Getting Real

Happy Black People

Pulling back the curtain on the Republican fantasy machine….

CBS News: On Tuesday night, 15-year-old Victoria Blackstone, a sophomore at the St. Agnes School in St. Paul, led the crowd at the Xcel Energy Center in the Pledge of Allegiance. The audience heard her 434-word essay, “Pledging myself to the Flag of the United States of America”… The RNC turned that essay into a three and a half minute video, a visually stirring montage rolling over Victoria’s words about sharing the Pledge with Americans who have stood at important moments in history.

It was a video that was supposed to elicit soaring patriotism and real emotions about the Pledge of Allegiance. But to do that, it used fake soldiers and a staged military funeral instead of the real thing…

DailyKos: Apparently, the Republicans couldn’t find very many African American supporters to show on the Big Screen Of Triumph, when introducing McCain… so they simply put up stock photos of black people. You know, riding bicycles and appreciating their moms and stuff…

At Drinking Liberally last night, we counted to 12, the total number of non white people spotted at the RNC during McCain’s speech, out of about 20,000 attendees. Guess that explains the need for stock photos. At least they didn’t, to our reckoning, pepper the XCel Center with cardboard cutouts.

Remember that weird image of a large building on a green lawn that briefly flashed behind McCain last night? TPM reports: “It has been brought to the school’s attention that a picture of the front of our school, Walter Reed Middle School, was used as a backdrop at the Republican National Convention. Permission to use the front of our school for the Republican National Convention was not given by our school nor is the use of our school’s picture an endorsement of any political party or view”, declares principal Donna Tobin.

TPM continues: The California Democratic Party is actually holding a press conference in front of the school… where Dems will hit McCain for not knowing the difference between the school and Walter Reed Medical Center, which is believed to be the backdrop the McCain campaign really wanted.

These people used to be very good at this sort of thing. Are they getting sloppy, or are we getting smarter? Or do they think nobody will notice anyway?

UPDATE: More pulling back the curtain – Rachel Maddow, uses the “L” word, at long last. I cannot tell you how long I’ve been waiting for someone, anyone, in the media to tell it like it is.

When Resentment Isn’t Enough

There is widespread consensus today that McCain’s speech sucked out loud. And it wasn’t just McCain’s clunky delivery, which featured creepy smiles at inappropriate times (Dubya does that too, come to think of it). Attaturk asks,

So I say with some incredulity, how could his speech — which he had MONTHS to work on and was written especially for him (as opposed to Palin’s being adapted for her) SUCK. SO. VERY. MUCH?!

I say there’s something weirdly unfocused about the McCain campaign. It’s as if no one is really in charge, and the worker bees in it are just stumbling along as best they can.

The convention showed a video of 9/11 last night. I didn’t watch it. You may know I was in lower Manhattan that day, and I don’t care to relive the experience, thank you very much. As soon as the video came on I switched channels. Now some are saying showing the video crossed a line.

Yes, probably so. However, I wonder if 9/11 packs much of an emotional wallop to most people any more. Those of us who were there will always have a raw spot about 9/11. Righties cling to it because it stokes their much-cherished sense of righteous victimhood. But what about the rest of the country?

This misleading headline to the contrary, we won’t really know what effect the GOP convention had on the electorate until Tuesday or Wednesday. I’m no good at predicting these things, but I will be surprised if the Republicans get much of a bounce out of that mess of a convention.

Today Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein both talk about the politics of ressentiment. We know the one thing that fuels the Right, their raison d’etre, is their seething resentment of everyone who isn’t them.

Most of all, they resent liberals. Back when there was at least some part of the federal government they didn’t control, they got a lot of mileage out of scapegoating the “liberal elite” for everything that seemed to go wrong. Now they are singing the same song, as if they themselves hadn’t controlled both Congress and the White House and the entire federal bureaucratic apparatus for most of the past eight years. Tom Shales wrote,

He [McCain] used the word “change” at least 10 times in his bombastic speech — the convention’s emotional climax — but since the Republicans have controlled the White House for the past eight years, what does McCain want to change from? And to? It really is an audacious ploy, to tell people that the country’s got to correct the mistakes made by a political party when that’s the very party you represent.

It’s like staging a revolution against yourself — saying that the Republicans have got to go so the Republicans can move in and clean up the mess.

So, the pundits say, they are attempting to “rebrand” the GOP, to persuade America it’s not the party of George W. Bush any more. So McCain uses the word “change” a lot, and speaker after speaker called him a “maverick” (or “mavrick” according to one delegate with a home-made sign). But what do they offer?

  • A video of 9/11. Yeah, that doesn’t remind us of Dubya.
  • Tax cuts.
  • Lots of tributes to Ronald Reagan.
  • Tax cuts.
  • Tough talk against our enemies, whoever they are this week.
  • Tax cuts.
  • And seething, pulsing, sneering resentment of liberals.

This is “re-branding”?

They find one outsider, one fresh face, in Sarah Palin, and they gave her a speech to deliver that Karl Rove could have written himself. It was all sneer and snark. Same old product with a new product spokesperson. This is not “re-branding.” It’s not even “re-packaging.” But it’s who they are.

Initial Reaction

I said earlier today:

In order to reach out to persuadable “swing” voters, IMO he [McCain] needs to show he understands peoples’ economic concerns and has some idea what he’s going to do to address them. He needs also to persuade listeners that his administration would not be a copy of George Bush’s. I think some vague noises about “reform” and “change” are not going to do that; he needs to call out specifics.

I don’t believe this speech accomplished that. Right now, as I keyboard, Chris Matthews is saying that McCain’s speech “divorced” McCain from the Bush Administration. But as Rachel Maddow points out, every economic proposal in this speech was no other than George Bush’s economic policy. No difference. It shouldn’t be that hard for the Obama campaign to remarry Bush to McCain. Even if Bush isn’t speaking to McCain after tonight.

If I were someone out-of-work, or worried about losing a job, or without health insurance, or about to lose my house, I don’t believe I would have heard anything in that speech that gave me hope. McCain mentioned those things but offered nothing new to correct the problems.

What’s going on here? I understand movement conservatives believe Republicans lost seats in 2006 because of corruption scandals, out-of-control spending, probably immigration. In their hearts, they don’t believe their “free market,” “privatize everything” policies are the problem.

The delegates, they’re saying, are still more jazzed about Sarah Palin than they are about John McCain. But I don’t think Sarah Palin will turn out to be the magic candidate that will sell the ticket to independents and swing voters, for reasons discussed in the last two posts. This is particularly true if the McCain campaign keeps her hidden away so the press can’t get to her, as reports say they will do.

My question, earlier this evening, was whether McCain would deliver a speech for the delegates or for the nation. What I think happened was that the speech was intended for the nation, but it failed because McCain and his speechwriters don’t know how to talk to the nation.