On the Attack
Somewhat incredibly, I’ve been watching the Democratic Convention for something like three hours now and I think Claire McCaskill who just finished was the first speaker who actually took some time to make an argument against John McCain. I understand that the theory of the day is that Democrats want to introduce people to Barack Obama, but it seems to me that viable political parties figure out how to walk and chew gum at the same time — it’s hardly impossible to work a few digs at the other guy into a talk that’s mostly about the virtues of your candidate.
But it’s been striking to me that so many speeches have been kind of vague about the need for “change” or about bad things happening right now or over “the past eight years” rather than using the names of political parties or candidates for office. I’ve been able to familiarize myself recently with the legal restrictions in place on what you can say as a 501(c)4 organization, but suffice it to say that Democratic Party officials speaking at the Democratic National Convention are under no obligation to eschew “express advocacy” or to disparage the character, qualifications, or fitness for office of their opponents.
59 Responses to “On the Attack”
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August 25th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
It’s entertaining to read your and Andrew Sullivan’s very different takes on things simultaneously. This time I agree with both of you, I guess. She did take digs at McCain (though Leach took digs at the current Republican leadership and actually had some substance). But Andrew’s also right that she’s a terrible speaker.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
They’re lazy. Writing an incisive speech that uses concrete examples to demonstrate your points is hard work.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Um, yah. Didn’t they just fall into the trap of focusing too much on character and not as much on issues? That’s just where the GOP wants us. If this campaign was just about the issues, it’d be no contest, and that’s where we have to try to steer it. Of course no campaign can ever be solely about the issues – nor should they ever be – but we can at least do more than inch and lurch in that direction.
I do not care that Michelle Obama’s brother is the coach of frikkin’ the Beavers. This is ridiculous.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Nancy Pelosi spoke harshly and drew contrast with McCain. Check out the full text here.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
And the simple fact is that, if the Democrats can’t learn to call those fucking animals what they are, we will be looking at a future of massive political violence directed against movement conservatism that will make the civil war look like child’s play. If the Dems can’t figure out how to defeat the thugs at the polls, there will be conservative blood flowing waist deep in the streets.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
I raised the question last week of whether the Democrats will rule the same as the Republicans –once they get power. Of whether the $500 Million plus being raised for this election has some strings attached –Some understandings with very wealthy people. Of whether that explains why the Democratic leadership has –in the past six months — become totally silently re past Republican abuses and thievry.
I am beginning to fear that the slogan “Change you can believe in” will end up being a cruel joke. I hope not.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Agreed, we need more of that. Go ahead and click on gop.com and look for any mention of their candidate for President (by the way, it was like that the past two elections at least). They got nuthin. They never had nuthin. How the hell did we end up with the Cheney Administration?
August 25th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
They weren’t playing the speech on TV anyway so it doesn’t matter. (Pundits were talking over it)
August 25th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
I’m not going to lie. That was a little creepy how Obama popped up on the screen at the end.
It just wasn’t necessary.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
The whole night was a disappointment. I guess the powers that be want a white-bread convention to gloss over the fact that our nominee is, you know, black. But I think we need some populist denunciations of the last eight years of plutocracy and the disastrous economic consequences and we’re not getting any of that, but that’s how you throttle John McCain.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Yeah, was Pelosi getting the crowd to chant “John McCain is wrong” not enough attack for you?
August 25th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
But I think we need some populist denunciations of the last eight years of plutocracy and the disastrous economic consequences and we’re not getting any of that, but that’s how you throttle John McCain.
Word. But Mama Obama isn’t the one to do it. Maybe Biden? Someone else? Everyone else?
August 25th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
I don’t think they’re lazy, as blah claims. I think they want to be so innoffensive to the average voter, or put another way, so greedy for every possible persuasion of voter that they want to grab anyone and everyone who thinks that any sort of “bad things” have happened over the last 8 years. If we talk about Bush’s poor response to Islamist terrorism, we could lose the crucial 9/11 Truth vote that wants support an administration that won’t attack New York again.
I don’t think McCaskill is a bad speaker. Andrew Sullivan is getting really grumpy. Can he go back to being a McCain supporter?
August 25th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Tonight wasn’t for going after McCain. Tonight was for getting Clinton’s voters on board.
Gee, you guys have some overly high expectations. This goes on all week, you know.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
What can you say or not say as a 501(c)4 organization?
August 25th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
It’s amazing to me that people are wringing their hands about this when almost no one who matters saw any of these speeches.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:16 am
no one who matters saw any of these speeches.
I sure as hell hope they saw Michelle’s speech, it was fantastic.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:34 am
I sure as hell hope they saw Michelle’s speech, it was fantastic.
I should’ve been more specific. They saw no speeches other than the Craig-Michelle twostep and – possibly on the cable networks – the Kennedy speech. The rest of the convention was submerged in favor of pundit babble.
I’d suspect that anyone who actually saw McCaskill speaking probably knows who s/he’s voting for.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Folks, relax. Need I remind you Barack and Michelle Obama are BLACK and trying to become President and First Lady of largely white, never before voted for anything other than a lilly white man, America? They have been painted as elitist, exotic, out of touch, uppity(mind your place now boy) and the cardinal sin of American politics-haters of the USA. Not to mention that they associate with other angry black people. They needed to show white America that black people are people too, with families and love and caring and concern and, yes, the American dream. Sure the people on this blog get all that but many in this nation do not and tuned in tonight for the 1st time. They saw a reason to not be scared of black people and a reason to trust in the hope that all that change talk represents-and the specific policies that will carry it out as they are unveiled for the millionth time-but the 1st time the media will pay attention to them.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:46 am
of course, no one watching the cable channels got to see it because they didn’t show it. i’m a bit disappointed. when they said “more coverage” i naively thought it meant more coverage.
Nope. It just means the same amount of coverage but with more time for panel discussions.
guess i’m watching cspan for the rest of the week. but my concern is, she gave a great speech and nobody outside the convention center heard it.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:47 am
Anybody who is disappointed that Michelle didn’t attack is, I’m sorry, a complete fucking moron. The narrative about her was “angry black woman”, and you’re upset that she didn’t come out as an angry black woman? Maybe this post was prior to Michelle’s speech, but it was perfect. It was exactly what it needed to be.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:15 am
You gotta love it when the press turns its won obsession with gossip and intrigue into the central story of the convention:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-08-25-clintons-cover_N.htm
August 26th, 2008 at 1:36 am
If Obama can consolidate his share of 75-80% of the Democratic voters into Kerryesque range of 89% then the 2-3 point Obama national lead will result in a 7-9 point blowout of Bush ‘88 proportions. The major goal of this convention is to consolidate the Democratic party and secondarily appeal to some Independents. Day 1 was an attempt to answer the question : Does Barack Obama and his family share my values/concerns/beliefs ? You have to be pleased with how that turned out.
I think Leach was not worthy of a prime time slot.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:00 am
Conventions are not for persuading undecideds.
Conventions are for communicating to political activists the talking points of the campaign. People like us. Over these four days, we will shown a hundred ways to make the case for Barack Obama, and for overcoming the objections to him that we will hear in our families, among our neighbors or with co-workers.
Turn off the cable or broadcast networks and tune into CSPAN and go to school on how to argue for Obama. The undecideds will be more influenced by people they know — people like you. Get with the program !
August 26th, 2008 at 2:18 am
You gotta love it when the press turns its won obsession with gossip and intrigue into the central story of the convention:
They’re sitting around, bored, so they file their pre-prepared ‘conflict’ stories. They are fucking trolls in print.
Obvious point: the commercial networks show the 10PM hour. If people don’t choose to watch, chances are they’ll catch it close to 11PM for the local news and Pricktease Weather. If they switch over at 10:55, they see Michelle Obama saying ‘God Bless America’, then the kids, then their dad on the video screen.
As for attack dogs: well, it’d be fun if Neil Kinnock flew over to introduce Biden. (They became friends after 1988.) The irony there being that Kinnock’s attempt to do a convention-style rally in 1992 was widely, if somewhat inaccurately, blamed for Labour’s defeat.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:35 am
Wow. The reaction to her has been “she sucked” across a lot of the internets.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:02 am
Google “Jim Leach” in Google News and you’ll see that his remarks got a lot of play in the Iowa media. That’s why he was chosen as the Republican for Obama and not Lincoln Chaffee or Susan Eisenhower. Iowa’s electoral votes are in play.
There is no national campaign, there is no national convention. It’s a buffet of portions that are cut up and repackaged for consumption in different markets. Every speaker prior to the Kennedy tribute was either party housekeeping related to the platform or various constituencies within the party or typical mom and apple pie BS (cute kids being good citizens, yay!). After the Kennedy tribute (which was totally appropriate) came Republican Jim Leach which was boring to the rest of the country but good for Obama’s Iowa operation, McCaskill (who you liked) and is in a tough state, and then the sister, brother-in-law, and then the wife of the candidate doing a rearguard action to try and sure up the candidate against future “he’s the other” attacks. So it looks like there is a plan to me.
Tommorow the national media is going to ignore everything and focus on Hillary Clinton’s speech but that doesn’t mean the local media in Michigan and Pennsylvania will do the same.
Wednesday is when Joe Biden speaks and my guess is he’s going to have sharp elbows. Hopefully Bill Clinton can manage to speak for five minutes earlier in the night without making a lemon face or praising John McCain so Biden’s message leads the news and not the Big Dogs’s mewling descent into the dustbin of history.
Thursday is the Big Enchilada.
Don’t mistake your experience watching the entire event as a national commentator with the purpose of the individual elements of the convention.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Do not expect Hillary to take on McCain. That will probably be the Big Dog’s job.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:21 am
Well, I missed the big highlight of the evening, the Michelle Obama speech. I hear it was a success. But I had given up by then because the rest of the night bored the hell out of me, and actually put me to sleep. Even the emotional Ted Kennedy moment had a dampened impact because it was surrounded by a sea of nothingness.
It looks to me that all of the wrangling about the Clintons and their role, the roll call vote, and other such matters have really distracted the convention organizers from the main task of putting on a compelling show, and conveying the fierce, urgent necessity of throwing out the awful Republicans and electing Democrats.
And if the point of the night was to humanize and introduce Obama to Americans, then should have done that: speaker after speaker emotionally testifying to the great things Barack Obama has done for them. But I didn’t hear much of that either. The one highlight for me was the father of an Iraq war soldier killed in action, in the Ken Burns film about Ted Kennedy, talking about the bond they forged as fellow gold star families, when Kennedy worked to pass legislation to get body armor for the soldiers in Iraq.
Moat of the night lacked definition, pace, a clear message and emotional impact. And the music really, really sucked. Matt, you have connections in the show business world, right? Tell them to give the campaign a call and make some constructive suggestions.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:27 am
Conventions are not for persuading undecideds. Conventions are for communicating to political activists the talking points of the campaign.
False. Conventions in the last several decades are designed to be compelling television that both energize and intensify the support of existing supporters and typically move undecideds quite a bit, by producing a convention bounce.
You are given several nights of free airtime with millions of eyeballs tuning in. You can’t squander that time.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:43 am
Democrats are pussies. That’s it in a nutshell. The public has that opinion. Hence Democrat’s disadvantage in polling when questions relate to national security. No one wants to be in a foxhole with a dope smoking hippie feminist fag when the shrapnel starts to fly. The coming election is a domestic foxhole. Republicans have leapt out of the hole guns blazing. Democrats stay hunkered hoping everyone runs out of ammo. They plan on riding into town in a liberation parade, they just don’t want to muss their hair to earn it.
August 26th, 2008 at 8:11 am
I’m sure that Mr. Yglesias will want to comment on the oped trashing Joe Biden in todays’ Washington Post by Michael Rubin.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/25/AR2008082502337.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR
August 26th, 2008 at 8:18 am
steve duncan – Hippies would be about 60 years old now so it’s unlikely they’d be on active duty. No branch of the US military allows illegal drug use. You can’t be openly homosexual and serve in the US military. The feminist UCMJ makes it illegal to discriminate based on gender within the military. Enlisted military personnel gave Obama 600% more money than they gave John McCain. Hence you are a delusional ignoramus.
August 26th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Time will tell if the Democrats are willing in the convention to both define the opposition as well as themselves in the kind of strong terms that work (and not try & remain ‘above’ it all).
If so, then, I worry that the convention planners might be assuming that everyone will tune in to the entire affair, just like hard core Democratic partisans & activists, and that is a fatal mistake.
The interested casual viewer might tune in once, maybe once per night, for some limited prime time viewing.
If so, I worry that the Democratic idea was to plan this as a multi-day extravaganza exclusively, without realizing the ‘whole world in a drop’ type approach that their opposition will certainly realize.
August 26th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Wow joejoejoe, your mother must have had her child rearing patience sorely tried. When she read you the fable of the “Three Little Pigs” were you quick to point out a wolf couldn’t actually blow a house down?
August 26th, 2008 at 8:33 am
lotta delusionals in this thread.
steve duncan, who really has not been paying attention since ‘68, and is still fighting the hippies in his head.
and ‘voice of reason’, who wants ‘conservative blood flowing waist deep in the streets’. oh yeah. that’s a realistic approach to getting the country back on the right track.
look–realistic change is going to come from getting out the vote, from putting good attack ads on the air, from influencing the press coverage, from donating to your favorite candidates, from having a good ground game in battleground states.
you can work to make this happen, or you can continue with the fantasies in your heads.
August 26th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Re RS’s comment “It’s amazing to me that people are wringing their hands about this when almost no one who matters saw any of these speeches.”
————-
What about the little people? The voters?
You know — the ones who supply the cannon fodder for Iraq? The ones who had $3 Trillion in Social Security savings stolen from them?
They would like to think that this election is about more than one set of self-congratulatory elites taking over from another set of self-congratulatory elites.
August 26th, 2008 at 8:51 am
My sensibility is, we need to root our campaign to the ground to give our attacks power, to convince people that our politicians transcend the usual falseness and corruption.
We need to humanize ourselves, and then tell people a lot of the things that only those who walk the blogs learn, the stuff that motivates us to fight.
People know somethings wrong. First we earn trust, then we tell them what’s wrong, and why electing us will put it right.
August 26th, 2008 at 8:53 am
steve duncan – The Three Little Pigs is a British story from an Oxford weenie and book thief. My all-American family didn’t go in for Anglophile crap. As a child if I needed a morality lesson from a porcine cartoon I consulted either Porky Pig or Spiro Agnew .
August 26th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Re kid blitzer’s comment
“lotta delusionals in this thread…. and ‘voice of reason’, who wants ‘conservative blood flowing waist deep in the streets’. oh yeah. that’s a realistic approach to getting the country back on the right track.”
———
Actually, I kinda like Voice of Reason’s idea.
It would be a nice change from the usual Democratic response of “lie down and spread your legs while making timid sounds of protest for appearances sake”
August 26th, 2008 at 9:07 am
I see McCain et al are stepping up the use of Hillary in their ads. I hope our side will take the opportunity to mine the archives of hatred for John McCain inside the Republican party.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:11 am
No kidding. How about audio of Rush Limbaugh screaming about how John McCain was betraying conservative principles and would destroy the party? Too gauche?
August 26th, 2008 at 9:57 am
“That’s just where the GOP wants us.”
The GOP doesn’t care where you are. They’ll make wherever that is a bad thing. Too smart, too dumb, too fat, too fit, too popular, too unpopular, too white, too black, too whatever.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Dan Kervick,
What did you think of Jesse Jackson Jr.’s speech?
August 26th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Re Don Williams
I have a certain sympathy for the blogs reigning Bolshevik relative to wanting to hear a speaker at the Democratic convention toss raw meat to the partisans. Hey, I like raw meat as well as the next guy. The only problem is that that type of speech tends to be bad mouthed by the pundits in the mainstream media the next day. As an example, in the 1956 Democratic convention, the keynote speech was given by the then governor of Tennessee, one Frank Clement. That was a perfect example of tossing raw meat to the partisans. I thought it was a great speech. However, the pundits thought otherwise and bad mouthed it which didn’t help the Democratic candidate in the election.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Micheline,
I heard Jackson Jr.’s speech on the car radio last night, and listened to it, but today cannot remember anything he said.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Enough with the kid gloves. It’s fine for Obama and the missus to be above the fray, but Magoo is vulnerable in so many consequential areas not least of all an insane, Israel-centric foreign policy that puts every American’s life in jeopardy. Here, Jim Webb can play a constructive role ripping Magoo-Lieberman a new one.
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