Month: August 2008

Weigel:

A problem for Barr and for the other third party candidates is how heroically distant the convention center is from everything they’re doing. Public transportation stops about five blocks from the gates of the Pepsi Center, and a security gate (complete with "empty all liquids" TSA rules) stops you three more blocks from the entrance of the center. It’s awfully hard for a reporter to run a "check out the wacky third parties" story without leaving the compound. And it’s hard for the third party candidates (they’re all here) to get close to the center.

Cable is uninterested. I’m not:

McCain’s PUMA opportunism gets a little out of hand.

[Re-posted] A reader writes:

I am a 36 year old African American woman.  I have two girls ages 10 and 8.  The country does not get the full import of this moment.  My daughters and I sat together along with my husband to watch Michelle Obama tonight.  Mr. Sullivan, we were all in tears.  This is a day that cannot be fully described.  This country has systematically oppressed Black women for centuries.  My ancestors were slaves and my great, great, great, grandmothers raped and treated as property.  My daughters have very few Black women to look up to in popular culture as role models.  They do not feel seen, they are not held up as the standards of American beauty.   We shed tears tonight as a family because Michelle (with her elegance and grace) is holding all of us up with her.  You don’t understand the burden that she bears.

No, I don’t. How could I? But as she spoke of somehow being able to reach for the American dream, through struggle and disdain and marginalization, it wasn’t just about race or gender – but about all those things that Americans have overcome. I couldn’t help but think, perhaps solipsistically, of my wedding a year ago this week. And what it means. And what it would have meant to countless gay people who, for centuries, were brutalized, mocked, jailed, murdered and beaten for who they were. And I get a part of this in a different way. And am glad.

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)

JPod is underwhelmed:

…the Biden addition has been a complete bust as a news event. The onus is now on Biden to deliver a killer speech on Wednesday and thereby allow Democrats to feel something other than disappointment at his elevation. Whatever a Hillary pick would have generated, it wouldn’t have been disappointment.

Biden was picked not as an event. He was picked because of his ability to trash the Republican record in language most Americans will understand, to treat Republican foreign policy as the disaster it has been, and to give good advice on foreign affairs if Obama wins. His impact has yet to be seen – or measured.

Last night was John McCain’s thirteenth appearance on the Tonight Show. More than Arnold. His peers in that elevated celebrity zone? Pamela Anderson, Dr. Phil, Larry the Cable Guy, Simon Cowell, and Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Obama? He’s been on once.

Seattle, Washington, 6 am.

Love it:

What I loved best about Michelle Obama’s speech tonight was that it was fearless, but in a very different way from the fearlessness modeled by Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. Here is a woman with a degree from Harvard Law School, who could have talked about law and policy and poverty, and yet she talked about her kids, her husband, and her family. And she didn’t do that merely to show us that smart women are soft and cuddly on the inside. She did what everyone else in this campaign is terrified to do: She risked looking sappy and credulous and optimistic when almost everyone has abandoned "hope" and "change" for coughing up hairballs of outrage.

Every Democrat in America seems to be of the view that optimism is so totally last February; that now’s the time to hunker down and panic real hard. Good for Michelle for reminding us that to "strive for the world as it should be" is still cool, and for being so passionate about that fact that she looked to be near tears.

I also agree with David Brooks’ excellent advice today, which is that Obama needs to simply be who he is. He just isn’t a Krugman-style attack dog; he isn’t terribly partisan; he isn’t really that radical. Clinton era tax hikes for the successful and tax cuts for the struggling, a healthcare proposal less statist than Romney’s, diplomatic caution, religious temperance, global awareness: these are his themes, bound together with the hope of the next generation. He is the 21st Century, while McCain is eager for the 19th. You have to trust the American people to see this – not panic, trust.

It’s the difference between a sober empirical judgment and a hotheaded partisan boast. From Newsweek:

Petraeus is careful not to credit all the progress to the surge of U.S. troops in 2007. The sea change came last year from a series of movements now known as the Awakening. […] So would the Sunni Awakening have succeeded without the surge? Possibly, he concedes.

And McCain:

COURIC: Sen. Obama […] says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?

McCAIN: I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened.

Notice the accusation of a lie when Obama is actually telling the nuanced truth, exactly as Petraeus did. Do we really need another commander-in-chief who cannot see complexity in the Middle East? And who turns military facts into partisan propaganda?

A reader notes:

There’s rich irony in listening to Carville and Begala assert that the convention ought to be devoted to tearing McCain down. After all, if there’s a model for the convention that Obama is running this year, it’s the 1992 gathering overseen by, well, Carville and Begala.

Then, as now, a candidate new to the national stage was seen by many as an elitist, identified with privilege, and regarded with suspicion as a radical.

Conventions present a unique opportunity to define a candidate, share his biography, and ground his policy message in a personal narrative. Candidates who are already well-defined – incumbents and prominent pols – tend to use their conventions instead to redefine their opponents in negative terms. I suspect that’s what Carville and Begala remember – the 1996 convention, when instead of passing the torch, Ted Kennedy used his nominating speech to inveigh against the "Republican trio of reaction," repeating "Dole, Kemp and Gingrich" five times.

There’s also a regrettable tendency at work here to define politics in gendered terms, as if an election were merely an exercise in assertive masculinity. That’s a losing proposition. If strength is recast as bellicosity, how can Obama hope to measure up against McCain, a man perfectly willing to fight any war, at any time, for any reason? If the fitness of a candidate is measured by the viciousness of his attacks, how can Obama win a race to the bottom against McCain?

It’s as if the pundits learned nothing from watching the primary campaign. Obama wins on the strength of his judgment, his maturity, and the strength of his conviction that our best days lie ahead. And his most effective attacks have been those that tie his opponents to the past, and which point to their faulty judgment. Obama won’t win this fall because he’s more manly than John McCain; this is a campaign, not a pissing contest. He’ll win because McCain is embracing the past, and Americans always look to the future.