Politics and Policy: Convention to Consequences
Let's catch up a little bit on the political and policy news. After the break we've clustered some readings excerpts that look at the Democratic Convention, some other political news and some major policy issues. Make no mistake the Democrats had a remarkable convention. Actually it was going to be remarkable in one way or another for several reasons. Fortunately for all of us it turned out remarkably positive on many fronts. Headed into the convention there were major problems in bringing the Hillary supporters back into the party, in establishing the credability of Barry with the voters as a guy who, if he clearly wasn't one of them, understood their problems, in moving from the cerebal and ethereal to the practical, pragamatic and substantive and in energizing the party and larger public.
On the whole there was no commentator who felt that any one of those could be accomplished, at least well. And certainly not all of them And early in the convention, especially after Hillary's speech - as the excerpts show - it looked like the problems were getting worse with Hillary damming with faint praise and setting herself up to catch the standard after it fell and position for 2012 ! The level of bitterness was apparantly severe or worse. Instead, starting with Michelle Obama's speech there was a carefull crafted convention that moved from strength to strength. The Clintons and their supporters were brought into the fold - Bill made a great speech if not a heartfelt one and one always has to wonder at the sincerity. And Teddy main a real old-fashioned barn-burner which was a tribute to his courage and dedication as well as the shibboleths of the Democratic past.
But the real keys were what had to be extraordinarily well-crafted, coordinated and delivered speeches by Michelle, Joe Biden and Barry. Early on the key strategic themes were established and worked and worked. Until we get to Barry's speech. Now a political speech, especially at a convention, is largely supposed to be emotive. And this one was but it was also substantive. If you compare Barry's speech to our prior assessment of key policy priorities he literally ticked them off right down our list. In what we think is the right priority order and with the sub-points being pretty much the right ones, whether it was the economy, energy, domestic policy or foreign policy. We'll try and dig into in more detail but his only real problem is that the initiatives he's proposing aren't affordable without increased deficits. On the other hand, and holding his feet to the fire on those isn't a fair test at a convention, one can still legitimately argue for the ROI. The return on investment - these are all the right major strategic initiatives and if we want to fix those problems it makes sense to borrow the funds to make the capital investment for the sake of future, long-term growth and social well-being.
So take a gander. Better yet listen to the speeches. As it happens C-Span not only has them all online but put them over on YouTube and I put together a playlist for you.
Democratic Convention
A Good Start on 2012 My bottom line reaction to Hillary Clinton's speech Tuesday night: Good, but not quite very good, for Barack Obama in 2008. Even better, if things should turn out like they might, for Hillary Clinton in 2012. Clinton's speech was carefully tailored, like the very attractive orange pants suit she wore. It was tailored to her need to speak directly to those who supported her, especially those unreconciled to Obama's nomination. It was laden with references to feminist advances—the Seneca Falls conference of 1848 got hearty applause, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was duly noted, Harriet Tubman was cited as advice to all (keep going). She saluted thereby her own persistence through the primaries and noted that America does not like a quitter. So much for those Obamaites who kept urging her to get out of the race. In contrast, the argument for supporting Barack Obama was far more abstract. Clinton voters supported her because she could help those unfortunate souls out there (the requisite lugubrious stories follow). Barack Obama would help those unfortunate souls, and John McCain wouldn't, not at all. He'd just be four more years of George W. Bush. Ergo, logic requires you to support Barack Obama. But Clinton's affect was chilly, or at least seemed so to me… What was missing was much in the way of description of Barack Obama. What kind of man is he? One who supports the same positions she does. Hillary's Grand Strategy - VDH
High Anxiety in the Mile High City I’ve been to a lot of conventions, and there’s always something gratifyingly weird that happens. Dan Quayle acting like a Dancing Hamster. Teresa Heinz Kerry reprising Blanche DuBois. Dick Morris getting nabbed triangulating between a hooker and toes. But this Democratic convention has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru. “What is that feeling in the air?” I asked him. “Submerged hate,” he promptly replied. There were a lot of bitter Clinton associates, fund-raisers and supporters wandering the halls, spewing vindictiveness, complaining of slights, scheming about Hillary’s roll call and plotting trouble, with some in the Clinton coterie dissing Obama by planning early departures, before the nominee even speaks. At a press conference with New York reporters on Monday, Hillary looked as if she were straining at the bit to announce her 2012 exploratory committee. “Remember, 18 million people voted for me, 18 million people, give or take, voted for Barack,” she said, while making a faux pro-Obama point. She keeps acting as if her delegates are out of her control, when she’s been privately egging on people to keep her dream alive as long as possible, no matter what the cost to Obama.
Obama's speech seen by 38 million-plus viewers More people watched Obama speak from a packed stadium in Denver on Thursday than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final "American Idol" or the Academy Awards this year, Nielsen Media Research said Friday. (Four playoff football games, including the Super Bowl between the Giants and Patriots, were seen by more than 40 million people.) His TV audience nearly doubled the amount of people who watched John Kerry accept the Democratic nomination to run against President Bush four years ago. Kerry's speech was seen by a little more than 20 million people; Bush's acceptance speech to GOP delegates had 27.6 million viewers. Through four days, the Democratic convention was seen in an average of 22.5 million households. No other convention — Republican or Democratic — had been seen in as many homes since Nielsen began keeping these records for the Kennedy-Nixon campaign in 1960. There weren't enough television sets in American homes to have possibly beaten this record in years before that.
74% of Democrats Say Convention Has Unified Them Three out of four Democrats (74%) say the party's ongoing national convention has unified them as they roll out now in full force to put their nominee, Barack Obama, in the White House. Just 14% think the convention has not unified them. Fifty-two percent (52%) of voters overall agree that the convention has unified Democrats, while only 30% disagree, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fifty-nine percent (59%) also believe that Hillary Clinton's speech Tuesday night endorsing Obama helps the candidate's chances of being elected president. More importantly, after weeks of media reports about division in the party between the Clinton and Obama forces, 84% of Democrats say Clinton's speech helps Obama. Less than half (45%) of all voters, however, believe Clinton really wants Obama to become president, and 36% think she does not. Again, Democrats have a lot more confidence in the former first lady: 68% say she wants Obama to win, while only 17% say she doesn't. But the speech clearly impressed voters with the sincerity of her support for the first African-American nominee of a major political party since the percentage of those who believe she wants him to win has increased noticeably. In a survey taken the night before Clinton's speech, 56% of Democrats and just 37% of voters overall believed Clinton wanted Obama to win. Perhaps most importantly, 64% of Democratic women now believe Clinton wants Obama to be elected president, versus 19% who do not think that is the case. Prior to the speech, only 47% of Democratic women thought Clinton wanted Obama to win.
Johnson’s Dream, Obama’s Speech AS I watch Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention tonight, I will be remembering another speech: the one that made Martin Luther King cry. And I will be thinking: Mr. Obama’s speech — and in a way his whole candidacy — might not have been possible had that other speech not been given. That speech was President Lyndon Johnson’s address to Congress in 1965 announcing that he was about to introduce a voting rights act, and in some respects Mr. Obama’s candidacy is the climax — at least thus far — of a movement based not only on the sacrifices and heroism of the Rev. Dr. King and generations of black fighters for civil rights but also on the political genius of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who as it happens was born 100 years ago yesterday. These men and women felt Johnson truly wanted to help poor people and particularly people of color, and that he was held back only by his ambition: his desire to be president, and because he was a senator from a Southern state. But when, in 1957, ambition and compassion were finally pointing in the same direction — when he realized that he would never become president unless he removed the “magnolia scent” of the South — he set out to pass a civil rights bill, he did it with a passion that showed how deeply he believed in what he was doing. It has taken me scores of pages in my books to try to describe that heroism, and all of them inadequate. But it also took Lyndon Johnson, whom the black leader James Farmer, sitting in the Oval Office, heard “cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary” to get the 1965 bill passed and who, with his legislative genius and savage will, broke, piece by piece, in 1957 and 1964 and 1965, the long unbreakable power of the Southern bloc. “Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans,” I have written, “but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”
Big Picture Politics
John McCain: No surrender The gnarled maverick outpolls his party and might even beat Barack Obama. But what sort of president would he be? Biography matters in a presidential election, and this year the candidates offer two quite different kinds of story. Mr Obama’s appeal depends on what he symbolises: the uplifting notion that the son of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother can, through talent and hard work, rise to the highest post in the land. Mr McCain’s appeal rests on what he has done. Mr McCain says he enjoys being the underdog, which is just as well. If this year’s presidential election is a dogfight, any Republican candidate starts with his ammunition all but spent and both wings on fire. The economy is in the doldrums. House prices are sliding. Petrol costs two and a half times as much as it did when George Bush came to power. Americans are sick of the war in Iraq, sick of their president and hungry for change. As the nominee of the incumbent party, Mr McCain should have no chance at all. Yet most polls showed him in a statistical dead-heat with Mr Obama going into their two conventions. That partly reflects voters’ reservations about Mr Obama. Some worry about his inexperience or his unsavoury friends. Some are unsure what all that rhetoric about hope and change really means. Some, alas, are unwilling to vote for a black man. But part of the credit for the way Mr McCain outperforms his party must go to Mr McCain himself. Bring back the real McCain
The Final Days No matter how careful the orchestration, though, a rivalry seared in the brutal lowlands of South Carolina circles around to this moment. Eight years after their epic Republican primary battle of 2000, the first-place finisher desperately needs the second-place finisher to win in order to validate his own legacy. And the runner-up now finds himself saddled with the baggage of a man he never much liked to begin with, forced to live with a record he personally considers deeply lacking and portrayed as if he were a clone of his longtime adversary. As John Weaver, McCain’s former chief strategist told me, “I’m sure McCain is thinking, Is Bush going to beat me twice?” Anxious denizens of Bushworld worry that McCain will beat himself and in the process take down their best chance for deliverance when it comes to the verdict of history. And the president himself, according to friends and prominent Republicans, privately rails about what he considers McCain’s undisciplined approach to the campaign and grouses about McCain’s efforts to distance himself from the administration. A new McCain ad this month declared, “We’re worse off than we were four years ago.” That’s the sort of stinging indictment a candidate usually issues when the other party is in the White House. The president understands the treacherous political environment facing Republicans and agrees that McCain cannot run as another George Bush, advisers say, but he also seems to think that the senator risks going too far because he needs the party base that still supports Bush and remains unenthusiastic about McCain.
Bush, Cheney, Schwarzenegger won't attend GOP President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are all skipping the Republican National Convention. Bush and Cheney are focusing on Hurricane Gustav, which is rapidly approaching the Gulf Coast. Schwarzenegger is staying home to deal with a standoff with California legislators over the state budget. All three had been scheduled to speak Monday night at the convention. Presidential candidate John McCain was flying to Mississippi to be briefed on the hurricane, but was expected to return to the convention city later.
Key Policy Issues
Obama Should Focus On Education Reform When I sat down with Mr. Ford at The Wall Street Journal's offices recently, I looked forward to hearing what he would say about the direction of his party and its liberal presidential nominee. I wanted to know what he thought of the party's leftward tilt on taxes, trade, energy and education. Mr. Ford's answer: that his party was able to win control of Congress two years ago by running moderate Democratic candidates in Republican districts. That, he says, is what it needs to do to stay in power. "If you look at the congressmen who won in 2006, the 'red to blue' as they call them as a group, not those who may have succeeded Democrats and are holding safe Democratic seats," Mr. Ford said, "and you consider the special election races this year, in the last couple of months in Mississippi, Louisiana and Illinois, what you will see clearly in the ascendancy in the party is a moderate, mainstream, Democratic approach to taxes, to fiscal policy, to spending as a whole, to national security, foreign policy. "I would contend that the Democratic majority is due to a moderate, mainstream, conservative philosophy -- conservative, a lot of people interpret that the wrong way, but just a moderate mainstream philosophy in the party being on the ascendancy, as opposed to [a philosophy that is] sometimes further to the left, some may call liberal." Mr. Ford stresses that education is among "the types of things Democrats are going to have to focus on . . . Not because we want to win elections, but because the country needs it. "Without a serious, broad-based competitiveness plan for the country that organizes around energy and education, the country will continue to falter. The next 10 to 15 years, we'll be fine. But if you look past that 15 year horizon, we cannot expect to be the No. 1 center for innovation, for technology, for job creation, the No. 1 economic center, indefinitely." What Mr. Ford sees in Mr. Obama is the potential to break the logjam on education and other issues that has prevented fundamental reforms from passing in Washington. "I think the country could invest in him and may be willing to align itself with his vision, if he has a broad enough vision to change the country 10, 20, 30 years down the road.
Paul Krugman: Feeling No Pain My first reaction to Bill Clinton’s convention speech was sheer professional jealousy: nobody, but nobody, has his ability to translate economic wonkery into plain, forceful English. In effect, Mr. Clinton provided an executive summary of the new Census report on income, poverty and health insurance — but he did it so eloquently, so seamlessly, that there was no sense that he was giving his audience a lecture. My second reaction was that in Mr. Clinton’s speech — as in the speeches by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden (this column was filed before Barack Obama spoke on Thursday night) — one heard the fundamental difference between the two parties. Democrats say and, as far as I can tell, really believe that working Americans are getting a raw deal; Republicans, despite occasional attempts to sound sympathetic, basically believe that people have nothing to complain about. As it happens, the numbers support the Democrats. That Census report gives a snapshot of the economic status of American families in 2007 — that is, before the financial crisis started dragging the economy down and the unemployment rate up. It’s a given that 2008 will look much worse, so last year was as good as it will get in the Bush years. Yet working-age Americans had significantly lower median income in 2007 than they did in 2000. (The elderly, whose income is supported by Social Security — the program the Bush administration tried to kill — saw modest gains.) Meanwhile, poverty was up, and health insurance — especially the employment-based insurance on which most middle-class Americans depend — was down. But Republicans, very much including John McCain and his advisers, don’t believe there’s a problem.
Sense and Reality on Energy High oil prices have helped to bring down the American economy and to devastate Detroit. Politicians are talking about energy policy, although they seem to be talking past each other. So it is now, and so it was in 1974, after the price shock that arrived after the Arab oil exporters started an embargo in retaliation for America’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and learned that they could sell oil for a lot more than they had thought. From the perspective of 2008, what is most remarkable is that in 1975, the country had a president who actually wanted to confront the issue. The answers he proposed seem highly relevant now, even if the steps needed are much larger than would have been necessary if action had been taken back then. The president, Gerald R. Ford, proposed to deal with the damage from rising oil prices by ... raising oil prices. That sounded radical then, and it sounds radical now. It also makes economic sense.Can you imagine hearing the following statements from either Senator John McCain or Senator Barack Obama? “To provide the critical stability for our domestic energy production in the face of world price uncertainty, I will request legislation to authorize and require tariffs, import quotas or price floors to protect our energy prices at levels which will achieve energy independence.” “Increasing energy supplies is not enough. We must take additional steps to cut long-term consumption.” “Obviously, voluntary conservation continues to be essential, but tougher programs are needed, and needed now. ”Those are excerpts from President Ford’s State of the Union address in 1975. He wanted more oil drilling, and more use of nuclear power and coal, but he also wanted to hold down consumption. The man who had been a Michigan representative for a quarter of a century wanted to force Detroit to raise the fuel efficiency of cars. He wanted Congress to impose taxes to assure that the price of gasoline did not fall, and to pass a windfall profits tax to assure that the oil companies did not become too rich. Instead of that, the campaign so far this year has featured partisan wrangling: Drill more. Conserve more. Tax the oil companies. Subsidize their exploration.
The State of New Orleans: An Update THE third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina lands squarely between the Democratic and Republican conventions. Some might lament that this reflects the public abyss into which New Orleans has fallen. But it also serves as a reminder to urge the next president to bring fresh attention to the city’s recovery. Yes, New Orleans is regaining economic health. The city has recovered most of its population and jobs, giving it a foundation to support rebuilding. It has also reopened 87 public schools, including many new charter schools, as the state strives to overhaul the city’s public education system. Yet serious challenges remain. A deficient system of levees leaves most of New Orleans facing the same risk of flooding from a major storm as it did before Hurricane Katrina. There are still not enough basic public services — like hospitals and child-care centers. Public transit remains a huge problem as the number of riders has gone up by 40 percent in the past year, while only seven more buses have been put into service. Although the population is increasing and the unemployment rate is very low (partly because of a shortage of workers for jobs related to construction and tourism), growth has stalled somewhat, as the city and region have added relatively few new households or jobs in the past year. The ability to attract more workers is hindered by the high cost of rental housing, now almost 50 percent higher than it was before the storm. To increase the supply of affordable homes and reinvigorate blighted neighborhoods, the city must contend with more than 65,000 homes that are vacant or abandoned. There is no question that there has been progress in New Orleans. Nonprofit groups, business leaders and some politicians are working hard to repair the city’s buildings and improve the criminal-justice and health-care systems. But as Tropical Storm Gustav threatened the city this week, residents had only to look at the inadequate levees and rotting houses to see how much remains to be done, how important Washington’s attention is, and how easily three years of halting progress could be washed away. Rebuilding New Orleans Status Chart
