Month: September 2012

11.23 pm. How do you follow that? With the Barack and Bill hug and wave. I believed Clinton's speech would be the make-or-break speech this week – and he made it. He improvised apparently – hence the Clintonian over-run on time. But by being a former president and exposing the shameless lies perpetrated by Romney, especially on welfare reform, he was able to say things no one else could. I don't buy the argument that Obama is more liberal than Clinton and never have. But for those who do, tonight was a brilliant reminder of the things that unite them. In other words:

I never liked Clinton but it is now pure churlishness to cavil at his remarkable skills. He is able to reach middle class voters with clear argument, grasp of detail and narration of history that very few others can. If Obama has said that his main failing in this campaign is that he hasn't told the story of the past few years well enough, then it is surely fitting that it was the husband of his former rival and former president Bill Clinton who finally told that story.

It's a story threatened at a critical juncture. I feel no reservations in seeing it through to the very end.

11.18 pm. Republicanism today is failed arithmetic. Clinton is really bringing this home – intellectually. It is not a series of platitudes; it is a series of arguments rebutting last week's entire convention arguments. It has far more policy substance than Romney's or Ryan's speeches. And it has the added benefit of being true.

11.15 pm. Clinton is now equating Obama's plan with Bowles-Simpson. And when you spell out the Romney plan as it exists, it does not add up. And it's perverse. Cutting revenues as a way to cut debt when revenues are at 50 year lows is not a policy. It's madness.

11.11 pm. Now the important passage on Romney's massive welfare lie. The requirement was for more work, not less. Bill Clinton is the perfect man to rebut this lie. I wonder if it will have some serious blowback for Romney. A former president has called him out on a clear lie.

11.10 pm. Now he's telling seniors that slashing Medicaid means slashing home-care for the elderly.

11.07 pm. "It takes some brass to attack a man for doing what you did." He's on fire. Now: welfare? Please: welfare.

11.04 pm. What's great about Clinton's speech: he has taken on the opposing argument directly. We are better off than four years ago. And the healthcare reform is already slowing healthcare costs. Now he's tackling the "robbing Medicare to pay for Obamacare" deception. He's a lawyer slowly moving the jury to a judgment.

10.57 pm. Now he's telling people exactly how the GOP tried to kill the recovery after 2010 by blocking a second stimulus and slashing budgets at the state level. Now touting the auto workers. And the new mileage standards. And a domestic energy boom. And better student loans. He's making it real. Have you lost count of the number of times he said, "Now, listen …" We are. He's telling a story that Obama has so far failed to tell effectively.

10.51 pm. Clinton's summary of Republican malfeasance these past four years is simply liberating. Liberating because it is true: their moral and intellectual and political degeneracy is our biggest challenge. And he is directly comparing his re-election to Obama's. And he's being as honest as he can: no one could have repaired the full damage of the 2008 crash in four years – but the green shoots are there.

10.49 pm. Genius: "We left him a total mess and he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough so we should get back into power".

10.45 pm. This is a brilliant and core point: the difference between Obama and the GOP is that Obama can compromise and the Republicans will not. If this election is about who can best compromise, it's over. Obama has tried to bring people together – including his former rivals. And the GOP has from the very beginning refused to do anything with this president but plan to defeat him. For Bill Clinton to use the example of Hillary to illustrate Obama's capacity for magnanimity and compromise is a very Bill Clinton coup de grace.

10.41 pm. Clinton is now telling Americans he has worked with Republicans in the past and liked them. He is telling the independents that the current Republicans are different – they are hateful, angry, and partisan all the way down. For a man impeached by Republicans to say they hate Obama even more than they hated him is quite something.

10.36 pm. He's on. I'm gonna sit back for a bit to absorb it better.

10.34 pm. And now the likable rogue. Man did he love that walk onto the stage. And he took his sweet time. Now: for the second most critical speech of the convention.

10.28 pm. She's winning me over. Now Matthew 25:40. But the passage is a command to each of us individually, not collectively. And that's the debate. Where she's strongest – and where this night has had a smidgen of a point – is on making bankers play by the same rules of the game as teachers, janitors or small business-owners. It's that equality of opportunity that our increasingly unbalanced economy is threatening.

10.27 pm. A point I made done better:

10.24 pm. That will be the pull quote of the night: "No, Mr Romney. Corporations are not people." Then she kinda got carried away. But it was juicy red meat – from someone who looks like a school librarian in a wind tunnel.

10.23 pm. I think I heard a mention of the debt. Wow.

10.18 pm. So far, I've been pleasantly surprised by Warren's autobiography – and she's gaining momentum with her accounts of middle class struggle: "the system is rigged." Now, a good bash at the bankers – and tax evaders. And the tone is right: "We celebrate success. We just don't want the game to be rigged."

10.14 pm. So far, an almost painfully bad night of speeches. The base-ralliers turned off the independents and the middle-American union members and businessmen were so boring I can't imagine they brkoe through to many. But they weren't aiming at me or the pundits, I guess.

10.10 pm. You know: this Costco man, Jim Sinegal, is actually quite effective in his corporate defense of "the long view" and old-fashioned capitalism. I bet he's effective in Ohio, Missouri and Iowa. But CSPAN cuts to an African-American woman with two pendulous ear-rings in what appears to be a coma. I keep slipping back into one myself.

10.07 pm. She improved. The arc from being "silenced" to getting the DNC prime time microphone was a little victimy but effective. She was a base-rallying speaker – followed now by a very straight, white dude who runs Costco. A good line: he's in favor of "companies that build and grow, not executives who reap and run."

10.03 pm. "An America where birth control is controlled by those who never use it." Fluke is in prime time scaring the hell out of progressive women. Whether she is persuading other women is another question. But that was a good line about Obama: "thinking about his own daughters rather than his own delegates and donors," when responding to the Fluke controversy.

I'd say Fluke's appearance is a ballsy move to mobilize women for Obama and against Romney.

9.59 pm. Sandra Fluke, Twitter was buzzing, was apparently skipped over in the program – but, no – here she is. And they've femmed her up a bit.

9.55 pm. Finally a decent line from congressman Chris van Hollen: "Yes, Mr Ryan, we are literally in your debt." It's good to expose Ryan's alleged fiscal conservatism for what it is: supply-side fantasy. Otherwise, another dismal speech from a bland white guy. Boy could you rip a giant hole in Ryan's logic and math – but this guy sure can't pull it off.

9.46 pm. Tedium still in place. The last dude said that he didn't think Romney was a bad man, just someone who made money without a moral compass! Cindy Hewitt does a little better – pointing out how risk-free a lot of Bain's projects were.

9.44 pm. Now: victims of Bain! Maybe the tedium will lift a little.

9.36 pm. The head of the UAW, Bob King, cites a Republican woman, Margaret Chase Smith, in defense of the auto bailout. The crowd is restless. But the argument is strong. The auto bailout really is a success story that has not been told effectively enough by the Obamaites. Now, a pivot to Bain and a fact-checking-proof phrase: "too often". As in: "too often Bain didn't build companies up but took them apart." Hard to debunk that vagueness. But then this speech from a union leader is not exactly appealing to my independent streak.

9.35 pm. A rather uninspired speech from an assembly-woman from GM.

9.30 pm. We're now watching a video on the collapse of the auto industry in 2008. The op-ed "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" by Mitt Romney is highlighted in day-glo yellow. The rest feels like that, er, Clint Eastwood Chrysler ad back in January. It ends with an auto-worker with a goatee telling us that he is better off now than he was four years' ago.

9.10 pm. A word on the issue of Jerusalem today. Goldblog:

The whole set-to today is about nothing, actually, except the exploitation of neurosis.

A sane view of this question is here. Money quote:

It has become politically suicidal to refrain from declaring loyalty to an undivided Jerusalem in which no one, save the ignorant and the true believers on the fringes, genuinely believe. Parties, party platforms, and even Presidential candidates pander to what they, correctly or incorrectly, perceive to be "the Jewish vote," advocating policies—like transferring the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—that no responsible president, regardless of party, will carry out. The discourse on Jerusalem within the political arena in the United States is a charade, and all but the deluded and the devout know it.

And yet when AIPAC says jump, an entire political party asks "how high?" Every now and again, you see the stranglehold and you realize just how contorted this debate is in Washington. By the way, "the exploitation of neurosis" is a terrific description of the leadership of the American Jewish Establishment these past three years and of Bibi Netanyahu's foreign policy.

9 pm. We just saw a stirring speech by one of the "nuns on the bus." Whie of course religious orders and people have every right to preach the Gospel as they see it. But I draw the line long before Party Conventions. It cheapens religion to associate it with such a partisan event.

(Photo: A choir performs on stage during day two of the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena on September 5, 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

Obama's riff on "you didn't build that" remains, in my view, the most serious mistake of his campaign so far. There's a reason the Romneyites have seized on it and will use it – dishonestly, of course – again and again. It works. Here's a post from Steve Lombardo that tracks Romney's slow but steady rise in the polls – and sees Obama's gaffe as the turning point in the campaign before the conventions:

Now there's a lot of noise in all that. But you can see Romney struggling before that dread quote, and gaining thereafter. It may end up a blip. But it still stings. Mr President, please don't listen to pious Massachusetts liberals as a guide to your election rhetoric. Warren will probably lose in Massachusetts she is so gratingly smug. You don't need to go down with her.

Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO), speaks during Day Two of the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena on September 5, 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Millman is uninterested in it:

Clinton’s laying-on-of-hands will be heavy on reminders of how good the economy was during his tenure, but this is just the Democratic counterpart to the ludicrous Republican nostalgiafest in Tampa. Barack Obama inherited a wildly different set of political and economic circumstances than Bill Clinton did – or than Ronald Reagan did in 1980. There’s no particular reason to believe that there’s some Clintonian "formula" for prosperity any more than there is to believe there’s a Reaganite one.

If Clinton helps Obama, it’ll be marginally. The kinds of voters Clinton appealed to that Obama doesn’t are probably beyond Obama’s reach. But more to the point, nobody can close this kind of sale for you. President Obama needs to close this sale himself. As I’m sure he knows.

Earlier Dish on tonight's speech here.

A reader writes:

I wonder how many people picked up the contrast of the two multiple sclerosis stories from the nominees' wives. Ann Romney received the very best treatment available to put her condition in remission. Michelle Obama's father kept going to work and painfully climbing the stairs back to the apartment every day. This is the story of the two health care systems in America.

Another elaborates:

I have been waiting for someone in the Obama camp to take this on, and boy did Michelle do it beautifully. I have MS, so I've avidly tracked their references throughout this campaign and prior ones.  Ann often references her own MS – how Mitt was going to install an elevator if the effects of her relapse proved long-lasting, how she horseback rides or does reflexology to help the MS, how she had to pause on the campaign trail because she was getting worn down and it aggravated her MS. Ann has a relatively mild form of relapsing remitting MS (as do I). It can be scary at times, and debilitating at times, but her experience is nothing like those who are secondary or primary progressive.

At the 2004 convention, Michelle noted that her father had MS, and occasionally she or her brother reference it, but last night she described his disability in vivid detail. You could see her father with his walker at the sink buttoning his uniform. His daily, basic efforts took a great deal of time and effort. It was yet another way of saying to the Romneys that your version of the world is yours, and good for you, but there are so many others out there who experience life in a harder way and please don't cover up or ignore the often brutal or truly challenging reality. We get it.

Ann Romney may never use her platform to point out that life can be really difficult for those disabled with MS, and horseback riding and reflexology is not something they can afford, nor would it help many of them. Nor will she note that the Affordable Care Act will help people with MS not be discriminated against based on their on pre-existing condition. It's a loss for all of those with MS and other diseases.

Update from a reader:

I'm a single-payer supporter, realistic enough to know the ACA was as good as we'd get, given the political circumstances, and who believes it will be an enormous improvement over the old system. I'm also a clinical neurologist, and while I despise just about everything Romney/Ryan stand for, particularly with regard to health care, it's not fair to compare Ann Romney to Michelle Obama's father with regard to MS.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, he died in 1991, before the first of the powerful disease-modifying agents that presumably stabilized Ann Romney's disease had been approved by FDA.  It doesn't seem fair to blame the discrepancy in their outcomes to income disparities.  (I have always wondered if Mr. Robinson chose to work for the City of Chicago because public or very large corporate jobs have too often been the only way to have health insurance for people who have a condition, like MS, for which individual coverage was not available, prior to the ACA, at any price.)

Don't get me wrong – working in a public hospital, a good part of what I do is try to ameliorate, for patients who are un- or underinsured, the consequences of dealing with chronic neurologic disease.  But comparisons should be apples to apples.

The Romney campaign is echoing Ryan’s false rhetoric over his hometown’s GM plant:

The Super PAC American Future Fund backs them up with a similar ad:

AFF also launched a web ad pro-choice Romney voters against Obama, as well as pushing out a video that tries to make Ryan look better by ridiculing Joe Biden as a “drunk uncle”:

Another outside group, Rove’s Super PAC American Crossroads, is putting $6.6 million into eight states taking on the Obama campaign’s “Forward” motto:

The RNC is also continuing their “Are you better off?” attacks by focusing on Obama’s self-grade of “incomplete” on the economy (ad buy size/scope unknown):

From the other side, the Obama campaign released a Spanish language ad featuring a subtitled Bill Clinton:

Down in Florida, the state GOP is trying to inoculate the effect of Charlie Crist’s DNC appearance by quoting Crist praising Republicans. In outside spending news, Jennifer Liberto reports that Wall Street will likely set a new record for campaign contributions with $164 million spent so far:

The biggest difference between this election and the race in 2008 is that Wall Street is now betting bigger on Republicans. During the last cycle, 57% of individuals from Wall Street gave to Democrats and President Obama. But this year, 60% of Wall Street’s contributions went to Republicans. … Included in that $164 million is some $50 million which has flowed from the hands of several high-profile hedge fund managers to so-called super PACs, secretive groups that can raise unlimited amounts of cash. More than $40 million of those super PAC dollars went to conservative groups, including some that support Romney.

Elsewhere, the Mormon Church is apparently running search ads around Romney’s name and then subsequently promoting themselves as politically diverse. In North Carolina, the Republican Jewish Coalition is on Israel word-watch for the Democrat’s official platform via a print ad in the Charlotte Observer – and it seems to have worked.

Ad War archive here.

Dylan Matthews fact-checks Deval Patrick attack lines against Romney. Yglesias, meanwhile, argues that state performance is a poor metric for administrative success:

The real truth, as noted in this great Andrew Gelman post from five years ago, is that there isn't that much change over time in states' economic well-being. All things considered the best predictor of how rich a state was in 2000 was simply how rich it was in 1929…. Massachusetts and Connecticut have always been rich and Arkansas and Mississippi have always been poor.

But Megan Woolhouse and Michael Rezendes argue that the bursting of the tech bubble – Massachusetts' "most important industry" – put the state economy roughly in the same shape as the national economy that Obama inherited:

On the campaign trail in 2002, Romney promised a jobs creation program “second to none in the history of the state,” pledging to use his corporate connections to lure chief executives across America to Massachusetts. The results fell far short of the promise. During Romney’s four years in office, the state added a net 31,000 jobs, a growth rate of less than 1 percent compared to 5 percent nationally during the same period. State unemployment fell to 4.7 percent from a peak of 6 percent, but remained above the US average, then 4.4 percent. Meanwhile, as the state recovery lagged other parts of the country, a net 233,000 people — 3.5 percent of the population — left the state, many seeking jobs elsewhere.

Beinart makes an important point about the Democrats' overall strategy:

Because of their own backgrounds and personalities, Nixon, Reagan and even George W. Bush connected personally to working-class voters (at least white ones) in a way that partially overcame the GOP’s image problem. But Mitt Romney has not, and will not. In different ways, every Democratic speaker honed in on that vulnerability. And then Michelle Obama masterfully used it to reintroduce America to her husband. The entire subtext of her speech was: Barack Obama and I are like you; we come from families like yours; we’ve lived lives like yours. We’re the un-Romneys.

The presidential race remains close. But the Obama campaign has what the Clinton campaign had in 1992 and the Bush campaign in 2004: clarity of message. It’s a message that makes Romney’s policy views a function of his biography. And in these bad economic times, the Democrats are using it to achieve a kind of political jujitsu. Usually, the president who presides over a lousy economy gets accused of being out of touch. That’s what happened to Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. But by relentlessly depicting Romney as a detached plutocrat, the Obama campaign has turned that traditional narrative on its head.

(Photo: Cutouts of President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are seen at a vender's booth in the American Presidential Experience exhibit on September 3, 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina.  By Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

Derek Thompson's takeaway from last night was that the GOP has "won the broader battle over stimulus":

Treasury yields are still historically low. It will never be cheaper to borrow money to pay for mandatory future expenses to infrastructure. But rather than make the case for short-term stimulus — as the president himself did in his failed American Jobs Act — the emphasis has shifted to fiscal responsibility and the contrast between Obama's plan to raise taxes and slow growth in government and Romney's plan to dramatically cut taxes and cut deeply into future discretionary spending.

Yglesias picks up on this too. Chait, meanwhile, places Obama's $787 billion stimulus package in historical context:

The domestic reforms embedded in the stimulus alone — the scope of which is described in Michael Grunwald’s book The New New Deal — did more to reshape the face of government in areas like education and energy than Clinton managed in eight years…. It is true that, as stimulus, Obama’s economic recovery bill was not nearly large enough to restore full employment. But for some perspective on its scale, recall that Clinton (facing a sluggish recovery from a far milder recession) proposed a $19.5 billion stimulus as his first major legislative measure, negotiated it down to $15.4 billion, and finally saw the whole thing collapse. In that light, Obama’s $787 billion bill looks like a fairly impressive political achievement.

Kottke is amazed by this Paralympics race:

Nicole Gelinas chews out NBC for not broadcasting the competition:

Thanks in part to NBC’s conviction that American viewers aren’t interested in the event, most of us likely don’t know that the Paralympics are not the Special Olympics. The Special Olympics represent a worthy cause: supporting intellectually challenged people and their families by boosting capabilities and self-esteem through sports. The Paralympics are neither a charity nor a cause. Like their Olympian counterparts, Paralympians aren’t interested in anything but medaling. Athletes win or lose gold, silver, and bronze—and are thus exhilarated or disappointed—according to their own work, talent, equipment, and luck. Nobody "wins" here just because he or she is missing a limb or two.

S.E. Smith worries that Paralympians are often celebrated for the wrong reasons:

Robert Jones, writing for The Guardian, says that there is a bit of a circus mentality to the Paralympics. It’s a showcase of exceptional people doing exceptional things, but he questions whether it really advances the position of disabled people in society, and what kinds of benefits it offers to ordinary people with disabilities. Indeed, he argues, it may actually harm people with disabilities by setting exceptionality as the norm to which all disabled people must adhere.

I recently argued that the Paralympics also reinforce dangerous narratives about disability-as-inspiration, which also serve to devalue people with disabilities and undermine our role in society. Many people don’t seem to understand the difference between being inspired by accomplishments that take dedication, drive, and a lot of hard work, and saying that it’s inspiring to see someone doing something simply because that person is disabled.