Month: August 2008

It’s an interesting take on Obama – and it was Jim Leach’s basic point. He is not a great speaker, to say the least. But he was the most substantive of the night and the most serious. He is right about one fundamental thing, I think. The ditch this country has gotten itself in – fiscally, militarily and diplomatically – is extremely deep. It will require more than an ordinary politician to get us out of it.

Not that it matters much, but here are the numbers on the spouses:

Fifty-one percent of registered voters express a favorable opinion of Michelle Obama in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, while 30 percent view her unfavorably; the rest, 19 percent, haven’t formed an opinion. For Cindy McCain, it’s 47 percent favorable, 20 percent unfavorable, with more, a third, yet to make a judgment.

Ambers gets at something here:

[Michelle Obama] is the most modern of first ladies-in-waiting, but the Obama’s marriage and family life are the most traditional of any presidential candidate’s family in recent memory.

There’s no question that if you judge the candidates on their actual lives, rather than mythologies, the Obamas are extremely mainstream and conservative. Married for life, great parents, very humble beginnings, driven meritocrats. No divorce or adultery – and regular religious attendance and faith. And yet they are tagged as elitists and radicals. Yes, they’re liberals in policy, although not radically so. But they’re conservatives in their lives.

The same paradox can be seen in Obama himself: a policy liberal but a temperamental conservative. To see the Obamas as they are requires us to see them in these paradoxes. And to recognize that they may not be paradoxes at all.

Well, even I found myself choking up a little. This was the last roar of a rumpled lion, made through the obvious pain of sickness, and clearly rousing for the base. The speech was a little abstract and a little reminiscent of previous Kennedy orations. But there was no mistaking this moment: the Kennedy mystique passed on to this young senator. And when you recall the Kennedy legacy on race, you cannot help but be moved by this week and this moment. He was much more on point than I expected; and much more composed. Whatever you believe about his politics, this was a poignant moment, and the convention effectively began.

My hopes weren’t high for tonight, and hoisting Ted Kennedy into some kind of speech will probably provide all the drama TV craves. But seriously: what a crashing, distracted, short-attention span craptacular so far.

For the last couple of months, I haven’t watched cable, because we don’t have it on the Cape. I try to detox from TV over the summer. And just one hour of watching first CNN and then Fox and I realize how little I’ve missed. They just yammer on and on about themselves. Watching O’Reilly and Juan Williams goofing off is journalism? C-SPAN is broadcasting DNC propaganda, of course. But it’s a little less nauseating than the cables. At least you get to judge the infomercial for yourself. It’s irritating when your friends or spouse talk over a TV show, but watching anchors talk over speakers on the television itself is a little more irritating.

Andrew Romano trots out old convention stories to put the Clinton-Obama feud in context.

Yes, Jonah is losing it.

George Packer wants Democrats to give Johnson his due:

Whenever Democrats gather to celebrate the party, they invoke the names of their luminaries past. The list used to begin with Jefferson and Jackson. More recently, it’s been shortened to F.D.R., Truman, and J.F.K. The one Democrat with a legitimate claim to greatness who can’t be named is Lyndon Johnson. The other day I asked Robert Caro, Johnson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer and hardly a hagiographer of the man, whether he thought Johnson should be mentioned in Denver. “It would be only just to Johnson,” Caro said. “If the Democratic Party was going to honestly acknowledge how it came to the point in its history that it was about to nominate a black American for President, no speech would not mention Lyndon Johnson.”

Caro is now at work on the fourth volume of his epic biography, about Johnson’s White House years. “I am writing right now about how he won for black Americans the right to vote. I am turning from what happened forty-three years ago to what I am reading in my daily newspaper—and the thrill that goes up and down my spine when I realize the historical significance of this moment is only equaled by my anger that they are not giving Johnson credit for it.”