DNC Journal

Notes from a convention.

The Speech
In a convention preview in the Tribune, Obama recalled his 2004 keynote speech: "I just sat in a hotel room watching a basketball game and wrote it up, most of it sort of in one sitting."

Really? From a Chicago magazine article called "The Speech":

"Obama labored over it for weeks, harvesting lines that he had already tested on Illinois crowds."

The rest of the Trib article is complete stenography. You have him one-on-one, why not ask him some real questions? Were there ground rules?

For example:

- How can you attack John McCain while upholding the central tenet of your campaign as representing a new kind of politics?

- How do you square chiding John McCain for not engaging in serious debate while you were the one who refused a series of town hall meetings?

- Mayor Daley will be giving a speech in support of you. How can you endorse a mayor so steeped in corruption?

Just to name a few.

*

Obama says in the article that "I had to scratch and claw my way to the point I am now, and I think I've done so without cutting corners or compromising my integrity."

- Don't you think your relationship with Emil Jones represents some compromise of your integrity?

- What do you think about Emil Jones giving his job to his son?

I mean, really. You're a reporter. Ask questions.

*

"Never shy to criticize the media, Obama pointed to the endless coverage and speculation over his running mate selection as an example of why voters don't know more about where he stands on the issues."

That's rich. The Obama campaign manipulated the media for just that result, including the leaking (from an otherwise leak-proof operation) of trial balloons testing out Joe Biden, including a front-page New York Times story. Please.

Blog Fog
NYT: "Inviting Bloggers Into The Tent."

Bloggers who are arms of the parties, that is. I was denied credentials to both conventions.

About Biden
The NYT outlines his positions. These caught my eye:

- Biden supports Roe v. Wade, but opposes public financing for abortion. Liberals often criticize opposition to public financing because it's harder for poor people to afford abortions.

- Voted for a ban on partial-birth abortions; voted against required parental notification for minors who go out of state for abortions.

- Opposes gay marriage. Voted for the Defense of Marriage Act denying federal benefits for same-sex couples, even though he says he suppports federal employee benefits for same-sex couples. Maybe he voted for DOMA for other reasons and accepted that provision.

- Voted against the first Gulf War but for this one. "I made a mistake. I underestimated the influence of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the neocons." Voted against the surge.

- Supports the death-penalty "as a crime-fighting technique."

Biden vs. Lavine
Eric Zorn wanted John Lavine's head on a pike for an unproven journalistic crime (that I'm not convinced he committed, by the way) but gives Joe Biden a pass for his plagiarism problems and biographical exaggerations.

"I think the statute of scandal limitations is almost run on that," Zorn writes, "though it certainly will invite a rejoinder about McCain's old problems - Keating Five, cheating on his injured first wife and so on. Maybe that was the idea? Lure the GOP into dredging up 20-plus-year-old issues, then clearing their throats and saying, "Well, now that you mention the 1980s . . . "

Right. That's why Obama picked Biden - as a way to get to the Keating Five and McCain's first marriage.

Race Card
"Mr. Obama faces genuine obstacles that are more salient than skin color," Matt Bai writes in the New York Times. "By any historical measure, he has remarkably little governing experience and almost none in foreign policy."

Little did many know that the Obama campaign would soon make the same argument against Sarah Palin.

Old Politics
"So the Obama campaign has turned to the politics of personal destruction, attempting to make a campaign issue out of John McCain's inability to remember how many houses he has," Paul Krugman writes in "Accentuate the Negative." "And the turn comes not a moment too soon."

All previous campaign themes are no longer operational.

What Is He Thinking?
Obama can blame the media for the public not knowing where he stands, but how does he account for mystified experts and intellectuals?

The upshot of the New York Times cover story "Obamanomics" is that, well, he stands for a bunch of different things, best exemplified by the article's headline: "A Free-Market-Loving, Big-Spending, Fiscally Conservative, Wealth Redistributionist."

The Times also finds Obama's general political philosophy a mystery.

* "His philosophy is ambition," said Fred Siegel, a historian at The Cooper Union in New York. Isee him as having a rhetoric rather than a philosophy."

* "He has a pretty conservative social message," said Theda Sckopol, a government professor at Harvard University. This impulse informs his views of religion. A deep current in American liberalism holds that church and state are separate realms. Mr. Obama does not swim in this river.

* Alan Wolfe, a professor at Boston College, said no one should mistake Mr. Obama for a raging liberal. "During the primaries, I used to tell people that Obama, not Hillary, was the real Clinton."

* "He buys into the precepts of American Exceptionalism, which portrays the 20th century as the story of American visionary leadership," said Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University. "What strikes me is how utterly conventional it is . . . I doubt seriously he has a fully formed world view yet. There will be an internal fight for the mind and soul of President Obama."

* Lawrence Tribe is an Obama supporter who found his vote for Bush's FISA bill "perplexing."

* Cass Sunstein: "He is a visionary minimalist."

Alan Brinkley: "He is not rooted in the way of a lot of politicians; we don't know what his precise philosophy will be. We just see these interesting shards."

The Torch
"Barack Obama will close the book on the old politics of race and gender and group against group," Kennedy said.

Really? Once he's won and those divisions are no longer useful to him, you mean? How will he do that?"

"This November the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans."

The Democrats have passed the torch more often than an Olympic relay team.

*

Kennedy says what struck him was that Obama's family "was so much like mine."

Um, right. Mine too, if by that you mean made up of humans.

Missouri Mush
Claire McCaskill: "I know this son of a single mom will stand up for the dreams of our daughters. And I know John McCain won't."

Um, McCain has daughters too. Just sayin'.

"In Missouri, we have a ringside seat to the real America, and I can assure it looks much different."

You know, everyone in Congress is from somewhere outside of Washington, D.c., that you might call the real America.

"It's time for someone who understands the real America: the waitresses, small businessmen, single moms and truck drivers."

You know, people we only pay attention to every four years when we need their votes. The Dems always try this line of attack and always lose. And that's never been Obama's constituency.

Pelosi Pap
Calls the Iraq war a "catastrophic mistake," but forgets the part where the Democrats endorsed it.

Close To Home
USA Today: "Obama's inner circle also has an unmistakable Chicago flavor to it."

How comforting.

Putting On Ayers
USA Today: "Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor who knows both men, is "very disturbed by [Ayers'] past and by his refusal to disavow what he did. Still, he says, "I think the implications fo this for Obama are zero."

They aren't zero, but they should be. It's not the supposed associations with radicals that is the problem, it's the associations with the Chicago Machine.

This Bud's For You
If I was John McCain, I would have responded to Obama's attacks about his houses with this: What does my opponent have against beer?

Michelle Bell
"When her husband ran for Congress in 2000, Michelle Obama groused so much about handshaking and fund-raising that Arthur Sussman, then her boss at the University of Chicago, finally asked if she truly could not find a single thing about campaigning to enjoy," Jodi Kantor writes in the New York Times.

"Michelle Obama thought for a moment. Visiting so many living rooms had given her some new decorating ideas, she allowed."

Wow. Um, harsh.

"She must continue to refashion her own occasionally harsh public image in warmer tones," Kantor writes. Because reporters should always advise political strategists to manipulate their public images to maximize electoral likability. And don't worry, we can discuss this sort of thing in the paper because the public is in the other room.

*

"So on Monday night, the campaign filled the stage and screen with Michelle Obama's family: her basketball-coach brother, Craig Robinson; her homemaker-turned-secretary mother, Marian; and the memory of her father, Frasier, a city worker stricken with multiple sclerosis. (When her father was alive, the family barely talked about his disease, Craig Robinson said in an interview last year; now Michelle Obama mentions it at nearly every campaign stop.)"

Geez, you'd think he was a prisoner of war or something.

Race Bard
"They do everything right. They have great kids, the work their hearts off, they make it in their professions, they don't live off welfare, they don't commit crimes, they don't live on affirmative action."

Why does Chris Matthews still have a job?

Menage Obama
Bill Maher: "The coverage after, that I was watching, from MSNBC, I mean these guys were ready to have sex with him."

Phone Home
Saying thanks: "The AT&T Convention in Denver."

Hill's Bill
For all the money Obama raised making appeals based on Hillary Clinton in the primaries, he should help pay off her debt.

Fox's Chicken
Alan Hannity is so bad one can only conclude that's why he has the job.

Speech Review
* Hillary Clinton had the most complicated speech to give and she rocked it.
* Dennis Kucinich gave the kind of speech you wish Obama would deliver.
* Apparently Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer was really good, but I didn't see it.
* Apparently Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and our very own Tammy Duckworth sucked.
* John Warner certainly did.
* John Kerry was brutally clumsy.
* Al Gore only made you realize that the party has three superstars in him and the Clintons, and none of them are on the ticket.

Missed Opportunity
Obama's speech began and ended with Obamanian rhetoric, but the meat of it was routine Democratic boilerplate that we hear every four years. It's too bad David Axelrod decided against a substantive campaign in favor of a personality-based campaign, despite Obama's protestations that the whole process has been too trivial. Hello? A reform agenda along the lines of the Contract With America would have been most welcome. Here's the change we're going to bring. Instead, change now simply means a change to the Democrats. Big deal.

History Lessons
C-SPAN ran old convention speeches over the weekend and it was fascinating. Gerald Ford, for example, gave a surprisingly strong speech - easily better than Obama's - that was interrupted by applause 65 times in 36 minutes.

I mean, does this sound familiar?

"As I try in my imagination to look into the homes where families are watching the end of this great convention, I can't tell which faces are Republicans, which are Democrats, and which are Independents. I cannot see their color or their creed. I see only Americans."

By The People
Wig vs. Bigwig.

Unity
If Obama can't even unite his own party, how can he unite the country? The fact is that Obama divided his party by playing dirty against the Clintons, and yet unity fell to Hillary during the convention. She did her part, but what about him?

It would have made more sense to put Hillary (and Bill) on the first night of the convention. Unite the party from the start and move past the Clintons right away. You could also do Jimmy Carter and even Ted Kennedy - you know, pass that torch at the outset. On the second night you have the other candidates say their piece and segue into Obama biography. Then you follow with policy and end with the big speech.

Bruce Ruse
I appreciate Barack Obama using "Born in the U.S.A." as part of his convention soundtrack in the sense that he's taking it back from Ronald Reagan, but it's nearly as inappropriate to use the song as a patriotic anthem when it's really about disaffected Vietnam vets. "Promised Land" would have been a much better choice - especially for a speech titled "The American Promise."

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