arack Obama’s speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination was . . . long. Too long.
The last fifteen or twenty minutes of it, when he went into preacher mode and talked of unity and reconciliation and change and such, were uplifting and solid political theater. Whether it’ll meet the ridiculously high expectations that he had coming in — and which he amplified by moving it to a sporting arena rather than staying in the convention hall — we’ll see.
The irony of the speech, though, is that the talk of a new politics followed forty minutes or more of a speech that, with some minor biographical edits and obligatory references to current events, could have been delivered by any Democratic presidential nominee in my memory. I’ve watched all of them since Jimmy Carter’s 1980 convention and they’ve all, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996, had the same theme: the country’s going to hell in a handbasket but, don’t worry, I’ll fix everything that ails you — even if it’s not remotely within the scope of federal authority — and pay for it by taxes on the top 5 percent, greedy corporations, and ending trade with foreign countries. Oh, and the magic energy pony will end our dependence on foreign oil, too!
The first rock concert I ever went to was Men At Work in August, 1983. INXS opened up for them. I enjoyed the whole show, of course, but I don’t need to tell you which band was objectively better. I saw them again on the post-TV show tour a couple of years ago. They were still fun, but it just wasn’t the same.
The McCain team spent the day touting a commerical spot that they’ll be running during and around Barack Obama’s acceptance speech tonight. The ad, named “Convention Night,” turns out to be a nice one:
Senator Obama, this is truly a good day for America.
Too often the achievements of our opponents go unnoticed. So I wanted to stop and say, congratulations.
How perfect that your nomination would come on this historic day. Tomorrow, we’ll be back at it. But tonight Senator, job well done.
In the first poll since the start of the Democratic convention, Gallup gives Barack Obama what RealClearPolitics calls “a big bounce,” taking a six point lead over his rival, John McCain.
Democratic candidate Barack Obama has gained ground in the latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking average from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and now leads Republican John McCain among registered voters by a 48% to 42% margin.
The latest three-day Gallup Poll Daily tracking average (Aug. 25-27) is directly coincident with the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and is no doubt beginning to reflect the typical convention “bounce” that Gallup has observed in most party conventions in recent decades.
Another way of looking at the same data is that the race continues to be a tie fluctuating within the range of normal sampling error:
Indeed, the only other national poll conducted during this period, Rasmussen’s, shows Obama and McCain tied 47-47. And, unlike Gallup, Rasmussen samples likely voters rather than mere registered voters.
Now, I fully expect Obama to get a bounce here, probably in the range of 4-5 percent. Thus far, though, there’s no evidence that it’s happened.
My colleague Tom Traina is looking ahead to the fall and scoping out some potential Supreme Court nominees for both Obama and McCain. He also points out that, as kind of a nature of the beast, you can’t always predict what kind of Justice a nominee will turn into:
Frequently, the appointment of justices is an attempt to fix a current political problem that just winds up resulting in three more political problems over the next couple of decades. Perhaps there is no better example of this than Richard Nixon’s attempts to overturn the “liberal” Warren Court through the appointments of Justices Burger, Blackmun, Powell, and Rehnquist. Most of the hallmark opinions of the Warren Court are still good law today, and it was the Burger court that decided the controversial case Roe v. Wade. In this sense, Nixon’s appointments were a failure.
[...]
On the other side of the spectrum, liberal darling John F. Kennedy appointed Byron White to the Supreme Court. White was known for opposing the doctrine of substantive due process, specifically the idea of a right to privacy. He dissented from Roe v. Wade and argued, along with Justice Rehnquist, that Federal anti-discrimination laws did not prohibit private schools from segregating by race. As you may suspect, White is not considered a liberal darling.
I think that’s right and it’s always something to keep in mind when it comes to Supreme Court nominees. Personally, I’m pretty sure that I would not have strong opinions about either John McCain’s or Barack Obama’s nominees, so it’s not a particularly big difference to worry about when it comes to the candidates. Which is not to say its unimportant who they choose, it’s just that I am not sure it makes a difference from my own peculiar ideas of jurisprudence.
John McCain got to where he is — the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for president — by building a reputation as a straight shooting maverick. While part of that was always more mythical than real, a key part of building the mythos was his unprecedented access to reporters and, briefly, even bloggers.
Now, he’s changed strategies and the people who he once called “his base” are fighting back. See, for example, “McCain’s Prickly TIME Interview.”
And so when TIME’s James Carney and Michael Scherer were invited to the front of McCain’s plane recently for an interview, they were ushered forward, past the curtain that now separates reporters from the candidate, past the sofa that was designed for his gabfests with the press and taken straight to the candidate’s seat. McCain at first seemed happy enough to do the interview. But his mood quickly soured. The McCain on display in the 24-minute interview was prickly, at times abrasive, and determined not to stray off message. An excerpt:
What do you want voters to know coming out of the Republican Convention — about you, about your candidacy?
I’m prepared to be President of the United States, and I’ll put my country first.
There’s a theme that recurs in your books and your speeches, both about putting country first but also about honor. I wonder if you could define honor for us?
Read it in my books.
I’ve read your books.
No, I’m not going to define it.
But honor in politics?
I defined it in five books. Read my books.
[Your] campaign today is more disciplined, more traditional, more aggressive. From your point of view, why the change?
I will do as much as we possibly can do to provide as much access to the press as possible.
But beyond the press, sir, just in terms of …
I think we’re running a fine campaign, and this is where we are.
Do you miss the old way of doing it?
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Really? Come on, Senator.
I’ll provide as much access as possible …
In 2000, after the primaries, you went back to South Carolina to talk about what you felt was a mistake you had made on the Confederate flag. Is there anything so far about this campaign that you wish you could take back or you might revisit when it’s over? [Does not answer.]
Do I know you? [Says with a laugh.] [Long pause.] I’m very happy with the way our campaign has been conducted, and I am very pleased and humbled to have the nomination of the Republican Party.
You do acknowledge there was a change in the campaign, in the way you had run the campaign? [Shakes his head.] (All bolds, italics, etc. in original. )
Now, this might just have been a bad day. Perhaps he’s usually much more cheerful and forthcoming than this, or perhaps Carney and Scherer did something to set him off, or whatever. But there’s not much doubt that McCain — and Obama, too, for that matter — have succumbed to run of the mill campaign strategies after winning their nomination processes by being something other than that.
For example, McCain had numerous conference calls with bloggers where all comers were allowed to ask anything they wanted with essentially unlimited follow-ups. I myself have been priviledged to engage McCain in back-and-forth banter lasting several minutes on more than one occasion. This had the same effect on skeptical bloggers as it did the mainstream press: humanizing the candidate and making us more forgiving of the occasional gaffe and policy disagreement.
Now, I never expected that would continue once he became the nominee. The man’s too busy now and has to focus his attention on swing voters, battleground states, and all that. He just can’t spare an hour every couple of weeks to talk to bloggers.
At the same time, though, I never thought he’d go into bunker mode, either. The questions in the TIME interview above — and, again, I don’t know the full context here — are softballs. He should have been knocking those out of the park rather than getting indignant. “Read my books”? Seriously?
He’s built up a lot of capital with the national press corps. (Many Democrats are annoyed by this but, as I’ve noted many times, there’s nothing stopping Obama and company from giving comparable access.) But, as McCain himself has noted, suddenly withdrawing that access after having gotten the media accustomed to it would be unwise. Indeed, the TIME piece uses that famous quote:
You think I could survive if I didn’t? We’d never be forgiven … I’d have to hire a food taster, somebody to start my car in the morning.
A much more famous quote, popular a quarter century ago, was “Let Reagan be Reagan.” If John McCain is going to win this thing, he’s going to have to do it as John McCain.
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - China and several Central Asian nations rebuffed Russia’s hopes of international support for its actions in Georgia, issuing a statement Thursday denouncing the use of force and calling for respect for every country’s territorial integrity.
A joint declaration from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization also offered some support for Russia’s “active role in promoting peace” following a cease-fire, but overall it appeared to increase Moscow’s international isolation.
and the EU continues to be unamused by the situation in Georgia:
France, meanwhile, said the European Union was considering imposing sanctions against Russia.
“Sanctions are being considered … and many other means as well,” French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said at a news conference in Paris. He did not elaborate.
More than one of the members of the SCO has their own potentially separatist provinces so they tend to take the issue of support for separatist movements seriously. Also, some Central Asian countries have benefited from Western FDI and are cautious about taking steps that could chill the investment environment or make them potential targets for sanctions.
Russia did not seek the approval of any regional body–the CIS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but it will be interesting to see whether the SCO summit this week produces any sort of retroactive endorsement.
The SCO has produced no retroactive endorsement and Russia has become further internationally isolated.
Steven Donegal has achieved what I’m pretty sure is an OTB first: An InstaLink to a comment, for this entry in yesterday’s Obama as Jackie Robinson discussion.
There’s only one way to resolve this 3 am thing: reality TV. Set up a TV program where each candidate is called unexpectedly at 3am and tell them of some impending crisis in their campaign and see how they react. That would be much more revealing than any debate.
Says Glenn, “Why not? It seems like everything is turning into reality TV anyway.”
Indeed. Why, even Pajamas Media is getting into the act.
Democratic pundits are understandably nervous about the fact that Barack Obama’s once impressive lead in the polls has all but vanished. That’s led to a lot of second guessing about the early convention speeches, the 50-state (or is that 57?) strategy, and so forth.
TNR senior editor John Judis thinks Obama needs to make radical changes towards “Avoiding a Long, Disappointing Fall.” He thinks that most of the concerns about Obama’s policies and experience are really just backhanded racism (a rather dubious analysis) but realizes there’s not much that can be done on that front. Thankfully,
Obama still has advantages that he can fall back on. Voters prefer Democrats to Republicans by a wide margin. And Obama has attracted intense support from African Americans; upscale, professional Democrats; and Democratic-leaning independents. According to [Stan] Greenberg’s polling, Obama is running nine points ahead of McCain in neighboring Oakland County, the home of well-to-do professionals and managers. All in all, Obama has a good chance to win in November–but this summer the Obama campaign has made the crucial error of conducting itself as it were on the verge of a landslide victory, comparable to Lyndon Johnson’s win over Barry Goldwater in 1964. And it is still displaying the same overconfidence.
This resulted in snubbing McCain’s suggestion for multiple town hall debates, staging a massive pep rally in a foreign land, and other errors of hubris. To correct course, Judis argues, Obama must use tonight’s acceptance speech to change forcus away from “change.”
Obama ran his primary campaign around the slogan “change we can believe in.” That helped burnish his outsider image against Clinton, but it doesn’t work as well against McCain (who, fairly or not, is still identified with outsiderdom and change), and it doesn’t provide the context for any economic program. This has been clear for months, but the Obama campaign has yet to provide an alternative.
I am not clever enough to come up with such a theme, but I can say that it should be an extension of Obama’s underlying appeal to the unity of American races, religions, states, regions, and even parties. That’s what brought him to Americans’ attention in 2004 when he declared at the Democratic convention that “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” What he has to say from now on should be framed as an attempt to prevent the wide disparities in wealth, income, and power that are undermining the promise of American democracy. By articulating a positive picture of a unified America, this theme also has the virtue of directly addressing voters’ fears about his favoring African Americans over whites.
NPR’s Juan Williams thinks “Obama Needs to Take a Stand on Race and Other Issues.”
[O]n any issue of racial consequence Mr. Obama has become a stealth candidate. It is arguably smart politics not to focus on potentially controversial racial issues when you are a black man running in an election with an electorate that is more than 75% white. But how is it possible that Mr. Obama, as he rises to claim the mantle of Dr. King before 75,000 people and a national TV audience of millions here tonight, remains a mystery on the most important civil rights issues of our day?
Mr. Obama is nowhere man when it comes time to speak out on reforming big city public schools, with their criminally high dropout rates for minority children. He apparently refuses to do it for fear that supporting vouchers or doing anything to strengthen charter schools will alienate vote-rich unions. His rare references to the critical argument over affirmative action — an issue that is on several state ballots this fall — give both opponents and supporters reason to think he might be on their side. He has had little if anything to say about the persistent 25% poverty rate in black America.
[...]
The uneasy truth may be that Mr. Obama is not worried about alienating white voters with his stands on race. It is more likely that he fears having to speak the truth about the poor — who are disproportionately black and Latino — needing to take more responsibility for family breakdown, bad schools, thug-life culture and high poverty rates.
Democratic strategist Dan Gernstein, though, argues that “Obama Should Just Be Himself.”
[T]he Democrats who are telling Mr. Obama “I love you, you’re perfect, now change” are underestimating the position of fundamental strength he is starting with, and the tremendous advantages his campaign will bring to bear this fall.
This is not just a matter of cyclical political dynamics that strongly favor Democrats (record-setting wrong track numbers, the damage George W. Bush has done to the Republican brand, a major intensity gap among the bases, etc.). Mr. Obama’s campaign itself has a substantial structural lead — the ruthlessly efficient money-raising and field-organizing machine that swamped the Clinton juggernaut is ready to do the same to Mr. McCain — that current polls just don’t account for and won’t for some time.
More importantly, the doubting Democrats are misunderstanding the challenge Mr. Obama faces in closing the deal with those crucial voters who want a leader who can move the country in a new direction but are not yet sold on Mr. Obama as the man for that job.
[...]
He mostly just needs to be himself — or to be more precise, to be more of himself. No reinvention, no repositioning — just recount the tough stands and political risks he has already taken, relentlessly reinforce those points for the next three months, and ideally look for a few opportunities to walk the change-making walk as we near November.
I agree with Gernstein that the fundamentals strongly favor Obama. Narrow polls (he’s only up 1.8 points in today’s RealClearPolitics average) notwithstanding, the race remains his to lose. The country is overwhelmingly in a mood to go in a different direction and they seem to like him. (Indeed, as Matt Yglesias notes, they seem to like both candidates.) Obama has to persuade people — who are just now starting to pay attention — that he’s got what it takes to lead. If he does that, he wins. If not, John McCain is what he was throughout the Republican primary process: The old reliable fallback position.
Gernstein’s suggestion that Obama achieve that by pointing out the tough stances he’s already taken, though, strikes me as unlikely to work. He’s a junior Senator who has spent most of his four years in an office that people count towards presidential preparation running for president. I’m not sure getting “booed by the nation’s biggest teachers union for openly advocating” a policy wildly popular everywhere outside that room is goting to cut it. He’s going to have to do it by inspiring confidence with his speeches and debate performances.
Like most of his recent predecessors as Democratic presidential nominee, he’s also going to have to assuage fears that he’s weak on national security and that looks down on regular people and their values. Telling people that they’re racist for even harboring such doubts is not the winning strategy.
