governor?
I get more reaction when I talk about the Republican leadership than anything else.
What happened to the progressive tradition in Utah, that elected people like the late congressman Wayne Owens?
Obviously, it got caught up in social issues, the Reagan Revolution. When the LDS church, my church, to my surprise opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, that created some lines that still haven’t healed. But the LDS church position on immigration is one I support -- it’s compassion. But the issues that matter now are jobs, keeping people in their homes. The environment matters -- active outdoor recreation is a big part of our lives and our economy. Utah is a drive state. And we’re an urban state.
Like Dana, I find the "Civil War" storyline to be a stretch -- on the whole, most Hillary Clinton supporters are getting on board with Obama. But when the McCain campaign starts using whole chunks of her ads and remarks from the primaries, it's a reminder of just how brutal her attacks really were.
Now is her opportunity to take a real stand and call out McCain for his fear-mongering in the advertisment above. Anything less, and the analysis offered by this Hillary Clinton supporter will become true:
At BEST, Hillary will be seen as powerless and unable to exercise leadership in regard to her supporters. At WORST, she will be seen as conniving to sabotage her own party at the most crucial political moment in a generation. Either way, her career will be over.
Ezra Kleincomments on Edward Kennedy's speech to the Democratic Convention.
Pam Spauldinghangs out with the LGBT Caucus in Denver.
Dana Goldsteininterviews Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL: Pro-Choice America and reports on how the convention reveals a divide over education in the party.
Sure you could read Marie Coccoargue that the Democratic Party exists to glorify the magnificence that is Hillary Clinton, but trust me, you'd much rather read Lani Guinier explain how what is at stake is bigger than any one person.
Oliver Willis has taken "the dumbest picture of Anderson Cooper Ever." It's kind of dying for the LOLCat treatment. But then again, I say that about all pictures.
Harold Myersontalks about the two Americas represented at the national conventions of America's two political parties. The big difference? At the RNC they serve ice cream. At the DNC they serve frozen yogurt. Just kidding. He also reports on labor's role in the 2008 election.
See our latest "party people" Q&A here along with links to earlier installments.
Finally, Ezra Klein stumbles into a group of Denver's forgotten poor.
A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Bracken Hendricks was a founder of the Apollo Alliance and was talking about the potential of green jobs and the benefits for national security, urban planning, transportation, and economic development six years ago, long before it became the first talking point of every Democratic candidate.
What are you trying to achieve at the convention?
The convention is the best opportunity to focus on themes. It’s the place to get people talking. The platform is great but the platform’s just a document. At the convention we can start shaping the language that people use to articulate problems and solutions. And they’re realizing that clean energy is a jobs agenda, it’s an urban agenda, it’s a national-security agenda.
Suddenly every candidate is talking about clean energy and green jobs. They point to shuttered factories with alternative-energy investment. You’ve been pushing this for years, but has it become a bit of a panacea? Not every congressional district can rebuild its economy on clean energy, right?
Bill Gates once said that every transformation is overstated in the short term and understated in the long term. You’re right, every county won’t manufacture solar panels. But every county will have to install them. We will have to retrofit every building. We will have to rebuild the transportation infrastructure. It’s deeply embedded in local economies, even as it's a national initiative.
And these are good jobs that can rebuild some of the broken ladders to the middle class.
Do we need to pass cap-and-trade legislation on carbon emissions to create the incentives, first?
No. Eventually, we have to have some kind of price-signalling mechanism for carbon. But there’s so much we can get started on now. We can’t wait for cap-and-trade to finance the transition. It could take two years to pass, another four years to really start generating revenues. We can’t wait for that. And it’s about more than pricing carbon – it’s about changing farm policy, transportation policy.
Is there a fight coming over coal? Between Democrats who want to make “clean coal” and coal gasification a big part of the energy agenda, and enviros who oppose mining?
There could be, but I think there’s a consensus that we have to do something about coal. There are people who think that, in theory, you could build an energy future on clean energy and efficiency alone, but the reality is that coal is going to get built, and the ideas about carbon sequestration are promising. It might get more complicated when there’s real money to spend.
—————————
From there, I went on to a briefing with Govs. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Martin O’Malley of Maryland, where there was a lot of talk about coal gasification and clean coal and coal, coal, coal as the future of the Democratic Party.
Call me crazy, but shouldn't it be bigger news that four people may have been planning on assassinating Barack Obama?
CBS4 has now learned at least four people are under arrest in connection with a possible plot to kill Barack Obama at his Thursday night acceptance speech in Denver. All are being held on either drug or weapons charges.
CBS4 Investigator Brian Maass reported one of the suspects told authorities they were "going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a ... rifle … sighted at 750 yards."
Law enforcement sources tell Maass that one of the suspects "was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative."
It's not clear how serious this was, but the sourcing seems solid (more here). But the cable news pundits aren't mentioning it at all, and it hasn't gotten a mention on TheNew York Times site, CNN, or MSNBC. Shouldn't this be a bigger deal?
After Michelle's very well-received speech, a huge screen lit up with Barack Obama on it, who was listening in live from Kansas City, where he is campaigning. Sasha and Malia, the Obamas' daughters, joined their mother on stage. We were then privy to a sort of awkward/adorable family phone call. "I thought she did good!" little Sasha said of her mom. "Daddy, what city are you in?"
It felt a little rehearsed to me. But probably a good way to reintroduce America to this family.
Michelle Obama, right before praising Hillary Clinton in her speech this evening, used a line that was deeply reminiscent of Clinton's own "invisible Americans" speech -- the one Hillary gave so many times, including on that fateful night when, beyond all doubt, she lost the Democratic nomination and yet, at first, refused to concede. Here's the Clinton line:
The injustice of poverty; the injustice of people who work hard all day and then on the night shift, and it is still not enough. The injustice of being invisible in a country of so much wealth and opportunity; having people walk by you in the halls and foyers and staircases of buildings you work and not even see you.
And here's Michelle tonight:
People who work the day shift, they kiss their kids goodnight. And then they go out to work the night shift.
I'm watching the convention on C-Span from my couch in D.C. like a good blogger (no Cheetos though) and from my perspective Claire McCaskill is knocking this out of the park. Rather than vague statements about how Obama is, like, totally awesome, she's saying McCain would be a bad president. Doesn't sound like much, but no one else is doing it.
"Change" as a message is meaningless without any argument about, you know, why we need it. McCaskill, unlike so many other people out there tonight, is making that argument and arguing that McCain represents part of the problem, not the solution. It's not an artful speech or particularly well delivered, but it actually makes sense logically, and that makes up for a lot.
Sitting inside the Pepsi Center, watching delegates dancing to the sounds of a funk band and screaming their heads off each time Barack Obama's name is mentioned, it's hard to believe that outside, the cable news networks are talking obsessively about tensions between the Obama and Clinton camps. It's one thing to train your camera on the spectacle of "PUMA" protesters wearing Clinton T-shirts adorned with McCain stickers, many of whom are registered and lifelong Republicans. It's another to imply that these folks somehow represent Democratic delegates, or are the theme of the convention itself.
At the Hispanic Caucus this morning, I saw dozens of people with tears trailing down their cheeks as Hillary spoke. They were tears of pride -- bittersweet tears, for sure -- but not tears of anger or regret. Every single person was wearing an Obama button.
Pro-life Democrats were disappointed that this year's platform, which was approved and adopted about an hour ago here at the Pepsi Center, didn't include a so-called "conscience clause" recognizing the fundamental morality of Americans who oppose abortion. But Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL (and a member of the platform committee) just said something that sounded like a conscience clause to me:
Slogans and bumper stickers fail to acknowledge the profound complexity most people feel on the issue of abortion. We can honor and respect those opinions while still respecting the fundamental values of freedom and privacy.
Dana Goldsteinlooks at how the Democrats' convention shows new heterodoxy on education:
As a teachers' union activist, Nancy is typical of hundreds of delegates attending the Democratic National Convention in Denver this week. Teachers and their unions remain some of the most loyal and influential grass-roots Democrats; out of 4,400 convention delegates, about one-tenth are teachers'-union members. And what's more, teachers are a broad-based group in a party often accused of being little more than a hodgepodge of identity-based coalitions. No one race or sex enters the teaching profession. Instead, what most teachers have in common is the fact that they've consciously chosen to devote their careers to educating other people's children -- a selfless, difficult, and poorly remunerated task.
But the centrality of people like Nancy to the Democratic Party, long a given, was put in sharp relief Sunday at a pre-convention Democrats for Education Reform seminar, held at the breathtakingly postmodern Denver Museum of Art. The event, billed "Ed Challenge for Change," was sponsored by a coalition of foundations, nonprofits, and businesses supporting the charter-school movement, including Ed in '08, the advocacy group founded by Bill Gates and real-estate mogul Eli Broad. The evening provided a truly unusual spectacle at a convention: A megawatt group of Democrats, including Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., and former Gov. Ray Romer of Colorado, bashed teachers' unions for an hour.
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I just want to take a minute to point out that several of my buddies from the Afrosphere are going to be at the convention this week, including my friends Baratunde Thurston and Cheryl Contee from JJP, Pam Spaulding, L.N. Rock, Gina McCauley, Liza Sabater, and Shawn Williams. There's more going on on each blog than there is space to list here, but suffice it to say that these blogs are all offering a variety of coverage and perspective that you're not likely to see on many of the bigger blogs.
Mostly boring official proceedings are going on right now at the Pepsi Center. It was just announced from the floor that Michigan and Florida delegates will each receive one full vote -- to a big round of applause and cheers. Hard to remember from here how many press releases were devoted to that topic, way back when...
With the ever-sharp Ron Brownstein (now of National Journal and Atlantic Media, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, where the formers increasingly outnumber the currents) moderating, Atlantic Media convened a forum of disparate Democrats this morning to look at their party and its nominee. SEIU’s Andy Stern, MoveOn.org’s Eli Pariser, Ellen Malcolm of EMILY’s List and Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute -- the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council -- debated such hardy Democratic perennials as trade and populism, merits and problems thereof.
Marshall expressed his long-held view that corporate-bashing populism doesn’t work, though he also said he favored Obama’s proposal for a windfall-profits tax on oil companies to help Americans pay for their heating oil this winter. Judging by my recent research into the ads of Democratic House and Senate candidates across the country, though, Marshall is at odds with his party on downplaying corporate-bashing: In all parts of the nation just now, Democratic candidates are running against “Big Oil” and “Wall Street speculators.”
Stern, for his part, pushed what might be called populism-lite, calling the backlash on trade an understandable reaction to “America’s failure to reward work” but declining to offer a critique of free trade per se. He also offered a surprising answer to Brownstein’s question as to what Obama had to do in the first six months of his presidency, mentioning health care, alternative-energy projects, and getting U.S. forces out of Iraq, but not bringing up the Employee Free Choice Act, which labor needs simply in order to survive. SEIU is very committed to EFCA, but Stern is a labor leader who shuns what some might consider parochial concerns even when, in this case, they’re not parochial at all.
Marshall also stressed how important it was for Obama to move in a “post-partisan” direction, but Pariser cautioned that MoveOn members could warm to a post-partisan campaign for universal health care but would be none too enamored of a post-partisan compromise that undercut that goal. Malcolm talked about other races in which EMILY’s List is investing its energy -- Jeanne Shaheen’s Senate campaign in New Hampshire and Kay Hagan’s in North Carolina. She viewed the two states as up for grabs in the presidential race as well -- an assessment of North Carolina, in particular, that looks highly optimistic just now.
When Brownstein asked the participants what their groups were doing for the election, Stern said the SEIU would be spending $85 million and having more than 1,400 members working full time on the campaign. Malcolm highlighted the states in which EMILY’s List would be active. Pariser said that MoveOn would turn out 150,00 volunteers to pound the pavement in battleground states -- 50,000 more than they did four years ago. (He also expressed concern that independent groups that focus on registering and turning out young voters were underfunded this year, having received commitments of roughly $15 million compared to $40 million four years ago. Presumably, however, the Obama campaign is making a huge investment itself in youth registration and turnout.)
Marshall answered Brownstein’s question about what his group was doing in the only way the head of a think-tank can: The Progressive Policy Institute, he said, would be turning out papers.
Brendan Nyhan points out that Karl Rove is basically going through a traditional checklist of racist stereotypes in criticizing Obama, but he missed a few. First there's the laziness smear, which Rove has been pushing for months. Rove returned to this theme last Thursday, but that doesn't mean he's neglecting the others. You'll remember that Rove sought months ago to characterize Obama as "that guy at the Country Club."
"He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."
This critique is made without irony, despite the fact that Rove surely belongs to a few country clubs Obama wouldn't be able to get into. But that aside, note that Obama is there with "a beautiful date," not his wife. (You know how the chicks dig black guys, who are biologically incapable of restraining our sexual impulses).
So, to reiterate, Obama is an uppity, lazy, promiscuous jerk who's had everything handed to him. As is typical with racism, this is projection, but what makes it frustrating is that the Obama campaign has everything to lose by pointing it out. What's particularly effective about such smears is that they tend to reinforce themselves through their familiarity; the stereotypes are so well known and understood that they can be internalized without much effort.
It's also worth noting Nyhan's critique of Charles Blow's vaguely homophobic column in The New York Times this Sunday, wherein Blow made this statement directed at Obama:
Your initial response to the crisis in Georgia was tepid and swishy. McCain was muscular and straightforward.
Once again, language that presents political questions in terms of binary masculinity often implicates the speaker. Did McCain's pulsing, throbbing response also take Blow to a place he'd never been before?
Via Matt, apparently National Review thinks Madonna represents "the slut vote." (Madonna is speaking out againstJohn McCain on her world tour, which kicked off this weekend.)
Where has K-Lo been for the past decade and a half? Calling Madonna a whore is sooo 1993. (Circa her Sex book, Body of Evidence, and "Human Nature.") If you want to go negative on Madonna, these days it's more appropriate to say she represents the African-baby-snatching constituency.
In light of this ridiculousness, let's enjoy a "slutty"-era Madonna flashback:
"Ooops-- I didn't know I couldn't talk about McCain. Musta been crazy."
Don't expect right-wingers to be outraged by Reggeaton artist Daddy Yankee's embrace of McCain, despite his liberal use of the term "Zorra" in his lyrics. Since TAPPED is a family blog, I can't explain what "Zorra" is roughly equivalent to, but it's kind of like a mixture of what K-Lothinks Madonna is and what McCain voters thinkHillary Clinton is.
More important, though, is that Daddy Yankee is a Reggaeton pioneer. For those of you who don't know what Reggaeton is, it's a "genre" of music with exactly one beat that Reggaeton artists generously share with one another. Which is to say it's simply the same song, over and over, and only the faces and presentation change. Which is perfect for a campaign and a candidate who are offering more of the same.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, commenting on this piece by Teresa Wiltzreminiscing on Lauryn Hill's1998 album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, doesn't understand the ongoing fascination:
At this point, I'm kinda tired of hearing about her. For a moment, she had the touch, and now something's gone terribly wrong. A tragedy, no doubt. But not one that requires regular notations on a career that hasn't produced anything of note in a decade.
Everyone in my 10th grade class was bumping Miseducation, even if they fronted like they weren't. It was an immensely popular album, but more importantly it was an immensely popular album by a woman, who was arguably the last serious lyrical female voice in hip-hop. She was and is an icon of self-determination, perhaps the only woman who demands a spot on the top 10 emcees of all time (at least the top 15). She demanded this kind of recognition not "as a woman" but as an emcee: She was as brolic as they come, all the subsequent hits make it easy to forget that album opens with a scathing diss track aimed at Wyclef Jean.
Female emcees before and since have primarily entered the culture on pop or sex appeal, and those who haven't (like Jean Grae) never got the kind of respect that comes from being a sick lyricist and a pop success. There was this one brief moment where it seemed like there was a space for women in hip-hop culture as something other than objects, and it faded when Lauryn lapsed into obscurity.
To the extent that there's an obsession with Lauryn, I think it has much to with the fact that it seemed like for a moment, the culture was changing, and that her presence would open the door for subsequent female emcees with comparable or greater talent. The tragedy is not just that Lauryn disappeared but that no one stepped through the door after she was gone. When I was graduating from high school, young women looking to see themselves reflected in hip-hop culture had Lauryn Hill. Who do they have now? -- A. Serwer
Like Matt and Ezra, I find this whole "Obama lacks substance" argument extremely dubious. A simple comparison of the two campaigns' Web sites will show that Obama has provided more detail. And when Politico went out and did some easy reporting on the topic, it discovered that, sure enough, McCain's policy proposals are light on the details, not to mention the policies and the proposals. But there aren't any questions on that front, because if you've been in Washington for a few decades you're allowed to radically shift your policies as much as you want without criticism (unless you're a Democrat).
Particularly egregious is this essay from Clinton dead-ender Sean Wilentz, who managed to criticize Obama's substance without trying to learn anything about it. He also apparently favors the McCain-Bush foreign policy:
Then, suddenly this summer, Russia attacked Georgia -- and Obama's immediate reaction was to call for reasonableness and good intentions and urge both sides to show restraint and enter into direct talks. Unfortunately his appeal sounded almost like a caricature of liberal wishful thinking. It was left to his opponent, John McCain -- whose own past judgments on foreign policy demand scrutiny -- to declare right away the sort of thing that might have come naturally to previous generations of liberal Democrats (let alone to a conservative Republican): that "Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory." Beyond the matter of experience, beyond how thoroughly the two candidates had thought through the situation, the difference highlighted how Obama still lacks a comprehensive vision of international politics.
You're kidding, right? McCain's decision to ratchet up belligerent rhetoric would have been a terrible decision if he were president, and was silly even as a presidential candidate, especially since he knows -- or should know -- that the U.S. has no real ability to check Russia in the region. And Wilentz knows -- or should know -- that Obama's foreign-policy ideas have been wellreported. Wilentz can pretend his lament is liberal, but he should at least do his background reading.
Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan has pulled his party (the Pakistan Muslim League-N) out of the Pakistani ruling coalition, citing the fact that Pakistan People's Party Leader Asif Ali Zardari has failed to reinstate judges ousted by former President Pervez Musharraf. This isn't just a matter of principle; Zardari is hesitating because the judges may overturn an amnesty on corruption charges that enabled Zardari to return to Pakistan last year.
In other words, if the PPP reinstated the judges, Zardari, who is his party's nominee for president, could be indicted, opening a path to power for Sharif. As it stands, Blake Hounshell at Passport notes that the PPP retains a majority coalition in Parliament, even without the PML-N (but not enough to establish himself as prime minister), although the balance of power could easily change, given current instability in Pakistan.
Perhaps therein lies the answer to this supposed mystery. Indeed, perhaps there’s no mystery at all, and Obama’s problems are the same problems Democrats always have at the presidential level: He’s an elitist.
Oh, I know. Upon reading that, some liberal spluttered herbal chai tea from her nose at the injustice of this whole elitist canard, and the earnest Ivy League interns at some liberal magazine have burst into laughter, offering the appropriate bons mots from Balzac at the preposterousness of such a suggestion, saying: “Don’t you conservatives understand? Democrats care about the little guy. They’re on the side of the proletariat -- I mean workers -- and as Obama has so eloquently put it, if the workers would only stop clinging to their silly sky god and guns, they’d understand that.”
Hillary said that students are being victimized by "predatory" student loans that charge 28% interest rates. I'm really quite serious: Is that true? In large numbers?
TAP ran into Karen Brown and Bonnie Tierney on 16th Street in Denver, Colorado. Brown was wearing a Hillary Clinton shirt and a John McCain button. They weren't delegates, but they'd come down from Colorado Springs to bear witness to the convention.
You have a Hillary shirt and a John McCain button.
Karen Brown: She was my first choice. Now I'm going to vote for McCain. Why?
KB: I don't like Senator Obama. His choices are all wrong. I feel secure with John McCain.
Where do you feel McCain and Hillary have overlap that Obama doesn't?
KB: I feel that Hillary would make me also feel safe as far as terrorism goes while I think Obama would be thinking about it. As he said in an interview, I'll "confront evil." John McCain said I'll "defeat" evil. I feel Hillary would've said the same thing. I want to feel safe here in America.
Who did you vote for in the past few elections?
KB: Bush. I changed from Republican to Democrat for Hillary. Hillary lost, but I'm still a registered Democrat. I'm going to vote for McCain.
Bonnie Tierney: She's a diehard Republican!
Will you also go with McCain?
BT: I am. Thirty-five years I voted Democrat, I'm voting for John McCain. I'd rather have four years of John McCain and the same and have a chance that Hillary will come back and win than have Barack Obama, who talked about change and hope with no substance. I'd just rather have McCain in. I think we have a better chance with McCain on terrorism.
Did you vote for Kerry in 2004?
BT: Yes. I've voted for every Democrat since, well, Nixon when I was 18, but Democrats after that. I'd like to see a McCain-Hillary ticket to tell you the truth. And there's nothing that would please my soul more than to see Obama lose. He's talking about eight years when he hasn't got the four years. When people start nominating Hillary on the floor this week, he may fall off the stage when he sees superdelegates switching to Hillary.
Richard Cohen has some harsh words for his critics:
“I used to get a lot more on the right,” said columnist Richard Cohen, who broke with liberals when he supported the Iraq War. More recently, the left has picked apart columns that are perceived as being favorable to John McCain.
“If you’re a little bit critical of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face,” Cohen said, adding that his liberal critics “were born too late, because they would have been great communists.”
Unfortunately for Cohen, he was born in an era where the term "communist" doesn't apply to people who believe all property and means of production should be owned collectively and administered by the state, but is instead a pejorative term that applies to anyone who disagrees with your right-leaning political beliefs. Alternatively, Cohen could have been born in time to be an adult during the Red Scare, where accusing your critics of being communists was more popular and infinitely more devastating to their livelihoods. As it stands, accusing other people of being communists in America today usually means you don't actually know what communism is, which if you're a newspaper columnist, reflects poorly on both you and your employer. --A. Serwer
TAPalum, and now associate editor at Campus Progress, Kay Steiger is doing Crappy Hour over at Jezebel this week. She meets PUMAs! She drinks top-shelf for free! Give it a read.
Don Beyer, former lieutenant governor of Virginia and Democratic nominee for governor, took time out from touring the Pepsi Arena in Denver to answer five questions about the state of play in the Commonwealth.
You’ve had a front row seat for the changes in Virginia since you ran and lost a decade ago. How different are things today?
It’s much different, and it’s much better from a moderate-progressive perspective. It’s driven by a variety of things. Maybe the biggest is the growth of Northern Virginia, which is clearly a centerpiece of sensible government. It’s also driven by some terrible governance by Republican governors. George Allen and Jim Gilmore -- especially Jim Gilmore -- did just everything wrong. They alienated the voters, wrecked the budget, jeopardized our triple-A bond rating, spent no effort on growing the state economically, neglected education, neglected highways. So they set it up perfectly for a savior like Mark Warner to show up. And Tim Kaine, as an heir to the Warner-Kaine administration, has turned out to be a star in his own right.
Tell me about how different the state of the state party is today compared to back when you ran.
It was a bit dismal 10 years ago. So what we have now is we have a lot of great people who would have never thought about running for office raising their hands. They know it wouldn’t be a fool’s errand to serve with people like Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Jim Webb. And so we end up with a great field of candidates. We were on a decline from 1972 all the way until 2001, where every cycle we lost House seats, lost Senate seats, lost congressional seats, often getting blown out. And Mark really turned it around.
Warner also persuaded some Republicans that you get what you pay for in terms of investment of the state, right? It seems there’s no longer a drown-it-in-bathtub, Grover Norquist-style approach to politics.
Absolutely. Virginia has always had a lean government to begin with, but Virginians also realize that good government improves our lives. So there is a sense that government can work if it’s sensibly run. We have a remarkable system of government where the governor makes 4,000 appointments to various boards and commissions. Some of these citizens make $50 a day or less to help run the state.
Virginia had three candidates discussed as possible vice-presidential candidates, but none of them -- Warner, Kaine, or Jim Webb -- got it. Were you disappointed a home-state guy didn’t get it?
I was hoping, because I feel that Virginia is so ready to tip. Lyndon Johnson is the only Democrat to win Virginia in my lifetime. I hate to say this, but there are so many people who have never known the state to pick a Democrat. Obviously, if those 26 electoral votes [net] flip, Al Gore wins and it would have come very close for John Kerry. It’s a big deal. Mark Warner? Phenomenally popular; it’s hard to imagine an Obama-Warner ticket not winning [the state]. Obama-Kaine would come close. Obama-Webb, less clear, but Jim Webb is a great story with national reverberations. Even though it’s not happening, it’s still great. [Warner]’s got a 30-point lead [in his Senate race], and Jim’s gonna speak Thursday. All of us are excited about Joe Biden. And when Tim Kaine is done in 2009, Obama is still going to be president, and he can have a future in national government if he wants it.
OK, I want your prediction for Election Day in Virginia between John McCain and Obama, including the margin.
Obama wins 53 to 47 percent. And I say that not just based on the tightness of the polls now, but because we have never had the mass field effort that Obama has now -- way more than 100 paid staff, 30 field offices. It is greater than four years ago by orders of magnitude. There is an enthusiasm gap that John McCain can’t possibly match.
Chris Redfern is the chair of the State Democratic Party in Ohio. He talked to TAP's Ezra Klein about the revitalization of Democrats in Ohio and the competition for dollars with MoveOn.org. Last time we were at a convention, Democrats in Ohio didn't hold a single statewide office.
That was 2004? We had a Supreme Court justice.
There's been a huge change. Now the governor, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the secretary of state, the state treasurer, and one of the senators are Democrats. What's behind it?
The governor, Ted Strickland. When you have incumbent governors, they tend to not invest in state party organizations because they view them as almost competitive in nature. They compete for volunteers, for activists, for money. If you ask any large state governor or party leader, you see there's a national tendency to not work as closely as they should with the party. Not so in Ohio. When Ted Strickland was elected, he invested time and energy into the party, so here we are. Preceding Ted Strickland, when I was elected chairman -- I'm from rural northwestern Ohio -- we built an 88-county organization, which gave us a chance to succeed in more counties. John Kerry won 16 counties. Ted Strickland won 72. So you do the math. When you invest in more counties, you not only have more chances to win those counties, but you may not lose as many as well. In 2004, Democrats pumped money into Ohio. They'll do the same now. How will the two campaigns differ?
The state campaign manager for Barack Obama is a guy name Aaron Pickrell, who was Ted Strickland's political director. Decisions can't be made in places like Boston or D.C. or New York or Chicago. They have to be made by people who understand the importance of Ohio-based decisions. When it's coming from a consultant in Boston, it doesn't work that well. Their Ohio operation was run by someone in Boston.
The polls have tightened in Ohio. Why?
You and I are paying attention. Most aren't. You'll see the kind of attention placed on this race by Gov. Strickland and Sherrod Brown and our legislative leaders that you haven't seen in the past, and our numbers will rise.
What's the utility of a convention like this for you?
Great opportunity to build relationships, raise money, increase awareness. A dollar invested in a 527 like MoveOn.org is a dollar taken away from a state party organization, and it's actually detrimental to state party organizations. I have to urge contributors to invest in state parties rather than 527s. It's great to invest in a 527 if you want to see a commercial in July. It's largely ineffective if you want to get the message out. Our job is to make sure we win in September and October and early November, not to do some flashy news conference in July with some new ad.
In addition to our coverage of the convention here on TAPPED the Prospect is running articles from the convention on a daily basis on the main site. So far today we have Harold Meyersonon what the conventions say about the parties:
Anyone who insists there's no difference between our two political parties should be made to attend their conventions. Even the high-dollar wing-dings thrown by the same lobbyists and law firms at both conventions look and feel different depending on whether it's D's or R's who are knocking back the drinks. And when you're actually inside the convention halls, looking down on a sea of delegates, you never have a nanosecond's doubt, no matter what or how much you may have imbibed, about which convention you're at.
That's because Democratic conventions are among the most integrated gatherings in America, and Republican conventions, not to put too fine a point on it, are all white. The transition, for people who attend both conventions -- chiefly, journalists -- is always a little jarring, and this year, it will be more jarring than ever, inasmuch as the conventions come back to back, inasmuch as the Democrats will have a black nominee and the Republicans a white one
And Bob Kuttner on whether Democrats will have a drama-free convention:
A random sampling of delegates arriving in Denver suggests that the mood is nervously hopeful. There is broad anxiety about why Obama is not doing better, given the favorable external circumstances. However, the selection of Joe Biden as running mate played even better than expected. The running joke is that the white guy is going to give the black guy some soul, as well as some street-toughness that Obama has lacked.
For most delegates, VIPs, and even most of the media, a modern political convention is not about the events on the podium or the formerly smoke-filled rooms where deals are cut. The action is in the hotel bars, the receptions, the dozens of daytime and after-hours events where you can connect with old chums, talk politics, and pursue free food and drink. To the extent that the nominee does his job of keeping secrets and keeping tight control, there is not much hard news to be had, and everybody shares opinions and rumors. The Prospect convention team, six strong, is sharing with The New York Times a fringe hotel far from downtown -- less because we have come up in the world than because the Times is pinching pennies.
Subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they’re published.
As a student journalist at Brown University, I covered David Cicilline’s 2002 run for mayor of Providence, a city he hoped to lead out of its Buddy Cianci-induced fever dream of drama and corruption. In some ways Cicilline was a classic Rhode Island politician: half-Italian, a graduate of Brown, and a friend of the Kennedys'. But in others, he was unconventional: His other half is Jewish, and he’s openly gay in the most Catholic state in the nation -- the first openly gay mayor of a major American city.
Yesterday I ran into Cicilline at a Democrats for Education Reform Event, where he was taking notes on the words of his counterparts in D.C. and Newark, Adrian Fenty and Cory Booker. Teachers’ unions were the topic of the day, roundly criticized by most of the panelists. In Providence, Cicilline has reduced crime but hasn’t quite gotten the traction of other mayors in reforming the schools. In May, he appointed a new superintendent -- one recommended to him by the Broad Foundation, a leading group in the constellation of pro-charter public education reform efforts. Here’s what Cicilline had to say.
Why did you come to this event today? And what is your education-reform goal for Providence?
Well, as far as I’m concerned, there is no more important issue, there is no greater responsibility I have as mayor of the city of Providence, than public education. So to see my colleagues like Mayor Booker and Mayor Fenty, it’s about coming and learning, and hearing additional ideas and strategies. It’s really to reinforce the notion that this is our single greatest responsibility, to ensure our kids can compete in the 21st century. If we don’t get this right, than nothing else matters.
Do you feel a lot of pushback from teachers’ unions in Providence?
Well I think it changes. We’re in the middle of negotiations now, and we have been talking for a number of months about differentiated pay, changing the school day, and meaningful evaluation of teachers. Those are things that are very difficult to enact. But the examples we heard here, I think, can really be a framework for other cities to follow.
Tell me about mayoral control in Providence.
I prefer to think of it as mayoral responsibility. I appoint my school board, and I’m responsible for presenting the school budget.
I spent Sunday with the American labor movement (and a somewhat balky laptop, which is why you’re reading this on Monday) gathered here in Denver and with union leaders who have major differences with one another but who are scared to death that John McCain may win this thing and who are mounting the most important of the ground campaigns on Barack Obama’s behalf. Their target is white working-class voters in battleground states -- the group that will determine the outcome of November’s election and that no other group on the Democratic side is really targeting.
Labor has always been able to put up good numbers when you compare the voting habits of their members to their non-union counterparts. The gap in presidential voting between working-class white union members and non-members is usually between 20 percent and 30 percent, and Mike Podhorzer, the AFL-CIO’s deputy political director, told a press conference on labor’s political program that the polling shows a similar gap this year. In the 2006 House election, white male union members voted for Democratic candidates by a margin of 39 percent. White male non-unionists voted for Republicans by a margin of 9 percent.
But there are two major problems. First, as a share of the overall population, labor continues to decline. Second, a lot of union members -- in such Appalachian swing states as Pennsylvania and Ohio (and among Michigan’s transplanted hillbilly autoworkers) -- have never voted for an African American before and are not convinced that this year is the time to start.
The unions have responded to the decline in numbers by waging very intense get-out-the-vote drives among their members, so that, for instance, in 2004, union-household voters in Michigan made up 37 percent of the electorate, 34 percent in Ohio, and 30 percent in Pennsylvania. They’ve also realized that in these Rust Belt states, the number of former union members who lost their union affiliations when their factories closed down exceeds the number of current union members. In response, they’ve set up the Working America program, a massive endeavor in which canvassers go to non-members’ households in working-class neighborhoods, enroll them (for free) in a non-workplace-related union directly affiliated with the AFL-CIO, and are thereby able to communicate with these members as they do with other union members. In Ohio, there are now a stunning 800,000 Working American members. AFL-CIO political director Karen Ackerman showed a Google map of one zip code in a Minnesota congressional district, highlighting in blue the 1,634 union households in the zip code – and, in red, the 1,819 Working America households.
The scale of labor’s program this year is larger than any it's ever attempted. Between now and November, the federation will have volunteers knocking on 10 million doors, put 25 million pieces of literature in the mail, make 70 million phone calls to members, and distribute 20 million leaflets at work sites. Though labor is fractured into two federations and the independent National Education Association, all these unions will participate in most of the AFL-CIO’s precinct walking and phoning, besides running programs of their own. (Presidents of unions that belong to the AFL-CIO as well as the breakaway Change to Win, and the president of the NEA, all appeared at a joint rally Sunday afternoon at Denver’s convention center. I can’t recall a labor political rally at which virtually every major union was represented -- or one at which every one of those unions’ presidents spoke, which made for one long rally.)
At a Sunday morning press conference held by Andy Stern and Anna Burger, the two top leaders of the nation’s most politically effective union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Stern announced that 1,463 SEIU members would be working full time on the campaign this fall. Only one-third of them will actually be mobilizing SEIU members; the other two-thirds will be involved in such activities as registering young and minority voters. Adding SEIU’s efforts to those of the other Change To Win and AFL-CIO individual unions, plus that of the NEA and the AFL-CIO as a whole, it’s likely that labor will spend something like a third of a billion dollars on the campaign this fall.
But their foremost challenge isn’t quantitative; it’s qualitative. It’s persuading white workers to vote for Obama. “This race is too tight,” AFSCME President Jerry McEntee, who also heads the AFL-CIO’s political committee, told yesterday’s labor rally. “We’ll have to fight with our own members on this. We’ve got to say to our Appalachian members who say they can’t vote for him, he’s black -- We gotta tell them that’s bullshit!”
Well, that’s one approach. What labor knows from years of experience is that the most effective way to sway members is to have their peers -- in this case, their shop stewards or local leaders -- talk to them at the work site about the election. Labor knows its members are susceptible to the GOP Disinformation machine; last month, the AFL-CIO put a million pieces in the mail specifically denying that Obama is a Muslim, doesn’t pledge allegiance, the whole nine yards. But they also know the best way to dispel this is one-on-one meetings between workers.
That’s putting a tremendous responsibility in the hands of thousands of local union activists, many of whom have never had to make this kind of sale before. Some may not. One leader told me that at a conference in Chicago earlier this month on labor’s campaign in battleground states, one president of a union said some of his local leaders said they might lose their jobs as local president if they pushed too hard for Obama.
There was universal sentiment at the gathering that Joe Biden was exactly the right Veep pick to win back some of their white members. Harold Schaitburger, president of the heavily white Fire Fighters union, told me that the heads of some of his Southern locals contacted him expressing relief that Obama had picked Biden; with that, they could campaign for the ticket.
In 2004, there were a number of independent “527” groups in the field trying to turn out the white working-class vote. This year there’s labor and – well, and labor. A movement that has always been bedeviled by racial divisions has to bridge those divisions as never before. Obama’s election and labor’s future depend on it.
After years of jumping when Drudge says jump, Mark Halperin must be exceptionally well sourced, which is why I assume things like this comment on McCain's housing problem won't hurt his career.
HALPERIN: My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama. … I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.
Halperin's language, including the use of "opening the door" to Tony Rezko, etc., is strikingly similar to what Marc Ambinder quoted a "campaign official" as saying the day McCain made the gaffe.
A campaign official said that the decision to Go Rezko was Obama's. "He's opened the door to this," the official said. ...
Earlier in the news cycle, McCain's press team invoked Obama's friendship with a former member of the Weatherman, William Ayres, and an official said that even Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, "is now fair game."
Notice the difference between how Ambinder relayed this information and how Halperin did. Ambinder attributed it to a source, while Halperin repeated what the source said verbatim but as his own expert "analysis." This is a conscious act of deception that facilitates the presentation of RNC talking points as Halperin's ostensibly "independent" view as a reporter.
I also think it's fairly obvious that the Republicans were planning on using Ayers, Rezko, and Wright anyway, and are trying to present the Obama campaign's push on McCain's housing as somehow "unfair" so that when they do use them, they will be "justified." At the very least, you would expect someone who has worked as a reporter this long not to take it at face value when a campaign operative tells you that they weren't intending to use the most explosive oppo material they had on their opponent, but the other guy "went too far."
At any rate, the McCain campaign has campaign officials to repeat its talking points. If Mark Halperin wants to be one of those, he should quit his job and join them. But he shouldn't be abusing his authority and credibility as a reporter by repeating what he hears from the McCain campaign as his own "analysis." -- A. Serwer
Nancy Ruth White, a Hillary Clinton delegate from Redlands, California, is one of the 300 delegates who signed a petition to read Clinton's name out on the floor. She spoke with TAP's Ezra Klein about her decision.
How did you come to be a delegate?
I'm a retired teacher. I've been involved with Democratic Party politics since McGovern in 1972. Then I became excited about Ted Kennedy's candidacy because I was strongly behind his emphasis on a national heath plan and his support for women's issues like the Equal Rights Amendment. So for about 35 years, I've been doing politics as my avocation. And I've also done this work through my teacher's union and my church and my community action board. I just feel the Democratic Party is the party for the people and is genuinely concerned about the plight of the working person.
You were one of the 300 who signed the petition to have Hillary Clinton's name read at the convention. Why did you sign?
I am a Hillary delegate but very committed to Barack Obama being our nominee. The reason I was one of the 300 signatures to have Hillary Clinton's name placed on the floor to be our nominee for president is because I believe she is a woman who has attained so much and come so far that she really deserves to be recognized. There are countless Democrats here because their states voted for Hillary. That should be recognized.
There's a perception in the media that supporting putting Hillary's name on the floor is in tension with support of Obama. You say that's not the case.
I don't think it is. I've talked to a lot of people and they're all more concerned about the direction of the party. If you look at the issues between Barack Obama and Hillary, they are so very similar on the issues. And it's so exciting choosing between a woman and an African American for our nominee. But above that, we need to make things happen, in infrastructure and health care and so on. Before I signed onto this petition, I checked and made sure that both the Hillary camp and the Obama camp were in agreement. Hillary is supportive of Obama and wants to keep the party united, and with that assurance, I was more than happy to sign.
Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL: Pro-Choice America, will be speaking from the convention floor early tomorrow evening. At the Sheraton Denver this afternoon, she spoke with TAP's Dana Goldstein about using reproductive rights as a wedge issue this election year.
Joe Biden is all anyone is talking about this weekend. Biden supports Roe, but also supports the Hyde Amendment. In other words, he opposes public financing of abortions, in direct contrast with the position of NARAL and other pro-choice groups. What do you think Obama's choice of Biden says about Obama's commitment to reproductive rights?
We disagreed with Sen. Biden on a few points. But I think the point to be made here is that it is Sen. Obama who is the nominee. It is Sen. Obama who will be setting the policy. So. That’s where the responsibility lies. With Sen. Obama, and he’s fully pro-choice.
Is Obama doing enough to draw out his contrast on reproductive health with John McCain? Should the Obama campaign be running television ads on the topic of choice?
I think they’re doing a lot. When he spoke both in Virginia and New York, he spoke about the importance of protecting a woman’s right to choose. When he was at Saddleback, he stated it loudly and clearly and proudly, that he is pro-choice and that he will defend that right. So I have every confidence that he is out there on it, he’s talking about it, he’s strong when he speaks, and he’s articulate. So we have absolutely no uneasiness at all.
Speaking of Saddleback, we saw there the airing of an accusation against Obama that has been circulating in the right-wing blogosphere for a long time: that he does not support life-saving measures for babies supposedly "born alive" during abortions. (Click here for more coverage of Obama and the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.) What's your assessment of that tactic?
The bigger point here is that John McCain is trying to divert people’s attention from his record. And he’s speaking to his base. Those pro-choice independent and Republican women will vote for Sen. Obama when they find out what McCain’s record is -- a 25-year anti-choice voting record. So to me, it’s just them trying to divert attention from John McCain’s record.
By talking about “born alive” infants after abortion?
That’s right. Let’s keep in mind that George W. Bush never called for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. John McCain has. He goes farther than George Bush. That’s also the strategy with the talk about Giuliani speaking, and Ridge. It’s that old trick. Look over there, look over there, and don’t look right here at John McCain’s record.
There's an idea out there that this year's Democratic platform represents a victory of sorts for folks like the Rev. Jim Wallis, who are pro-life Democrats focused on reducing the number of abortions. Do you agree?
Well, I was on the platform committee, so we have been intimately involved in crafting the language. It is very, very strong. It reflects our mission in terms of protecting women’s reproductive choices. In addition, it reflects that we have always, as pro-choice Americans, supported access to birth control, supported age-appropriate, accurate sex-education, that we have always supported adoption, that we have always supported carrying pregnancies to term. And that’s what it means to be pro-choice in this country. But women make lots of choices in their reproductive years, including the right to terminate a pregnancy. And we support women in those choices.
One of those choices is what sort of contraception to use. At Saddleback, John McCain said life begins at conception.
You know, Americans come to that belief with their own conscience and their own science. That’s America.
But what does that mean for messaging around the issue of birth control and emergency contraception?
Let’s start with the fact that 97 percent of the women in this country have at one time accessed birth control. So accessing birth control is a mainstream value. And most Americans can hold that they might have personal beliefs that are different from somebody else. But they also know that fundamentally, government cannot be telling them that they cannot access birth control. So to me, again, this is about who decides. The issue about birth control is so mainstream. It is John McCain who is out of touch with women in this country.
What will NARAL be doing on the ground in terms of get-out-the-vote this year?
Our program this year is called "Protect and Elect." We have to protect the seats we gained last cycle, in 2006. We gained 23 pro-choice seats in the House and three in the Senate. We’ll be looking then at those seats that we think we can pick up in the Senate, including Oregon, Jeff Merkley against Gordon Smith. And Mr. Merkley is talking extensively about reproductive choice. Of course, Jeanne Shaheen, a champion of reproductive choice in New Hampshire. Then here we are sitting right in Colorado, where Mark Udall is running for an important seat.
So we target Republican and independent pro-choice women voters. That’s who we go after in educating them on John McCain’s record. We will mail them, we will call them, we will knock on their doors. And often what our polling shows is that women who are pro-choice, at the end of the campaigns, when the health-care plans sound a little bit the same, and gosh, the war -- they’re not sure what the exact answer is on the war. The one issue they will go to look at in making their determination is the issue of reproductive choice. And that is the determining factor in who they will vote for, and it can be the margin of difference in winning and losing.
Markis right -- Joe Biden's logorrhea is endearing. But after finally watching his rousing speech from yesterday (I was on a plane while he was giving it), I have to make the following two points:
1. Stop saying "literally." I have literally never heard a person say the word "literally" so many times in one 17 minute period. You could also cut down on the frequent "ladies and gentlemen," but that bothers me less.
2. Practice saying "Barack Obama," Joe. It's not something that sounds sorta like "Barack America." It's not "Barack Obaman." It's "Barack Obama."
Meanwhile, there's not a whole lot to report yet here in Denver. TAP is staying at a perfectly lovely motel in nearby Glendale. Beginning today, expect Q&As with delegates and important progressive issue leaders, and beginning tomorrow, full coverage of the convention speeches, events, and looks at the grassroots and national advocates hoping to influence the Democratic Party.
I don't know Biden and he doesn't know me, but I saw a lot of him during the two-year struggle to construct and pass the 1993 Crime Bill. Like many things associated with Biden, it was an open-ended, rambling process. I was on the staff of Sen. Bill Bradley, where I had been involved in crafting a successful amendment to set aside a few hundred million dollars for crime prevention programs and after-school activities. I found myself -- to my amazement -- wedged among dozens of staffers and members of Congress in the room where House and Senate committee members alone were supposed to resolve the differences between their two bills. In the chaos, I realized what Biden is: a plodder, but a passionate one. He's never the smartest guy in the room. His SAT's probably wouldn't beat Barack Obama's, Al Gore's, or John Kerry's. But, like FDR, he knows it. And so, he works. He learns.
As I listened to Biden pontificate about constitutional law and theories of crime prevention, I slowly realized that he was not just a preening blowhard watching himself in an imaginary mirror. Rather, in a way that was at times reminiscent of the entirely self-taught Sen. Robert C. Byrd, Biden has worked hard to master these issues, and wants nothing more to persuade and share his passion for that learning. And so while it required a large commitment of time, a Biden speech defending, say, the Violence Against Women Act, was worth paying attention to, in a way that only a few other senators' speeches (Byrd and the late Paul Wellstone) have ever been.
He didn't have always have brilliant solutions -- just as he doesn't have brilliant, never-before-seen solutions on the foreign policy issues that he waited almost 30 years to take on as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. But the values are liberal and the conclusions are right. More importantly, when Biden holds a view, he justifies it not by instinct -- the much over-rated power of which George W. Bush boasts -- but by immersion in the various viewpoints and relevant facts. There is no better counterpoint to the era of contempt for the "reality-based community" than Biden's evident belief that knowledge and facts, piled up high and sorted through, can support our moral commitments, whether to human rights or women's rights.
Like lots of folks in their twenties, I don't have a land line, so I keep my cell phone on all the time, even when I'm asleep. I like to think that in an emergency, my family always has some way to contact me.
When I went to bed at 2:45 a.m. this morning, after packing for two weeks on the road to the Democratic and Republican conventions -- and enduring a close call where I thought I'd lost my wallet -- I was exhausted. I had also already learned, and blogged about, Barack Obama's pick of Joe Biden as his running mate.
So I was none too pleased when, at 3:30 a.m., just as I was drifting into a deep sleep, I received a text message. From the Obama campaign. Telling me something I already knew, and that even if I hadn't, I wouldn't have needed to know until the next morning.
Was anybody else awakened by the veep text message? Annoyed?
What I'm looking forward to with Joe Biden on the ticket: Photo-ops with his sprawling family. Biden reminding everyone that his son is deploying to Iraq in October....and he still supports withdrawal. And sure, the occasional hilarious verbal gaffe.
How he'll be attacked: For recommending to John Kerry that John McCain should have been his running mate in 2004. That'll lose him some credibility in criticizing McCain this time around.
If you're looking for some Biden reading, check out my dispatch from the Iowa campaign trail with Biden last January. It was a blast. And here's even more Biden.
As of this writing, no VP announcements, but here is the output of the rumor mill over the past twelve hours or so: Chet Edwards, a Texas Democrat, for Obama's VP? I think the very thought of all those "Obama/Edwards" placards is enough to rule this one out. Or how about McCain/Petraeus? I think that one was just to make the wingers salivate. CNN learns that the Obama rejects have been notified, but doesn't know who they are. Kathleen Sebelius and Tim Kaine are booked for the Sunday talk shows, which suggests they aren't the picks, although the schedule could easily be changed. Hillary Clinton, apparently, wasn't vetted at all. And last, but not least, Mark Halperin says two GOP sources have said it's Romney for McCain's VP, although Atrios reminds us what a Halperin prediction is worth, noting that the pundit had an Obama/Lugar item up briefly before deleting the post. Halperin, it's worth recalling, once referred to Matt Drudge as the "Walter Cronkite of his era," and co-wrote a book on the "way to win" the White House using the patented Bush/Cheney/Rove style of divide-and-conquer-51-percent-of-the-vote politics circa 2004. In short, even if it is Romney, it won't be because information brokers like Halperin told us so.
The lede in this Washington Post story on the McCain/number of houses "controversy" really nails the dynamic: "Sen. John McCain's inability to recall the number of homes he owns during an interview yesterday jeopardized his campaign's carefully constructed strategy to frame Democratic rival Barack Obama as an out-of-touch elitist and inspired a round of attacks that once again ratcheted up the negative tone of the race for the White House." See, this was never about McCain being rich. This is about McCain contrasting himself with someone his campaign has decided to label an elitist. Now, for many on the left, an elite is measured materially -- number of houses, having a house servant budget exceeding the average value of most Americans' homes, being unable to remember whether a place is in your names, your wife's or some sort of corporate trust. But the right views elitism as cultural; hence Obama is a celebrity, a citizen of the world who hangs out with Hollywood stars. The issue, politically, is which version of elitism resonates more with the public, rather than the fretting of well-intentioned people like Paul Krugman who are perennially concerned about a lack of public policy discussions in American presidential politics.
The Obama-9/11-60's radicals ad I noted yesterday is too hot for not just CNN but also Fox News. Apparently they don't want to get sued for slander, which I had previously assumed would be a badge of honor for them. (EDIT: Fox accidentally runs the ad anyway).
Noam Scheiber goes back to McCain's initial 1982 run for Congress in Arizona (with video!) to highlight the appeal of the vet's military service, and how that is being squandered carelessly to fight back against Barack Obama.
Another Politico "exclusive:" a law review article Barack Obama wrote in college. Please, fellas, all these bombshells are giving me PTSD.
For those craving a bit more substantive political blogging, try the Routledge 2008 Election Review, a blog "intended to provide analysis of all things related to the 2008 election cycle—the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain, the role of the Democratic and Republican parties, key congressional elections, media coverage, central policy issues and how they’re discussed/framed, public opinion polls, the role of outside groups, historical perspective, the rules of the game, and whatever else comes into play." It's very satisfying to see political scientists embracing this medium, especially during the silly season of a presidential campaign.
And Finally, the Washington Times takes a serious look at "liberal bias" in Wikipedia articles, and explores alternatives like Conservapedia, which the article admits are "incomplete." I dunno -- the Conservapedia articles are complete, they just exist in a parallel universe from far, far, from reality.
Cameron Strang, editor and publisher of Relevant magazine, has decided not to give a benediction at the Democratic National Convention Monday night as scheduled. Strang, a registered Republican until he switched his affiliation to independent this week, has been courted and consulted by the Obama campaign as a means of reaching out to younger evangelical voters. Strang was one of the thirty or so religious leaders at an off-the-record meeting with Obama in June; in July his published interview of Obama touched off a firestorm over comments Obama made about abortion.
On his blog, Strang, who is the son of charismatic evangelical publishing powerhouse Stephen Strang, who endorsed McCain, wrote on his blog that he was intrigued by the DNC's invitation of a few weeks ago because, he thought, why not "continue positive dialogue, show support for an emphasis on faith issues and pray in a forum where faith isn’t typically thought to be emphasized? To quote someone close to me—and meaning no disrespect whatsoever to Christian Democrats—it was a chance to be 'light in the darkness.'" Strang wrote that there was an understanding that he wasn't being asked to endorse Obama, but when he found out his prayer would be on the main stage, "it gave me serious pause. Through RELEVANT I reach a demographic that has strong faith, morals and passion, but disagreements politically. It wouldn’t be wise for me to be seen as picking a political side, when I’ve consistently said both sides are right in some areas and wrong in some areas. (And truth be told, I haven’t yet made up my mind about who I’m going to vote for this November. There are a lot of specifics I’d like to hear the candidates talk about before my decision will be made.)"
Often touted by left-leaning religious advocates as the face of a new evangelical generation, Relevant, marketed as "LIFE + GOD + PROGRESSIVE CULTURE," claims a print subscriber base of 80,000. Strang made clear in his post that abortion remains a pivotal issue for him and his readership.
TimdefendsJim Wallis and his abortion reduction rhetoric as a better alternative to the culture wars and bringing new voters into the Democratic Party.
But pro-choice advocates and feminists have always championed minimizing unintended pregnancies through safe, effective, affordable birth control and comprehensive sex education, and supporting women and their families through pay equity, child care, parental leave, raising the minimum wage, and other policies. Wallis didn't bring those policies ideas to the table; what he does bring to the table is condescension to women by maintaining that he knows better than they do what's good for their souls.
A few weeks ago I spoke with Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for a Free Choice, and asked her about Wallis' role in the abortion reduction frame as well as his emergence as a leading figure of a religious "left." Kissling replied that "his views on women and abortion are dangerous. He sees women as victims. He cannot acknowledge that there is a woman who is strong, competent, capable, moral adult who can make the decision to have an abortion because that is the best moral choice for her."
Matthew Yglesias points out that people at The National Review, a magazine that not only staunchly supported racial segregation in the South, but whose founder believed at the time that whites were "the advanced race" should probably avoid taking license with the beliefs of Martin Luther King Jr.
William F. Buckley, dissembling mightily in his famous 1957 editorial "The South Must Prevail," wrote that segregation was fine as long as it was "merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races," something MLK would have called an "excuse rather for Ado-nothingism and escapism which ends up in Astand-stillism." And he would have been right. Yet, here is Kyle-Ann Shriver, showing that she clearly has no idea who King actually was:
The positions and values of Senator Obama stand mightily against those espoused, and what’s more, practiced, by Martin Luther King Jr. Based on all these considerations, I think it is quite probable that King, were he alive today, would not vote for Barack Obama.
What I find consistently odd is that conservatives who try to claim Martin Luther King Jr. are blatantly ignorant of his views. They've seen excerpts from the "I Have A Dream" speech but can't be bothered to read a single piece of the man's work beyond what's been featured in old Cingular commercials. King was a liberal--he was a firm believer not just in the power of the Church but in the power of government to help the disaffected. Not only that, he was a radical liberal, who said that "the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice," who compared American conduct in Vietnam to the Holocaust, and who chided America for having "taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes."
In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that if King were alive today, it would be Barack Obama who would be giving hand-wringing speeches distancing himself from King, making excuses for his past statements, and calling on white Americans to put themselves in his shoes. Oh, and the GOP noise machine would be in full smear mode, just like they were back in the day when King was still alive.
People who have no idea what King stood for, let alone people who work at a magazine that stood against him in his time, should probably refrain from uninformed speculation about what he believed, or what he would do.
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