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.
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.
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