As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."
Monday, September 08, 2008
Arnold Off Message
It's kind of odd how big a role Der Spiegel is playing in the Presidential campaign. First Nouri al-Maliki essentially endorsed Barack Obama's plan for Iraq in those pages, and now Arnold Schwarzenegger explains how he was prepared to self-censor at the Republican National Convention before the budget crisis kept him at home.
SCHWARZENEGGER: The speech I would have given is the one that Fred Thompson gave. I gave him my speech because I did not go to the convention. It was a great speech because it talked in minute detail about McCain’s torture and his being a POW, and that’s the speech that the party wanted me to give. Why? Because this way I don’t go and talk about centrist politics and maybe rub some people the wrong way. That’s another stage.
We all know that there's tight message control around these conventions, and virtually all of the speeches are written by the respective campaigns. Still, it's interesting that Mr. Post-Partisan Maverick McCain, who always puts country above party and who very rarely talks about his POW experience, was willing to go to these lengths to muzzle Arnold.
(Also, who else thinks it would've been a bad idea to have the guy you handpick to present the story of torture and prison camps do it in what amounts to a German accent?)
As we move away from the RNC Convention, I hope that the brutal treatment by law enforcement of peaceful protesters doesn't get completely ignored. The major media hasn't raised much of a peep about it, but there are so many outrages - really police state outrages - that occurred last week that at least somebody should mention it. They used tear gas, concussion grenades, physical barriers, and nightsticks; snatched people off the streets, arrested hundreds and raided homes.
This is really the kind of thing you'd see in the Soviet Union or its satellite states. And our silence equals complicity. I don't know what to do about this. The media views protesters with scorn and ridicule, making it acceptable to deprive them of their civil liberties and brutalize them. They have few advocates anywhere in society. And yet each outrageous assault makes the next one more likely, and expands the police state. We haven't reached a breaking point because there is a systemic barrier to allow anyone to reach it.
I had a chance to finally take a look at the cottage cheese and lime Jello speech from Thursday, and while the AP took a shine to it, I'm not sure what they were watching. This speech tried to sell no policies, no vision for the future, no ideas to restore America at home and abroad, but tried to shame people into not offending a war hero by denying them their vote and their country. The election is not about issues to them, but about a person, a singular figure.
Last week, in an apparent effort to paint Sen. Hillary Clinton as self-absorbed, the AP's Ron Fournier counted the number of times she used "some variation of the pronoun 'I'" in her convention speech. Fournier came up with 17....
... When can we expect Fournier to tally up the number of times John "cause greater than self" McCain used the pronoun "I" in his convention speech? It's well over 100* -- and that doesn't even count variations.
McCain offers nothing but himself, the idea that he can bust heads and crack skulls and somehow come up with plans by accident. Haven't we already had eight years of this?
The way Republicans operate is to make the election about character, and lie about the issues. They obviously want to re-fight the culture wars with a strategy to fire up their depressed base through making them feel resentment against those liberal Eastern elites that are supposedly ruining their life.
One of the key insights in “Nixonland,” the new book by the historian Rick Perlstein, is that Nixon’s political strategy throughout his career was inspired by his college experience, in which he got himself elected student body president by exploiting his classmates’ resentment against the Franklins, the school’s elite social club. There’s a direct line from that student election to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” and from there to the peculiar cult of personality that not long ago surrounded George W. Bush — a cult that celebrated his anti-intellectualism and made much of the supposed fact that the “misunderestimated” C-average student had proved himself smarter than all the fancy-pants experts.
And when Mr. Bush turned out not to be that smart after all, and his presidency crashed and burned, the angry right — the raging rajas of resentment? — became, if anything, even angrier. Humiliation will do that.
Can Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin really ride Nixonian resentment into an upset election victory in what should be an overwhelmingly Democratic year? The answer is a definite maybe.
But let's not underestimate the power of big lies, too. McCain lied about Obama's health care plan, comically so, claiming that Obama would put "a bureaucrat between you and your doctor," when in fact that's what an insurance agent IS. He lied about taxes (even Major Garrett recognized that), neglecting the fact that his own health care plan would tax medical benefits from employers as income, resulting in a huge tax increase on the middle class. He lied about his own record on ethics, claiming he investigated Democrats and Republicans, when he clearly let his fellow Republicans off the hook in the Abramoff investigation. And there was the overarching lie of the whole thing, that McCain is leading those change agents of the Republican Party against themselves, as if they haven't been in power for the past eight years.
In the final analysis, you can easily see the priorities of the GOP by what they discussed at their convention. It was all backlash, personal attacks, POW stories and "drill now" rhetoric, and nothing, of course, about the guy who ran them into this ditch and whose policies John McCain is mirroring. Obama and Biden are absolutely right with their line of attack on the convention, that the economy was the missing elephant in the elephant's room. Especially at a time with 6.1% unemployment, eight straight months of jobs loss and 1 in 10 homes in foreclosure, this is a terrible time to be this out of touch. Joe Biden is on fire in this clip in the city where I grew up, Langhorne.
"What do you talk about when you cannot explain the last eight years of failure?" You lie, and you snark, and you feed the backlash. It didn't work in 2006. Let's see what happens this year.
To a man, everyone on the liberal blogger side of the aisle was stunned that the McCain campaign would allow the TV shot to go out to the world on his big night to be him in front of a lime green background. Cottage cheese and lime Jello, in the vernacular of the blogosphere. Surely they WATCHED the shot through a monitor and knew that it would make him look sickly.
But that's not the only head-scratcher with the RNC staging, which the set designers had months to organize. The giant screen was useless outside of the room, always putting the speaker at the podium behind monochrome, or worse, in the East River (in Rudy Giuliani's speech). Putting the seats for dignitaries along the side of the stage was OK, but the white line across the boxes designating them looked to the TV angle like the seats were empty, in a wide shot. And then there's this, which is absolutely amazing.
A lot of people were asking tonight: what the hell was that mansion up behind John McCain tonight during the first part of the speech? As I noted below, the TV close-ups only showed McCain's head against the grass in the picture, which made it look like he was reprising his famed green screen performance. And when they panned out, it looked like McCain was showing off one of his mansions.
Well, several readers have written in to tell me that the building is actually the main building on the campus of the Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, California. And sure enough, this page on the school's website makes it pretty clear that they're correct.
Could this be? Could the producers have wanted a shot of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and they farmed it off to the intern who picked Walter Reed MIDDLE SCHOOL? I mean, is that possible? None of the consultants and muckety-mucks charged with picking the backgrounds know what Walter Reed looks like? As Josh Marshall says, "is this the RNC or a scene out Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman?"
You know, it wasn't so long ago that these guys were the pros at this. Say what you will about Mission Accomplished Day, putting Bush in that flight suit was brilliant theater. Where did those people go?
I Respect John McCain's Incredible Service To Our Nation
OK, so I missed McCain's speech (more on that later), but I'm catching snippets here and there and reading the reports, and it looks to me that he ate it.
Of course, the guy's not known for oratory, so I wonder why they made it 53 minutes long. I guess that his main message was that the whole country must come together in the spirit of bipartisanship and line up behind every single conservative policy that the Bush Administration has rammed down our throats for the past eight years. But that doesn't make it a bad speech. I think the wooden delivery, the fact that they used that stupid screen so that the subject at the podium was behind a solid color almost all of the time (yes, we had more lime green Jello to watch tonight), and the lack of passion had something to do with it.
Jeffrey Toobin called it "the worst speech by a nominee that I’ve heard since Jimmy Carter in 1980." Michael Gerson, Bush's speechwriter ferchrissakes, said it was "a missed opportunity. Many Americans needed to hear from this speech something they have never heard from Republicans before. And in reality, a lot of the policy they’ve heard from Republicans before." The reviews aren't glowing.
And Tom Ridge calling him John Bush doesn't help.
For three days, the Republicans hid the top of their ticket and talked in abstractions about some brave warrior king, Sgt. Rock or something, and then the real guy walked out tonight and offered the exact same policies as the past eight years. I think Matt Stoller is absolutely dead on.
If I'm a Republican, I'm really annoyed that Palin isn't running for President. McCain's speech was not nearly as good or as interesting as Palin's, and he's an awkward speaker. The loudest applause came from his references to her.
...two things I noticed from the earlier part of the program. Tom Ridge told a story about how he visited McCain at a low point in the primary campaign, and asked him how he was doing, and McCain said "I've been through worse." Amazing that he plays the POW card in private, too. Then, in Cindy McCain's campaign video, they tell the story of how the two met, at a party in Hawaii. They seem to have forgot the part about John being married at the time.
Before I take a look at tonight's RNC hatefest, I just want to look back at the astounding arrogance of Rudy Giuliani, who relished in his churlish insults so much that he went over time and forced the cancellation of Sarah Palin's video tribute. Those things go a long way to humanize candidates - think the gauzy Olympic profiles. Rudy was too busy yukking it up, so he ruined it for the party.
I'm firmly committed to a "hissy fit" strategy about Republicans attacking the very people who have made this country great. But I would be remiss if I didn't continue to provide perspective on how Sarah Palin just stood up there and willingly lied in front of her countrymen last night.
I've already discussed the earmarks and the bridge to nowhere - Palin is as besotted with porkbarrel projects as anyone in Washington. That's how Alaska operates. But let's also note this fiction - that Barack Obama has no record.
In reporting on Gov. Sarah Palin's September 4 speech at the Republican National Convention, numerous print media, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time magazine, the Dallas Morning News, Reuters, and an article and a column by Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle, uncritically reported Palin's claim that Sen. Barack Obama "is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform -- not even in the state senate," without noting that Obama has played key roles in the passage of reform legislation at both the federal and state levels. For example, Sen. John McCain, a co-sponsor of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, thanked Obama for his work on the bill.
Obama was a lead co-sponsor of that bill (S.2590), which sought to "require full disclosure of all entities and organizations receiving Federal funds" -- an amount that approximately totals $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks and loans. While signing the bill into law on September 26, 2006, Bush recognized Obama as a sponsor of the legislation, saying, "I want to thank the bill sponsors, Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, Tom Carper from Delaware, and Barack Obama from Illinois." Moreover, in a press release upon Senate passage of the bill, the bill's primary sponsor, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), referred to the legislation as the "Coburn-Obama Bill." In media reports, the bill has also been referred to as the "Coburn-Obama" legislation or bill.
There are plenty more, too. But it takes some kind of chutzpah for a lady to lie about her own record while claiming her opponent's is non-existent. Of course, lying is all in the Republican family.
GIBSON: Senator, since I've been following politics, every single presidential nominee has said that the first quality they look for in a vice presidential pick is the capability and the readiness to take over as president.
Can you look the country straight in the eye and say Sarah Palin has the qualities and has enough experience to be commander in chief?
MCCAIN: Oh, absolutely. Having been the governor of our largest state, the commander of their National Guard, she was once in charge of their natural resources assets, actually, until she found out there was corruption and she quit and said it had to be fixed.
The "largest state" thing - in landmass, 47th in population - is so absurd it ought not be dignified. But this "she is commander of the Alaska National Guard" is just as juvenile.
Maj. Gen. Craig Campbell, the service commander of the Alaska National Guard, told McClatchy that Palin has "no command authority" over the Guard when it comes to national security. The Guard responds to in-state natural disasters and civic emergencies, but Palin hasn't approved any of these activities during her tenure, allowing Campbell to have authority over Guard operations.
Just to be clear, Palin's lack of national security experience, to my mind, is not necessarily a disqualifier for national office. Plenty of capable national candidates have run without direct experience in foreign policy. Few have been as unprepared as Palin, but that need not be a deal breaker.
The problem here is that McCain and his campaign keep lying about this. Instead of crafting a compelling defense for Palin's lack of qualifications, the Republican campaign just creates its own reality.
Exactly.
...I agree with James Fallows, this speech is likely to have played much better in the hall.
UPDATE: The governor's plane never went on eBay. She's a pathological liar.
Next thing we'll be hearing that Sarah Palin fought off a polar bear while delivering her remarks last night:
Sarah Palin delivered a powerful speech last night, but she did not "wing it."
That is what Erick Erickson, citing sources close to McCain, has written on his blog, RedState.
Erickson writes that "the teleprompter continued scrolling during applause breaks. As a result, half way through the speech, the speech had scrolled significantly from where Governor Palin was in the speech."
This claim has been picked up on Drudge and could quickly enter into the insta-mythmaking about a speech that need not be embroidered.
Perhaps there were moments where it scrolled slightly past her exact point in the speech. But I was sitting in the press section next to the stage, within easy eyeshot of the teleprompter. I frequently looked up at the machine, and there was no serious malfunction. A top convention-planner confirms this morning that there were no major problems.
It's mythology now, of course, to be repeated endlessly. Despite there being photographic evidence, on every shot over her shoulder, that the TelePrompTer matched her words.
If this is indicative of the reaction to last night's set of speeches, then I'm not too concerned. The GOP is running a red meat base strategy because they think the low-information voters will just jump on board with the tougher candidate. Na ga happen.
In two different focus groups of Clinton-supporting Nevada women -- married and unmarried -- conducted immediately after Gov. Sarah Palin's Wednesday night speech to the Republican National Convention, a few common reactions quickly took shape.
First, women in both groups were impressed with Palin's speaking ability and poise. But they were hardly convinced that she was qualified to be vice president, or that she truly represented the "change" they were looking for, especially in light of what was deemed an overly harsh "sarcasm" pervading her address [...]
In the "married" group, when one attendee kicked off the discussion by saying "she's a good speaker, and a crowd pleaser," the rest of the room articulated their agreement. "I didn't expect to be as impressed as I was," said another respondent. But then another woman added: "Once she started mudslinging, I thought, it's the same old crap as other politicians. McCain used her to get the women's vote. And she's using McCain."
"Thank you," another woman responded. "That really upset me; there was no need for that. It was snippy."
The unmarried group also voiced similar objections to the harsh, partisan edge of Palin's remarks. "I'm not impressed with her at all as a person," one said, citing her "finger pointing" and general sarcasm after the group had generally agreed that she was a talented public speaker.
Still not all focus group members thought Palin came off too harsh. "She didn't seem very aggressive to me at all," said one unmarried participant.
But in both groups, narrow majorities said they held a more negative view of Palin after her speech. "She comes off pretty cutthroat," said one.
On other issues, women in both groups said they wanted to hear more of Palin's own policy views, outside the realm of energy. Education, heath care, the economy and Iraq were all cited as areas in which women were hungry for more information -- especially in light of McCain's age. "I think America is concerned, because of McCain's age, that we're gonna have a female president who's maybe inexperienced. The nation needs to know what her issues are," said one married respondent, which prompted another to add: "I don't think she's got what it takes." An unmarried participant said she had yet to hear enough "in regards to her personal views, which could be implicated on us if McCain was to die."
The speech didn't reflect her views because it wasn't her speech; it was written for somebody else. And she delivered it well, but the effect showed her to be just another Republican politician playing the resentment card. Works well in the hall, not necessarily at home.
Not only that, when there was substance, it was a set of lies:
PALIN: "I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history. And when that deal was struck, we began a nearly forty billion dollar natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence. That pipeline, when the last section is laid and its valves are opened, will lead America one step farther away from dependence on dangerous foreign powers that do not have our interests at heart.
THE FACTS: Palin implies that construction has begun on a major natural gas pipeline from the top of Alaska into Canada. That is not correct.
In fact, no building has begun and actual construction is years away, if it ever happens. This summer the Alaska Legislature, at Palin's request, passed a bill under which the state will issue a "license" to a Canadian energy company, TransCanada Corp., and pay it up to $500 million as an incentive to someday build this enormous project, which Alaska politicians have long sought with little success. The license is not a construction contract, and federal energy regulators have not yet approved the project [...]
PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."
THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million.
In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation, although she has cut, by more than half, the amount the state sought from Washington this year. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to Gravina Island, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."
It's amazing that she kept in the bridge to nowhere line, when she's documented as supporting it. And this memo of an earmark with Palin's own handwriting on it, pronouncing "We did well!!!" just shows how bankrupt this "reformer" meme is. Here's another report fact-checking the speech. Obviously the GOP hopes that they can keep lying their way through it.
“Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown,” Ms. Palin told the delegates in a speech that sought to eviscerate Mr. Obama, as delegates waved signs that said “I love hockey moms.” “And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”
Let's see if the media will react to a Democratic hissy fit. Because there's ample opportunity. Roland Martin lays this out. Community organizers, which were part of George H.W. Bush's thousand points of light, give comfort to the suffering, help save jobs, create opportunity. In the largely white confines of the Republican convention, the phrase is a slur, like "ghetto hustler," but lots and lots of people benefit from community groups, including church groups, and the help they provide ordinary people. The Obama campaign is going to try and ramp this up, they've already done so in an email to supporters:
I wasn't planning on sending you something tonight. But if you saw what I saw from the Republican convention, you know that it demands a response.
I saw John McCain's attack squad of negative, cynical politicians. They lied about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they attacked you for being a part of this campaign.
But worst of all -- and this deserves to be noted -- they insulted the very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political process.
You know that despite what John McCain and his attack squad say, everyday people have the power to build something extraordinary when we come together. Make a donation of $5 or more right now to remind them.
Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.
Let's clarify something for them right now.
Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.
And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.
Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America's promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. And it's happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America.
Meanwhile, we still haven't gotten a single idea during the entire Republican convention about the economy and how to lift a middle class so harmed by the Bush-McCain policies.
It's now clear that John McCain's campaign has decided that desperate lies and personal attacks -- on Barack Obama and on you -- are the only way they can earn a third term for the Bush policies that McCain has supported more than 90 percent of the time.
But you can send a crystal clear message.
Enough is enough. Make your voice heard loud and clear by making a $5 donation right now:
https://donate.barackobama.com/fightback
Thank you for joining more than 2 million ordinary Americans who refuse to be silenced.
Palin read a TelePrompTer well last night, but I'm not sure it fundamentally changed this campaign. And if the Obama campaign can pull off the righteous indignation, it might have hurt.
I thought Palin would do a great job tonight and she did. She had the crowd from the first moment. And there's absolutely a not-so-good movie, American Idol quality to the candidacy that is very dangerous for the Obama ticket. It really didn't matter what she said. There were lies in it, of course. But she was brassy and sassy and well-scripted, and she delivered. There was a meanness to the speech that didn't make a ton of sense, but a smile can do a long way to mask that. The Orthogonian resentment is embedded into it, and we'll see if a new face can make that work for going on 40 years.
This is probably the best the Obama campaign can do as a response:
"The speech that Governor Palin gave was well delivered, but it was written by George Bush's speechwriter and sounds exactly like the same divisive, partisan attacks we've heard from George Bush for the last eight years. If Governor Palin and John McCain want to define 'change' as voting with George Bush 90% of the time, that's their choice, but we don't think the American people are ready to take a 10% chance on change," said Bill Burton, Obama Campaign Spokesman.
The other clowns on the dais today were bitter old men. Palin didn't fit and she was sure to be endearing. The problem for her is that the record isn't washed away by this, and there's still a lot to uncover, but this will undoubtedly give the ticket a bump in the polls. The key is to ignore her completely and keep the focus on McCain, his loss to the religious right, his giveaway to George Bush. It's how to win this election.
• Turning locally, while Arnold missed the festivities in St. Paul to look very serious about the budget, Pete Wilson made it out there in his stead - and he slammed Schwarzenegger's call for a tax increase, clearly temporarily forgetting the increase of his own. And when he was reminded, he said, "The situation was very different."
• Among the bills about to land on the Governor's desk is an equal pay bill. This has become a big issue in the Presidential race, and I'm glad to see the legislature on the right side of it.
• This is a good Chris Hayes piece from The Nation about union members at the RNC, but the California-specific part about the SEIU-UHW fight I found just right:
The more I talked to the UHW members and heard their grievances, the more I thought about the fact that organized labor has two goals that can often come into tension: power and dignity. We tend to focus on the power aspect in politics: the power to collectively bargain, to make sure labor captures a fair share of profits, to demand higher wages--all of which have been in sharp decline. That's the objective nature of unionization. The subjective nature of unionization, though, is dignity. It is the process by which working people come to believe that their views and their ideas and their demands are important. That they should be listened to. These two values can be in tension, as I suspect might be the case in California. Sometimes maximizing power might (I stress might, because the UHW-SEIU situation is very, very complicated) require people to fall in line, but the prerogative of dignity is to speak out and stand up.
• I'm interested in hearing more about Prop. 5. Anything that rolls back our stupid and shortsighted drug war is positive, in addition to addressing the prison crisis. Martin Sheen, of all people, has joined up with the No on 5 crowd, being run by the people who brought you the pro-Denham team during the aborted recall.
• Just noting the prison guard payoff to Don Perata because nobody else has.
There are rumors out there that the President's remarks last night weren't even live. Then again, neither was the crowd. And while Bush was missing in action in St. Paul, so was any mention of him from the other speakers on the dais.
We just checked all the full texts of the speeches from last night's festivities that are on the GOP convention's official Web page. The word "Bush" appears exactly zero times. The word "president" doesn't appear anywhere in connection with Bush.
Quite a trick, making the most powerful man in the world disappear. Of course, it's an imperative when he's out there saying batshit crazy nonsense like this:
President Bush said Tuesday that while it’s too early to assess Hurricane Gustav’s damage to U.S. oil infrastructure off the Gulf Coast, the storm should prompt Congress to OK more domestic oil production.
“One thing is for certain, when Congress comes back, they’ve got to understand that we need more domestic energy, not less,” Bush said in the Roosevelt Room. “One place to find it is offshore America - lands that have been taken off the books, so to speak, by congressional law - and now they need to give us a chance to find more oil and gas here at home.”
Yes, nothing says "we need to set up more offshore oil rigs" more than dangerous storms off the American coastline that threaten oil rigs. Good thinkin', Mr. President!
Of course, McCain has swallowed this anti-environment drill now rhetoric whole, and the Palin pick just proves that. As Friedman says here (hey, sometimes he makes sense), "Palin’s much ballyhooed confrontations with the oil industry have all been about who should get more of the windfall profits, not how to end our addiction." If the next President needs to lead on fighting climate change then there's only one choice. And Bush and McCain are on the wrong side of history.
...also AWOL from the Republican confab - any talk of the economy. I guess there's no honor in it.
It might be worth telling every media figure who listens to Sarah Palin tonight that she'll be reading a speech written for somebody else. It's typical for a politician to read somebody else's words, but not somebody else's speech:
There was a flutter of attention when McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told a group of Post reporters and editors yesterday that his team was having to rework the vice presidential acceptance speech because the original draft, prepared before Gov. Sarah Palin was chosen, was too "masculine." While we all wondered to ourselves what might make a speech masculine or feminine, no one batted an eye at the underlying revelation: that the campaign was writing the nominee's speech before knowing who the nominee would be [...]
So when you watch Sarah Palin tonight, expect to learn something about how well she handles a Teleprompter. Expect to learn something about the McCain campaign's assessment of its political standing with women, or working families, or social conservatives. Whether you're learning what Sarah Palin really thinks or feels is anybody's guess.
Fercryinoutloud, that's from FRED HIATT. If he's figured this one out, I hope the context will stretch to the rest of the media. Tonight is a kabuki theater show and a layup for Mrs. Palin. It will mean nothing.
Maybe Team McCain had to start writing the speech because they didn't even vet Palin until the day before they picked her, which would explain the utter chaos that has followed the pick.
You wouldn't think that anyone would look at the dysfunction that is the California legislature and use it as a model, but that's precisely what the national Republicans have done in their party platform, as the eagle-eyed Matt Yglesias discovers:
Page 16 of the Republican Platform endorses a Balanced Budget Amendment “to require a balanced budget except in times of war” and then page 17 says that “because the problem is too much spending, not too few taxes, we support a supermajority requirement in both the House and Senate to guard against tax hikes.”
The next time you see some legislative Republican weeping crocodile tears about the impact of the late budget, understand that they consider it a success, all the way up to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and John McCain. They desire a balanced budget amendment and supermajorities to pass tax increases, so that no matter who holds the seat of power, spending cuts must be used as the only possible answer to any fiscal crisis or economic downturn, with no consequent way to reverse them after the downturn subsides. This is what they want - they think a paralyzed government is the best possible solution. In fact, if they could do away with the government itself - except for the cushy salaries for the lawmakers and their staffs, of course - then it would be absolutely perfect.
In practice, there aren't enough votes to make the desired spending cuts, either, so the only recourse is borrowing. So what the Republican wet dream really looks like is a perpetual mortgaging of the future, spending billions upon billions in taxpayer money for no material benefit.
When we do get the opportunity to overturn this at the ballot box, what has to be made clear is that Republicans want no part of governing. They are hostage-takers, and far from this being a localized problem in California, it's a national strategy to strangle government, and to lock in impossible burdens that constrain Democrats and Republicans alike. There's a name for professional hostage-takers, but I don't think I need to tell you what it is.
The President had a 8-minute cameo tonight, but it'll play nicely as 16 30-second ads. He told us all about how John McCain will stand up to the angry left, because, you know, it's 1971 and the hippies are holding a sit-in on the South Lawn and over at the Lincoln Memorial. And he said we need a President who will "remember the lessons of 9/11," probably because they bumped Rudy Giuliani tonight.
After Bush's understated appearance (of course, more overstated than the McCain campaign wanted), Fred Thompson ambled onstage and told a very unknown story: apparently, John McCain was a POW in Vietnam and he was held hostage for 5 1/2 years. I know, I didn't have a clue either. Glad for Thompson to tell me the whole story in excruciating detail, because McCain is so reluctant. I don't even understand where Thompson managed to get that series of pictures from McCain's POW days that were displayed on the 40-foot screen behind him. Maybe he found them in a Google image search. Thompson said that "being a POW isn't a qualification for President, but it reveals character," so I guess everyone can go ahead and agree with Wes Clark now.
(Also, we're back to McCain telling his captors the Green Bay Packers defensive line instead of the Pittsburgh Steelers; they're in Minnesota so I'm surprised he didn't claim it was the Vikings.)
When Thompson wasn't clearing his throat - really, that was half the speech - he was giving that down-home folksy wisdom we all loved during his 10 minutes running for President. He pushed the abortion and tax issues hard, as expected. And in a telling moment, he tried to rehabilitate Sarah Palin, which is great. They have to rally around her now and it is clear that they will. She's not going anywhere; no Eagleton scenario here. And the culture war issues rejected by the majority of the country, are back.
Joe Lieberman then got cheers in the audience for telling the assembled that McCain is nothing like that bastard George W. Bush, and that Clinton worked with Democrats better than Obama would. OK, the cheers were kind of wanting. You could have written his hard wank of a speech about a month ago all by yourself - about how good people of both parties should come together in the spirit of bipartisanship and put country first and fall behind a good soldier who represents the best of America. It's impossible to even rebut it because it's so deeply silly, the whole "my party left me" nonsense, the whole "we can all agree to do whatever John McCain says" stuff.
Now I'm watching the St. Paul police firing tear gas and concussion grenades at protesters.
Chris Matthews called it "a very effective night."
UPDATE: Here's the Obama campaign on Bush:
"Tonight, George Bush enthusiastically passed the torch to the man who's earned it by voting with him 90% of the time, and who will continue this President's legacy for the next four years – his disastrous economic policies, his foreign policy that hasn't made us safer, and his misguided war in Iraq that's costing us $10 billion a month. The man George Bush needs may be John McCain, but the change America needs is Barack Obama," said Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.
Feel The Excitement! RNC Day 1, or 2, or Something
I'm not in St. Paul, but the reports I'm hearing from inside the hall - as well as what I saw on the teevee yesterday - suggest that there's nobody there. I mean it's practically empty. The Xcel Center isn't the biggest arena in the Twin Cities area (that would be the Target Center, where the Ron Paul convention is). It's not the SECOND-BIGGEST, either. It's a mid-sized area for a mid-sized party that the GOP wants to make look bigger, and they're failing at that.
And this is priceless: apparently the very first speaker of the night, Jo Ann Davidson, said that it was wonderful to have Sarah Pawlenty on the ticket, and it's great to be in her home state because she's the Governor of Minnesota.
Somebody typed that into a TelePrompTer.
Man, the McCain campaign doesn't even vet the SPEAKERS.
Suppression, Police State Tactics, And The Innovation Of Uprisings
At my Labor Day barbecue, I was mentioning the police state tactics going on in Minneapolis right now, and one of my guests dismissed it as nothing compared to a country under authoritarian rule, like, say, China. Take a look at journalist Amy Goodman being detained for asking a question of the police and you may be disabused of that notion:
Goodman was aiming to help two of her producers get out of jail, after they were subjected to police brutality simply for filming in the middle of a protest. And she was one of nearly 300 people arrested yesterday amid a peaceful protest in St. Paul, where the police used rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd. Those detained were held without charges for up to 36 hours. While there were scattered incidents of property damage from some protesters, the law enforcement response was simply disproportionate and deliberately intimidating, essentially creating a Green Zone around the RNC. There are Humvees in the streets and conspicuous National Guard officers. This is what our political conventions have become.
The FDL crew is doing a great job of raising awareness of these civil liberties and free speech crackdowns. And Jane Hamsher says that the police presence has forced activists to innovate in exciting ways:
What happened on the streets of St. Paul yesterday was something else altogether. Whereas Denver was the site of young people clutching their blackberries and hustling passes to more and better parties, in St. Paul they were creating a whole new model for communication, documentation and activism.
Members of the Coldsnap legal collective fanned out across the city and communicated with each other (and the world) openly on Twitter about what was happening during the protest, and were thus able to alert and steer journalists, observers and anyone else with an interest immediately to what was happening on the street throughout the day. Nothing that law enforcement did happened in secret, and ACLU lawyers and other observers were able to be quickly alerted to anything that was happening. When we first arrived we started following their bulletins in the wake of the weekend raids, and as more information came in verifying their reports it became clear that they were a highly trustworthy source of information.
Meanwhile, the Uptake provided an army of video journalists with Qik cameras that broadcast live on the internet. You could track their whereabouts on a Google map, and they provided on-the-spot coverage of what was happening in real time. Really, I can't recommend enough going to their main page and taking a look at what they managed to do yesterday. They also provided a lounge where visiting bloggers could have internet and video editing space, and that's where we were headquartered yesterday. We were able to not only hear about what was happening all across the city virtually instantaneously, but see their reporters quickly diverted to anything that was happening and watch as their cameras went into action.
It was like a million ants scurrying around the city, passing back bits of information that formed themselves into a whole in a completely decentralized manner. Its very nature defied efforts to control and spin and propagandize.
This is how 21st century politics and activism will be waged. Twitter is now in the toolkit of activists, and in a year or two there'll be something else even more amazing. Participatory engagement is back and it's completely different from the 1960s. The traditional media may not be televising it, but it's new and vital and means a lot for how we encourage movement politics going forward.
So with Hurricane Gustav thankfully rerouting away from New Orleans and with the damage more minimal than expected, the Republicans will try to fire up their red meat machine in force tonight to make up for lost time. Of course, the looming hurricane didn't stop them from partying with the band "Hookers & Blow" last night.
The problem is there's another hurricane in the Gulf that could hit Florida and Georgia on Thursday, and with the GOP already on record as refraining from attacks in the midst of a natural disaster, they are constrained and in a box here. So it's kind of a hybrid convention instead of the expected full-fledged assault on Barack Obama. They had to shuffle the schedule, and tonight Unca Fred Thompson and Droopy Dog Lieberman are on tap, along with President Bush. They couldn't even dodge that bullet of having Bush associated with McCain at the convention; literally everything he says tonight can be made into 30-second TV commercials. And the behind the scenes stuff is delicious:
Almost certainly, Bush had to cancel his planned speech while Gustav loomed. But the sources say he didn't like the idea and felt pushed. Bush is described by sources as "furious" at McCain for being deprived of his last appearance before his party, which nominated him twice, as a sitting president. He believes he is being treated disrespectfully.
Shuttering the convention for a night was probably inevitable given the hurricane, but to provide a cover-up for scratching Bush and Cheney it became absolutely necessary. But once the hurricane passed, Bush asserted his primacy as president and forced his way back on the schedule to deliver a satellite speech to the convention.
McCain is desperately seeking ways to pivot from Bush, whose in-person appearance on the first night of the convention threatened to obliterate his message as a "maverick" and "reformer." Even though McCain himself would not be onstage, Bush and Cheney would have dominated the opening and underlined continuity between their administration and McCain. The cancellation of the first night of the convention is a small price to pay for their absence.
McCain's campaign is perfectly aware of the mortal danger of Bush's embrace. He has needed the president to rally the Republican base. But once he has the nomination his imperative is to project himself as an antidote to what has gone wrong with Republicanism.
This is the reason for putting Lieberman on the same night as Bush, to somehow show that McCain's Republican Party is even crazier than Bush on foreign affairs moderate and post-partisan. So much so that Lieberman has previously praised Obama to the hills, which won't be repeated tonight.
The Republicans wanted a week of sustained attacks on their opponent. But they got a muddled convention filled with distractions over hurricane on the ground and Hurricane Sarah Palin and Hurricane Bush's Ego. Not to mention that there's a 10,000-strong contingent of Ron Paul supporters having a bigger and more interesting convention right next door, which is starting to get some media attention.
There's no room at the Xcel Energy Center for maverick Ron Paul, so his acolytes have packed their cars, hitched rides on "Ronvoys" and will pitch tents at Ronstock '08 in defiance of next week's GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn.
Almost 9,800 tickets had been sold for the Rally for the Republic, being held in Minneapolis, which seeks to bring together activists who are anti-war, anti-government regulation, anti-immigration, anti-taxes, anti-Federal Reserve, anti-outsourcing, pro-individual liberty, pro-civil liberties and pro-Paul.
The Ronvoys — fleets of buses and vans carrying Paul's loyalists — were to begin arriving Saturday. A few rally-goers planned to walk from Green Bay, Wis., and join up with Paul for the final miles of their Walk4Freedom. Other attendees are driving, carpooling or flying in for the convention alternative.
If this whole election doesn't work out, the two Alaskans could team up for a comeback, just like the old days five years ago:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin began building clout in her state's political circles in part by serving as a director of an independent political group organized by the now embattled Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.
Palin's name is listed on 2003 incorporation papers of the "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.," a 527 group that could raise unlimited funds from corporate donors. The group was designed to serve as a political boot camp for Republican women in the state. She served as one of three directors until June 2005, when her name was replaced on state filings.
Because she's a figure of the fundie right, and because to get anywhere in Alaska politics you have to suck up to Ted Stevens, this is completely unsurprising.
The delegates on the floor of the RNC cheered louder for Palin than McCain. They see her as one of their own. Given the pain and suffering Republicanism has given us over the past eight years, given how many elected officials wanted to stay as far away as possible from these people, that should tell you everything. Palin is out of step with mainstream Americans. This is her base:
Ninety percent of the Democratic delegates said the nation was in a recession, while 72 percent of the Republican delegates say it is not.
“If we were in a recession, people would not be eating out — they would be in the grocery store and cooking at home,” said Phyllis Gorman, 59, a business owner and delegate from Oklahoma, in an interview after the delegate poll was taken. “When I drive by McDonald’s, there are so many people in line there. There are still a lot of cars on the road. If we were still in a recession like we were in the ’70s, people wouldn’t be doing anything.”
That would sound right coming out of the mouth of Ted Stevens, too.
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