Monthly Archives: September 2012

Thoughts on Last Night

Posted on by

It struck me that the GOP convention featured speaker after speaker talking about the hardships their grandparents had overcome. Last night we heard speaker after speaker talk about the hardships they had overcome themselves.

To be fair, several Dem speakers spoke of parents and grandparents also. But the hardship stories were different in another way — the Dems connected the hardship stories to real policies in a way that the GOP did not. John Dickerson noticed this, too.

If the speech is effective beyond the power of well delivered rhetoric, it will be because the first lady took this description of Obama’s core self and linked it to policy. This is what Ann Romney and Mitt Romney never did. The message of the GOP convention was “Trust Mitt.” That was Michelle Obama’s message too: Her husband could be trusted because he came from a background and has lived a middle class life. But then she started connecting the biography to the policy. This was always Bill Clinton’s great gift. If this connection is successfully made, then that’s what will make this pitch more politically [word missing?] than just a pretty speech by a loving wife who thinks her husband deserves an A for effort.

“We were so young, so in love, and so in debt,” she joked about their early student loan debt, which was higher than their mortgage. “That’s why Barack has fought so hard to increase student aid.” She made the same connection between Obama’s grandmother and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help women get equal pay for equal work. Tax cuts, the auto bailout, and every other policy, she argued, grew out of his biography.

You got that from most of the Dem speakers; a personal connection, a story of how their own experiences shaped their views and inspired them to enter public life. With Republicans there’s a huge disconnect; their experiences of real hardship are second and third hand. We ended up listening to Ann Romney — who is having an elevator installed in the garage of one of her homes to manage her several cars — pretend to care about the price of gasoline.

Another difference between GOP and Dem “hardship” narratives is that Republicans like to tell these stories to show how Grandpa succeeded without anyone’s help, whereas Dems talk about coming together to achieve success. Mayor Julian Castro, for example, talked about “investing in opportunity.” I liked this part of his speech —

Of all the fictions we heard last week in Tampa, the one I find most troubling is this: If we all just go our own way, our nation will be stronger for it. Because if we sever the threads that connect us, the only people who will go far are those who are already ahead. We all understand that freedom isn’t free. What Romney and Ryan don’t understand is that neither is opportunity. We have to invest in it.

Another thing that struck me is that the Dems talked a lot about veterans, a group absent from last week’s GOP rhetoric. And when Iraq veteran Tammy Duckworth said,

President Obama pushed for fairness in the military, listening to commanders as we ended “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and on how to allow women to officially serve in more combat jobs—because America’s daughters are just as capable of defending liberty as her sons.

— I saw a roaring ovation from the women in the hall. (Duckworth also reinforced the “working together” theme by talking about how her Blackhawk helicopter crew didn’t abandon her after a rocket-propelled grenade tore her legs off.)

In Tampa, the GOP seemed to have entirely dropped its long-standing conceit of being the pro-military and pro-national security party. Maybe somebody said this, but I didn’t hear them talking about supporting the troops or getting tough on terrorists. It was like they forgot. Why was that?

After Osama bin Laden was killed, I wrote,

The larger point is that, while the death of bin Laden might not be a front-burner issue in 2012, it certainly has changed the trajectory of U.S. politics in President Obama’s favor.

Some commenters argued that the polling bump the President got from bin Laden’s death would be short-lived, and I didn’t disagree, but my point was that the killing of bin Laden would force the GOP to make narrative adjustments it didn’t want to make. And I think the lack of talk about security and terrorists in Tampa was the result of that adjustment.

Righties still can, and do, reassure each other that Obama is soft on terrorists. They still like to compare President Obama to President Carter, who in rightie mythology plays the role of the Specter of Wimpiness. But it must have sunk in to at least some of them that they can no longer credibly claim to be the party of Tough Guys Who Will Protect You From Scary Things versus the wimpy Dems. That part of their sales pitch was kneecapped when Bin Laden was killed.

And given the rolling embarrassment that was Mitt’s “world tour,” I suspect Mitt himself may have banned talk of foreign policy from the convention.

Here is Deval Patrick’s speech, if you missed it.

Dem Convention Day One

Posted on by

I’m going to do a little live blogging. Is it me, or are the Dems a lot more fired up than the Republicans were?

Deval Patrick — Wow. Great speech. It’s a shame he was on before 10 o’clock eastern when the networks begin broadcasting. I’ll have to post a video as soon as there is one. I’m sorry I missed Ted Strickland. I’ll find a video of that, too.

Wait — here it is —

Update: Mayor Julian Castro is doing pretty well, I think.

Update: Michelle Obama’s speech was, as always, very real.

Tomorrow — the Big Dog.

No Scribbling on the Etch-a-Sketch

Posted on by

white-romneyBeside the chair, one of the more remarkable things about last week’s GOP convention was a lack of specificity. Speakers ran down Obama and promised President Romney would make “tough choices” — Republicans like the word “tough” — but so far Mittens has managed to run a nearly content-free general election campaign, and the convention didn’t change that. His acceptance speech told us next to nothing about what specific policies he might pursue.

A couple of day’s ago Greg Sargent provided a glimpse into the Romney campaign strategy. Apparently the Romney folks assume that many people who currently plan to vote for Obama are just being emotional — they like Obama and are attached to the symbolism of the first black president. These are the voters Romney thinks he can win over.

Romney’s argument is that the Obama Administration has been a dismal failure, and it’s time to put someone in charge who knows how to Get Stuff Done. Unable to convincingly pivot (or shake the etch-a-sketch) from the extreme right-wing positions he endorsed during the primaries, Romney now is offering himself to the general electorate as a generic alternative candidate. He is deliberately making himself the blankest possible slate. His people think that if the electorate sees Romney has a responsible, successful businessman and not the vampire squid that he is, voters will be won over and won’t ask questions.

As I remember it, in 2000 George W. Bush pretty much got away with a similar sort of campaign. He made some promises about cutting taxes and using the budget surplus (that he eliminated with the tax cuts) to save Social Security, but other than that he mostly just packaged himself as a successful businessman and governor and moderate Republican while painting Al Gore as, well, weird. In 2000, enough of a complacent public bought that to enable the Bushies to get their boy “selected.”

Greg Sargent argues that public opinion about President Obama is more complex and nuanced than Romney thinks.

Despite the Romney campaign’s assumptions, these voters may be proving unexpectedly resistant to the conclusion that the Obama presidency amounts to an “extraordinary record of failure,” as Romney put it recently. It’s true that majorities disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy. But disapproval can mean different things. A disapproving voter may be disappointed in the slow pace of the recovery, but may also have decided that the crisis was so severe — and the resulting problems run so deep — that Obama could not have done much to make the country recover faster.

This came up again and again in interviews with swing voters done by Ron Brownstein and yours truly. And it would explain why more Americans consistently hold Bush responsible for the current economy.

In other words, a lot of voters may be disappointed about sluggish economic growth without necessarily wanting to kick the President out of office, especially if Romney can’t explain precisely what he would do differently to turn things around. An extraordinarily charming politician might pull it off, but Romney ain’t that, especially when he behaves just like your SOB boss when he has to mingle with employees at the company Christmas party.

I also wonder how Romney is going to remain Mr. Blank Etch-a-Sketch during the debates. You know President Obama is going to hammer him on specifics, and I don’t think Romney’s “vote for me ’cause I’m the white guy” act is going to score him points. This is not 2000; people are not complacent. They want to see the fine print. Maybe they have been underwhelmed by Mr. Obama, but they aren’t going to hand the White House keys over to someone they suspect might make things worse.

Barring some unforeseen disaster that might be blamed on Obama, between now and November, I think Mr. Romney is going to have to stop just saying he is a successful businessman and start acting like one to appeal to the majority of voters. And to me, that means providing a more credible business model than what he’s coughed up so far.

Update: One more thing — Republicans don’t know how to be cool.

Glee and Panic and Invisible Polls

Posted on by

Something really odd going on this morning about an alleged new poll that allegedly shows Romney roaring ahead of President Obama among independent voters. National Review posted this four days ago:

According to a new poll conducted by Democracy Corps (the James Carville/Stan Greenberg-founded firm), Mitt Romney is leading by 16 points among independents, 54 percent to Barack Obama’s 38 percent. Twenty-six percent of independents think the country is going in the right direction; 68 percent think it is going on the wrong track. Forty percent of independents approve of Obama, while 56 percent disapprove.

The overall poll isn’t a terrific win for Romney — he’s at 47 percent to Obama’s 49 percent — but if he’s opened up a gap anywhere near this large among independent voters, that’s certainly a hopeful trend for him.

This morning, in a delayed reaction, a number of rightie blogs are reporting this information and predicting a growing tidal wave of support for Romney that will sweep him into the White House, and Dems are panicked.

Now, these numbers about independents might be true, but I can’t confirm them. Some of the rightie blogs provide links that allegedly go to the source data, but if you follow the links you either get to a “page not found” or “404” page or to the home page of Carville and Greenburg’s Democracy Corp, with a note near the bottom saying that the page you are looking for can’t be found, but maybe you’d like to look at something else?

I haven’t been able to find any national polls that break out independent voters separately, just state polls, and those are all over the map. However, Nate Silver’s trend lines for November 6 show Obama pulling further ahead of Romney.

The Democracy Corps site does have an article on results of a poll, dated four days ago, but it doesn’t say anything about independents.

What might have happened:

  • There really was such a poll, but Carville & Greenberg yanked it off the Web.
  • A hacker planted fake polling data on the Democracy Corps page and then alerted National Review.
  • The Right is hallucinating.

All three of the above bulleted items are equally plausible, IMO. If someone does find the source data somewhere, do let me know. I’d like to see it.

Elsewhere — there are several commentaries out today on the theme that Democrats are really, really worried, and possibly panicked, about their convention, for one reason or another. One such story is that they are worried that Bill Clinton will end up sandbagging the President to help his wife win in 2016. Steve M. takes that one apart pretty deftly. And, seriously, it doesn’t even make sense. President Obama isn’t running in 2016; how would it help Hillary Clinton politically to undermine him now? That’s just weird.

La Douleur de la Mitaine

Posted on by

Nate Silver says Mittens may have gotten a teenie little bounce of maybe two or three percentage points — more of a bouncette — out of the GOP convention. He really needed better than that to change momentum in his favor.

And on to Charlotte.

Via Digby — GLoria Borger actually said this —

“In 1968, France was a dangerous place to be for a 21-year-old American, but Mitt Romney was right in the middle of it.”

I immediately envisioned a comic book cover showing Young Mitten (“La Mitaine Jeune”) running through the streets of Paris, dodging a barrage of stale croissants and irate taunts, armed with nothing but the Book of Mormon. I so wish I could draw. This would be perfect for Mad Magazine.

The quote comes from Tommy Christopher at Mediaite, and you should just read the whole thing. La Mitaine Jeune was in France avoiding military service the same year 16,592 Americans died in Vietnam. La Mitaine got four deferments, no doubt made possible by money and family connections.

Borger says the French were très désagréable to La Mitaine because of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. French attitudes toward the U.S. war were complicated, as I remember. Vietnam had been part of French Indochina, and there was a lingering attitude that if France had gotten some help from the U.S. they might not have lost at Dien Bien Phu. So, yeah, he may have gotten some attitude. Poor baby.

One More Thing …

Posted on by

Did you know there was a contingent of Occupy protesters in Tampa last week? No, I didn’t either. Thank goodness.

Just imagine if the protesters had acted up enough to draw attention away from the goings on in the convention center. It would have helped the Republicans by distracting the public from GOP weirdness and made Republicans look more sympathetic.

I say again, when the opposition is voluntarily making a fool of himself in public, stay out of the bleeping way.

Mittens: The Government Won’t Be Here to Help (So Call 211)

Posted on by

There’s some joke with the punchline “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help!” Righties love that one. They’re big on self-reliance, except when they need help themselves. Then they scream bloody murder if the government isn’t there pronto, even though rightie politicians keep cutting funds for whatever it is that is needed. Somehow, the connection between gutting the budget of the National Forest Service and the NFS not putting out forest fires right away doesn’t click together in their brains.

Yesterday the freshly nominated Mitt Romney and his buddy Bobby Jindal toured a town flooded by Hurricane Isaac. Since Mittens doesn’t think the government should do anything to help anybody who doesn’t already hold an investment portfolio worth something in the six figures, I wondered why the hell he bothered. What would he say to the people he met?

Now we know —

Romney shook hands with National Guardsmen outside the U.S. Post Office and talked with a local resident, Jodie Chiarello, 42, who lost her home in Isaac’s flooding.

“He just told me to, um, there’s assistance out there,” Chiarello said of her conversation with Romney. “He said, go home and call 211.” That’s a public service number offered in many states.

Would the government at least provide her with goggles and a snorkel so she can find her submerged phone? Probably not.

Did Mittens say anything else? This is all I could find —

Romney, who chatted with a handful of storm victims and shook hands with first responders, didn’t have too much to say. “I’m here to learn and obviously to draw some attention to what’s going on here,” Romney told Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who he accompanied to the Jean Lafitte town hall to meet with emergency workers. “So that people around the country know that people down here need help.”

That snippet of conversation represented the bulk of Romney’s public remarks in Louisiana on Friday.

Jindal may be a doofus, but he’s a doofus who probably wants to run for public office again someday.

His host, Jindal, is now calling on the federal government to expand the rebuilt flood protection system that prevented serious flooding in New Orleans during this week’s storm. That system, built after flooding from Katrina devastated much of New Orleans, cost the Army Corps of Engineers $14.5 billion. It doesn’t extend as far as Jean Lafitte, which is situated in Jefferson Parish, and has been affected by a series of hurricanes, including Katrina, Rita, Cindy and now Isaac.

“It is absolutely critical that the Corps, and certainly our delegation working them, but that the Corps and the federal government look at those other levees,” Jindal said Thursday. Lafitte is included in a proposed ring levee that the state hopes to build, but there are no concrete plans to build yet.

Romney was silent on whether, as president, he would support paying for such an expansion. Romney’s running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, has proposed eliminating $10 billion a year in disaster spending and requiring Congress to pay for emergencies by cutting from elsewhere in the budget. That proposal was blocked by GOP leaders.

You know that deep inside, Mitt Romney feels much tender pity for those people who lost everything in the flood, and he hopes they can build shelters for themselves from scrap lumber and perhaps get a few hot meals from the local church ladies. But in Mitt’s World it’s not government’s job to help people who are sitting around whining because they just lost everything they own to a storm. Tax money spent on moochers like Jodie Chiarello may threaten his tax cuts. And if people need money to rebuild, they can always borrow from their parents, right, Mitt?

Death by Politeness

Posted on by

The article that really got my attention this morning — and not in a good way — is “How MSNBC Became Fox’s Liberal Evil Twin” by Alessandra Stanley. Clueless Wonder Stanley slams MSNBC’s coverage of the convention for its bias, preferring much more polite and even-tempered “coverage” by cardboard cutouts on NBC —

NBC and the other broadcast networks cut their live convention coverage to an hour during prime time this year, which leaves barely time to show the main speeches, let alone analyze them. Yet NBC’s chief anchor, Brian Williams, has conspicuously avoided the most fractious MSNBC discussion panels. Those anchors who do make dutiful appearances, like David Gregory and Tom Brokaw, are badly needed but don’t stay long or join the fray — like piano players in a brothel, they don’t go upstairs.

This is a democracy, sweetheart. We need to know what’s going on upstairs.

And that leaves fewer choices for viewers who like their election coverage with informed commentary without a twist of bias.

Telling the truth isn’t “bias,” dear. Politely refraining from saying that someone running for the presidency is basing his entire campaign on lies is not “impartiality”; it’s journalistic malpractice.

For years, as the Republican Party became more and more extreme, mainstream media have attempted to even things out by filming Republicans with softer and softer focus, and with plenty of gauze on the lenses to make the wrinkles disappear. On the other hand, Democrats are placed under a Kleig light without filters and not allowed to wear makeup. And then the narrative accompanying this is “both parties are just as bad.” The polite political commentators dear Ms. Stanley prefers congratulate themselves for being unbiased, when they are nothing of the sort. They are enablers. They are making excuses for the alcoholic uncle by telling people he’s just been under a lot of stress lately. And this kind of enabling does neither the uncle nor the family a bit of good; it’s just socially expedient.

I can agree that Al Sharpton and Ed Schultz come across as Dem Party cheerleaders sometimes, but Chris Matthews has done more than his share of enabling of Republicans over the years. Ms. Stanley tears into Matthews for his recent “bruising harangue against Reince Priebus” — how impolite to point out that Republicans are dog-whistling racists — and finishes the column with this —

Virginia’s governor, Bob McDonnell, who backed, then rescinded, a state bill that would require women seeking an abortion to first have an invasive ultrasound, is a favorite target. After his convention speech, the MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry said sarcastically that Republicans might be nervous “standing next to a governor who represents a vision of small government that is small enough to put on the end of a transvaginal probe.”

No wonder Brian Williams stays away.

Oh, how crude to bring up Bob McDonnell’s actual record. What do you want to bet that Ms. Stanley really misses David Broder?

Back at the Roach Motel

Posted on by

Best post-convention analysis I’ve seen so far (via) — “Stuck in a Room With Mitt Romney” by Paul Constant. Just a taste —

So the messaging sounded inoffensive, but when you really think about what is being said at this convention, you realize that all the red, white, and blue bunting and clothing and video imagery is a put-on. All the talk about patriotism, about supporting the troops, is just lip service. This is the most unpatriotic crowd I have ever been a part of. What they are against is community. Every sentence is devoid of empathy. Every finger-wag is aimed directly at an American who can’t afford health insurance, who hasn’t had a raise on their minimum-wage job in four years. Even as they rail against a statement that the president never really made, they are talking about tearing America down and leaving something meaner and greedier in its place. They’re radicals—radicals who’ve gone over the edge and are trying to make their radicalism mainstream.

Do read the whole piece. You won’t be sorry.