Marbury

singing the praises

Pundit king Halperin gives The Speech an A+:

He is not a perfect candidate, but once again proved that he can, in the face of daunting expectations, deliver a simply breathtaking speech at an absolutely pivotal moment....In the process, Obama appeared to achieve every goal the pundits and political backseat drivers had set out for him in advance: he showed his heart, emphasized the economy, and, most of all, looked like a president. Worlds better than the revelatory 2004 convention speech that set him on the course to the nomination.

Halperin also waxes on something I didn't mention but might have: Obama's extraordinary poise and technical control, on this massive occasion. Like a great singer, he varied the tone and timbre of his voice with amazing precision, and paced his delivery to perfection.

Talking of singing, here's linguist John McWhorter on the musical roots of speech and speeches:

The intonations of casual speech are a kind of music; and, when wielded effectively, they can satisfy in the same way as a good song. Steven Mithen at Reading University has even proposed that language began as strings of musical syllables, gradually reinterpreted as nouns and verbs. Thus, euphonious intonation has a way of sounding like grammar--i.e., logic. In fact, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig have discovered that the part of the brain that processes musical sequences is the same one that generates grammatical syntax.If our expectation that a subject will be followed by a predicate is founded in the same process that leads us to hear the sequence of notes of "Twinkle, twinkle, little star / How I wonder what you are" as a proper tune, it's no wonder Obama can get so much out of the sheer melody of his delivery.

the child spake, and he was pretty tough

Before going into this convention, we thought speaker after speaker would hammer John McCain, leaving Barack Obama to deliver the high-flown optimism he does best. Didn't quite turn out that way.

There weren't as many scathing attacks on the Republicans and McCain as we'd expected. There were some sharp lines from Kerry and Clinton and one or two others, but that was about it. Then Barack Obama delivered one of the toughest speeches of the convention last night.

It wasn't real red meat stuff. But overall the tone was stern. He portrayed John McCain as out of touch, saying that he just doesn't "get it". He raised the $5m-is-rich remark and Phil Gramm's "mental recession" (though he steered, probably wisely, away from seven houses jokes). He laid into eight years of Bush economics, and pretty much challenged McCain to a duel over who has the better judgment on foreign policy. He rebutted McCain's TV-ad line of attack directly after telling a bit of his own story: "I don’t know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine." He finished by declaring that America "cannot turn back".

In between he includes some uplift, reprising some of the 2004 rhetoric about the United States of America, and finishing with a reference to the anniversary of Martin Luther King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial. There were also quite a lot of dull-but-worthy policy prescriptions. I think he made the right decision to bore a little. If it had all been Big Talk, the rhetoric, combined with the cheering crowds, it would have made an easy target for the Republicans next week.

Overall, I thought the speech was pretty good. Nothing like as exciting as his 2004 speech. But acceptance speeches are rarely very exciting. The candidate has too many bases to cover. They need to talk across the range of issues. They need to rouse the faithful and reach out to the non-believers.

I wish he'd made more of one particular theme: "future vs past". It's good to have a tune people can hum. But perhaps we'll see more of that in the coming weeks. I also was surprised he didn't make more of his faith. But, pretty good. He made it about American and Americans, rather than himself. He seemed grounded, and serious.

As for the stadium, well it wasn't as bad as I feared. He was framed well, so that for most of the time he could have been speaking in any hall, notwithstanding the cheering in the background, which didn't get out of hand. Could have done without the fireworks though.

convention fatigue

A quick thought. This is the first time that the conventions have been back-to-back. I wonder if that will turn out to be bad news for the Republicans. Are people really going to tune into politics for two weeks in a row?

the folly of invesco

I hope I'm proved wrong but the decision to stage Obama's speech in Invesco Field instead of in the convention hall looks odder and riskier as the week goes on. It will make Obama look like a rock star when he needs to be looking like a fighting politician. Shrewd Republican strategist Mike Murphy lists a few more reasons:

The Pepsi center is the visual “home” of this convention. Having Obama do his big finish in another venue screws up the visual vernacular of the convention. Turn off the sound, and watch the tape. In the end it will look like two different conventions; one visually dominated by Clintons, another by Obama. That is a message of separation, not unity. Also, ask any TV director: staging a TV mega-event outdoors is very tricky. Lots of things are hard to control. The whole Obama speaks to massive crowd thing is impressive, but done. We’ve seen it before. Finally, the Mount Olympus set looks problematical at best. An Obama staffer assured me it’ll look better tomorrow. For their sake, it better. They should have changed this up yesterday and moved to a more intimate man in the arena set up back in the Pepsi center. Obama is the nominee, he should own this house.

UPDATE: Dee Dee Myers frames Obama's challenge this evening nicely: "He needs to get from the stadium to the diner, and it’s a hard thing to pull off.”

bill is king again

After all that, the old bastard delivers not only a much better speech than many had feared, but the best speech of the convention to date - some are saying the best speech he's ever made.

He gave a convincing endorsement of Obama, made believable by a reference to his own critics in 1992, when many said he didn't have the experience to be president. Indeed, he made the best case for Obama that anyone has made yet this week.

But the endorsement was just a part of it; he also offered an intelligent, passionate critique of where the current administration has gone wrong, and what America must do to restore its reputation in the world. Displaying his adroit grasp of chiasmus, he said: "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power".

Some of the sharpest of his media critics, like Michael Tomasky, Andrew Sullivan, and Jonathan Chait are bowled over (Chait says, "now I understand why Hillary stuck with him all those years.")

How does he do it? How does he turn on a dime like this? I think he works out what the best thing to do is, politically, and then he diverts his his surging, powerful competitive instincts into the most productive direction.

He loved Hillary's speech last night. But he couldn't bear the thought of it being acclaimed as the most memorable Clinton speech of the convention.

Apparently, he won't be attending Obama's speech tonight. But as he flies off to wherever he's going, he'll be muttering under his breath, beat that, kid.

joe is the man

A brilliant mini-portrait of Joe Biden from the former American Ambassador to Romania:

On the 20-minute drive into the city, he quizzed me on Romanian attitudes, the status of various government leaders and the inside story on Romania’s foreign policy toward Slobodan Milosevic, who was still in power next door in Yugoslavia. Because Biden has known all the major Romanian leaders since the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the questions were Ph.D. level, not Romania 101. That was remarkable in itself since he is no specialist on Romania; he could do the same, landing in dozens of nations around the world...

...In most of our meetings, Romanian leaders reiterated their strong interest in joining the NATO alliance. At lunch at my house with opposition party leaders, one of them said that NATO membership was important to their country for a reason I’d never heard before.

“If we’re in NATO, we won’t have to worry about NATO attacking Romania over our relations with our Hungarian minority the way you attacked Yugoslavia,” he said. “Since Turkey has been in NATO for decades, you let them do what they want with the Kurdish minority.”

Biden, visibly angry, rose from his chair, leaned across the table, and said: “If that’s why you want to get into NATO, I’ll make sure you never do!”

Read the whole thing. Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

there's more than 18 stars on that flag, boy

The admirable David Plouffe gives a press conference in which he calmly explains and re-explains the Obama campaign's strategy. Unlike previous Democrat campaigns, you never get the sense of panic and shit-what-shall-we-try-next emanating from the candidate's camp the moment things aren't going brilliantly. Instead you get the impression of a team with a clear sense of its own purpose, largely uninfluenced by the media and Washington chatter.

Having said that, Plouffe should be careful about saying stuff like this:

"All we care about is these 18 states"

His tactical point is, we're not worried about fluctuating national polls, we're focused on getting our game right in the states that we need to win.

But he's the campaign manager for Barack Obama. And Barack Obama is running for President of the United States. That means all fifty.

bless

From the same piece, on Bill and Barack:

Clinton associates, long familiar with his habits and rhythms, say it would take little more than phone calls on a somewhat regular basis to keep him satisfied. Attention has always been Clinton's lifeblood. "We all know that he wants to be loved. Just call him. Call him any time of day or night," said one associate. "Talk to him about anything. Talk to him about the Olympics or what he thinks about a certain congressional district or even about the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. Obama could even put the phone in a drawer and just let President Clinton talk away. It wouldn't take much. It could be so easy."

on fairy tales

There's an article in today's Washington Post, by one of its most senior reporters, on the still-difficult relationship between Obama and Bill Clinton. It contains the following remark:

There is a history to all this, going back to the time when Clinton urged voters not to buy into the "fairy tale" of Obama's rise...

Now, here's the thing: Clinton never described Obama's rise, or Obama's campaign, as a fairy tale. He used the phrase to describe, very specifically, the media's version of Obama's record on Iraq.

Rep. James Clyburn's subsequent attack on Clinton for using racially charged language was based on a misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise, of Clinton's remark. It set off a series of similar attacks that led to Clinton being widely derided as a racist - because Clyburn's interpretation was accepted unhesitatingly by the media. Apparently, it still is. Despite the fact that such an interpretation is clearly at odds with the truth.

Anybody who thinks that Bill Clinton's rage at his treatment by the media over the last year is wildly unjustified should take note.

this election isn't about the clintons

The most sensible comment I've read on the question of Hillary's speech comes from, of all people, Republican strategist Mike Murphy, writing on Time's blog yesterday. He says the Clinton supporters in the hall - the delegates - don't really matter, because their power to organise the vote at election time has more or less disappeared...

What is true – and very important – is that there are a ton of Democrat leaning voters who didn’t vote in the primaries, but look demographically a lot like the Hillary primary voters we’ve been paying all this attention to. They’re older, white, often blue-collar. And many have big doubts about Barack Obama. Hillary can really hurt Obama among this crowd if she shows hostility, maybe even enough to throw the election. That’s why the Obama campaign is acting like a bunch of nervous yes-men at one of Stalin’s birthday parties. But Hillary is a good, tough party soldier. Her speech tonight will be very good. So will her endorsement deliver the vote Obama really needs? Nope. Obama has to earn it on his own; many are more anti-Barack than pro-Clinton.

(My emphasis). This seems to be the key point to me. The fuss over Hillary's speech has been way overplayed. It wasn't that important - and nor is Bill's speech tomorrow night. This election is about John McCain and Barack Obama. It matters little if and how convincingly Bill Clinton says Obama is 'Ready from Day One' tomorrow night. If Obama has to rely on the Clintons to convince people he's ready to be president, he's already lost. The only person who can do that is Barack Obama.

what makes britain great

The New York Times takes a bemused look at the British abroad in Europe:

Reports of scandalous incidents rumble on regularly here and elsewhere, helping to cement Britain’s reputation as the largest exporter of inebriated hooligans in Europe.

Earlier this summer, flying home to Manchester from the Greek island of Kos, a pair of drunken women yelling “I need some fresh air” attacked the flight attendants with a vodka bottle and tried to wrestle the airplane’s emergency door open at 30,000 feet. The plane diverted hastily to Frankfurt, and the women were arrested.

a preview of hillary's speech this evening...?

are the dems fluffing it again?

The 2004 Democratic Convention made everyone in the hall feel good. It focused on John Kerry's life story, telling the nation of his war heroism and positioning him as a true patriot. Speaker after speaker spoke movingly of the Kerry they knew and loved, and about the policies he would introduce as president.

A couple of weeks' later it was the Republicans' turn. They didn't spend much time talking about George Bush or his vision for a second term.  They just turned their guns on Kerry and the Democrats and blasted away. Zell Miller, the keynote speaker, embodied this approach. He tore into Kerry's judgment and patriotism, suggesting that he'd have to ask France before taking any military action. A week of solid firing later, and Kerry was already slipping behind Bush in the polls.

The 2004 Convention is now regarded as a massive missed opportunity. It was too much about Kerry's biography, and not enough about why Bush was a bad president. That's why some Democrats are already worried, after one night, that this year's convention will repeat the mistake. Michelle Obama gave a terrific, moving speech, and nobody expected attack politics from her. But none of the other speakers ripped into Bush either. It was great to see Kennedy, and everyone at the convention will be feeling warm and cuddly. But the biggest task of this year's convention isn't to reassure everyone that Obama is nice or that Democrats are warm-hearted folks. It's to tie John McCain to the failed policies of George Bush.

Many Democrats will be hoping that Hillary Clinton leads the charge this evening.

why barack needs to get mad

From my latest piece for The Guardian's Comment Is Free:

In the second of 1988's presidential debates, Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was asked the following question: "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis [his wife] were raped and murdered, would you favour an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"

Dukakis replied: "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life." He went on to discuss the decline in murder statistics in his home state. His answer was coolly delivered, well argued and coherent. It was also disastrous. Dukakis's poll ratings dropped several points the day after, and his answer to that question was blamed by many, including the candidate himself, for his subsequent defeat.

It's no mean feat to make George Bush Sr seem emotionally empathetic, but that's what Dukakis did that night, if only by contrast. Instead of betraying any hint of the anger such a scenario might be expected to evoke, Dukakis gave an entirely rational answer. In doing so he came across as a bloodless bureaucrat, a robo-politician with no heart and soul. The guy's asked about what he'd do if his wife is raped and murdered and he barely blinks?

That moment remains a powerful reminder of the role of anger, and overt emotion generally, in presidential elections.

Read the rest of the article here.

will mccain's veep choice be a clause IV moment?

Or, in American terms, a Sister Souljah moment? That's to say, the moment when a politician deliberately picks a fight with the more extreme wing of his party in order to demonstrate his independence?

It's thought that the person McCain would really like to pick is Joe Lieberman - the Democrat turned independent pictured above, who's been campaigning for McCain. The two get on very well, and Lieberman would make it harder for the Democrats to portray a McCain administration as more of the same. Lieberman is also solid on national security and would hold his own against Biden in the VP debate. But Lieberman is pro-choice, and the pro-life Republicans are threatening a fight at the GOP convention next week if he's picked.

McCain hates being told what to do. I bet he's itching to take on the more extreme pro-lifers, but has so far been restrained from jumping into a fight with them by his more level-headed advisers. They may conclude, however, that a bit of a fight isn't a bad idea. It could reinforce the perception amongst the public at large that McCain is his own man, and no ordinary Republican.

Bill Kristol, the NYT columnist, is a Republican well-connected with the McCain campaign. He suggests McCain is seriously considering Lieberman. It's risky, but maybe McCain thinks he needs some calculated risks at this stage. If the Democrat convention goes really well this week, the chance of a Lieberman pick will be even higher.