Okay, here’s the part where I eat crow. Hillary gave the best speech I’ve ever seen her give, and her support for Obama seemed unequivocal. She sounded all the notes she needed to sound, and she had total command of the audience. Whether this will have any effect on her most rabid supporters I don’t know, but if they remain intransigent, no one can say this speech gave them any encouragement.
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Hillary speaks tonight, Bill tomorrow. There’s a fair amount of grumbling among Obama’s supporters about this arrangement, viewed as an ill-advised capitulation to an excessive Clinton demand (shamelessness has long been part of their modus operandi, and why not? It has served them very well over the years). What’s the point of giving them two nights rather than one? some worried Democrats are demanding. Why create a patina of party unity, inspired by the noble old figure of Ted Kennedy, and then build up Obama’s personal bona fides courtesy of his elegant wife, all on the first night, and then step all over the message over the course of the following two? Why hadn’t the convention organizers, wondered one journalist friend of mine who finds the situation almost laughably inappropriate, given the two Clintons a portion of the first night, saluted them for their past contributions and for a race well run, and then said Hasta la vista, have a safe flight home, thereby allowing the remainder of the convention to get on with the business of launching Barack Obama’s fall campaign? Instead, we not only get two days of potential psychodrama, but also two different, creative, instructive demonstrations of consummate passive-aggression.
My wife and I ran into Congressman George Miller, (D-CA), today, while we were scurrying around town trying to score a variety of credentials (yes, absolutely including my press credentials, and I won’t say anymore about that except that I have to go through this nonsense every morning; the convention press office is not providing week-long documentation to journalists, and I even saw Tina Brown in the queue ahead of me this morning, forced to go through the same rigamarole as the rest of us ordinary ink-stained mortals). George is a wonderfully affable man with a solar-powered smile, a big bushy moustache and a great belly-shaking laugh. In fact, were it not for his California tan and his California casual style sense, you might actually mistake him for Santa Claus. A Santa Claus who has spent the days since Christmas at the gym; George is a burly scrapper of a man, but I don’t want to give the false impression he’s portly. Our conversation rapidly turned to the twinned Clinton speeches, tonight’s and Wednesday’s. “So, what do you think?” he asked us. “Blood on the floor?” I said, “Oh, that’s a given, George. The only question is which of them will draw the greater quantity: The guy struggling with his anger issues, or the woman who will profess full support while deftly wielding a surgeon’s scalpel?” He rolled his eyes at this and said, “Oh God!” Which I took to be confirmation.
Continue reading ‘Denver dispatches - Erik Tarloff - Tuesday 26th August’
Up on stage it’s all smiles. But around the edges of the convention, Democratic operatives are clearly worried about their campaign. The last month has seen a gradual coming to terms with the fact of their candidate’s limitations. Early hopes that Barack Obama would race to a double-digit poll lead against a seemingly hapless John McCain were quickly dashed. But no consensus exists as to why the campaign’s rise has been halted. And it is this discussion - why aren’t we winning, and what should we be doing about it - that dominates conversations in Denver’s corridors, hotel lobbies and lavish receptions.
This morning, for instance, i popped into a breakfast briefing, in which all the talk was about the campaign’s inability to land a compelling economic narrative. Where, participants asked, was the mix of big themes and practical policies which would convince wavering, mortgage-minded voters that President Obama would put money back in their pocket? (The New York Times asked a similar question in a long, interesting Sunday magazine front cover this weekend.) More importantly, what now is the campaign’s fundamental message to the American people; the equivalent of Bill Clinton’s “It’s the economy / time for a change / don’t forget about healthcare.” The sense is Obama has so far struggled to put convincing policy meat on the bones of his themes of hope and change, and has found particular problems on economic issues.
Perhaps more problematically, this convention itself is proving a difficult place to deploy these details. Four nights of convention means four chances to get a message across. Yet last night’s well-received Michelle Obama biopic had little in the way of policy. Its job was to introduce her and her husband as ordinary, empathetic, relate-able people. This evening’s set of speeches is meant to be about the economy - but the focus will naturally be on whatever it is Hillary Clinton decides to say. Tomorrow the focus is meant to be on security, mixed in with introducing Joe Biden as running mate. The upshot? If the campaign wants to say something about the economy, it may well have to rely on the candidate himself, on the final night. Whether he will be able to do so - in amongst all the other things the speech needs to do, and with huge expectations driven by his previous speechifying - is fast becoming one of the big tests by which to judge the convention’s success.
Along with Erik Tarloff, James Crabtree will be blogging for First Drafts from the Democratic convention in Denver this week
At every political convention I’ve covered, I‘ve begun by promising myself not to write about the miserable hassles involved in securing press credentials. I’ve never succeeded. Sooner or later, my good intentions have given way to sustained whining. In print. This time, though, I’m determined to come as close to a British-style stiff upper lip as is within my power, contenting myself with a simple… Don’t get me started.
This morning, my wife and I went to the convention hall early. She had a rehearsal session scheduled for a little colloquy in which she will be participating this evening, with Sherrod Brown, a rising-star freshman senator from Ohio, and a small number of economic, healthcare, and education experts. The main purpose of the little colloquy was for the participants to say, in a variety of ways, Obama is good and McCain is bad, and the session director kept reminding them that this was their remit. Occasionally, if one or the other of them said Obama is good but neglected to add that McCain also happens to be bad, the director was quick to point out this little lapse. They all quickly got into the groove. But I don’t mention this rehearsal because it was anything to write home about. The thing itself was frankly a yawn (please don’t tell Laura I said so). What I mostly managed to take away from it is: Obama good, McCain bad.
But something interesting happened before the rehearsal began. Laura and I were sitting in the green room, waiting for the other participants to arrive (a sign of how tight the security is here at the hall: The session ended up being delayed more than half an hour because Senator Brown and his wife were being frisked and examined by the police outside the hall; I suppose you never can tell which member of the US Senate is a crazed terrorist in Solon’s clothing), minding our own business, when a rather handsome black woman of a certain age with two very attractive little girls entered the green room. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” the woman said with a little laugh. “I just follow orders.” And then she introduced herself: “Hi, I’m Marian Robinson.” The name rang a bell, but it was the face that clinched it: she looked absolutely identical to her daughter, Michelle Obama. This was the potential future first mother-in-law, shepherding her two grandchildren around the Denver convention centre. For the record, I saw no sign of any special protection around these three precious entities; they were ushered in by some sort of minder, a pleasant young woman who, believe me, was packing no heat, and they then sat and chatted with us, good-naturedly and unaffectedly. Mrs Robinson herself was as gracious and unprepossessing as can be—we laughed about the absurd anonymity and apparent arbitrariness of convention rules and directives—and the kids were sweet and well behaved.
Continue reading ‘Denver dispatches - Erik Tarloff - Monday 25th August’
My wife and I arrived in Denver for the Democratic convention this evening. The airport was swarming, and security downtown extraordinarily tight. Cops everywhere. On bicycles, on foot, in cars. Our driver told us the city had entirely sealed off several blocks of downtown this afternoon because two unclaimed packages were found on the street. Their contents, no surprise, proved to be innocuous.
We’re staying in the same hotel Barack Obama will be using, and the security here is especially stringent. Indeed, we were even prevented from going to our room when we first arrived. Special credentials are required to use the lifts while the convention is in session, and the office handing out those credentials was closed when we got here. No one seemed able to locate anyone who might be able to rectify the situation. This is how Democrats manage conventions.
Eventually, once we established the impossible Catch-22 of being unable to show our credentials because the people who provide the credentials had disappeared off the face of the earth, someone else in authority arranged for us to ascend the lift in uncredentialed glory. This was a minor inconvenience, a delay of a mere 20 minutes or so, but it augurs ill for the more serious business tomorrow of trying to secure my press passes. I’ve now been to four political conventions in my life, and the press-pass-securing part of the process has never gone smoothly. Of course, they’ve all been Democratic conventions. Republicans, whatever their other flaws, are better at getting trains to run on time. At conventions, anyway; they haven’t exactly been managing the government of the US with breathtaking efficiency lately.
Such gossip we’ve been able to pick up so far has largely concerned itself with the role Hillary Clinton will play at the convention. Rightly or wrongly, it’s generally assumed that she will try to sabotage the Obama candidacy. But it’s further assumed that she must accomplish this with a certain deftness, leaving no fingerprints, or else she will risk being blamed should he lose. Democrats are not in the mood to lose this election; they arguably are bringing more passion this year than any other election cycle in my lifetime. If Hillary is blamed for the loss, the party will not overlook it, and will not forgive it. I don’t know if this analysis is right, but if Obama loses, I expect she will be blamed regardless. She has certainly allowed herself, and her people—yes, I’m talking about the big dog as well as some of her more rabid, cult-like supporters—to behave in a maliciously mischievous fashion.
But I suspect the gossip has the details wrong. I don’t think she will do anything especially crass. Yes, she will have her name placed in nomination, already an indulgence that threatens to disrupt the proceedings. But my guess—and it’s only a guess, based on absolutely no evidence—is that she will go to the podium before the roll-call vote and move that the nomination be made unanimous, by acclamation. There will be some booing, no doubt, from some of her hardcore supporters (the so-called PUMAs, Party Unity My Ass!), and there may even be scattershot demonstrations against, but the motion will certainly pass. And the crisis will have passed. I think this whole quadrille was probably negotiated several weeks ago.
But I’m taking a risk here. If I’m wrong, First Drafts readers will be aware of my mistake virtually in real time. That’s the risk a blogger takes.
Erik Tarloff is a novelist and writer, and a former occasional speechwriter to Bill Clinton. Along with James Crabtree, he will be blogging for First Drafts from the Democratic convention in Denver this week
The cream of America’s black population has never done so well as in the last ten years—two secretaries of state, a national security adviser, chief of the armed forces, heads of major companies from American Express to Time Warner, congressmen and women, rectors of major universities, bishops, newspaper editorial writers. The list goes on and on, and perhaps later this year it will be capped by the election of a black president. What a difference from the 1960s, when only sport, the arts and preaching were open to ambitious blacks. Even in the 1970s, as I long ago documented in Encounter magazine, middle-class professional blacks were beginning to roar ahead in sizable numbers, closing the gap with their white peers. Thank you Martin Luther King.
But like America’s infrastructure, neglect has meant that the cracks beneath are once again coming to the surface. Not, as in the past, in the form of civil rights agitation or riots, but in the shearing of family ties, educational failure and the appalling state of health and morbidity among American blacks. The “benign neglect” of Patrick Moynihan, social affairs adviser to President Nixon, has moved to malign neglect. Not that recent presidents have ignored the issue, but their various plans pale before the ambitions of Lyndon Johnson’s far-sighted “war on poverty,” which was sabotaged by the Vietnam war. Another such war is now needed.
The basic statistics have been thrown into relief by a new report, “The Measure of America,” published by the American Human Development Report, which is modelled on the UN annual report of the same name. The UN report was the brainchild of the late Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, and based on the work of the Indian Nobel economics laureate Amartya Sen.
Continue reading ‘Power’s world: measuring American development’
Edward Luttwak’s last cover story for us, a provocative essay arguing that the middle east was of small and declining strategic significance, proved so irritating to so many that it remains one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published, to judge by our website traffic. (It’s also being turned into a book. The film rights may still be available.)
Now Luttwak is back with another dose of far-out contrarianism: George W Bush’s presidency, he argues, far from being the foreign-policy catastrophe almost everyone, left and right, takes it to be, has actually been a stunning success. With the admittedly rather glaring exception of Iraq, Bush’s aggressive foreign policy has successfully rolled back the global tide of jihadism and brought recalcitrant governments in the Muslim world on side. “You’re either with us or against us”—the Bushism most commonly invoked to stand for what is supposed to be the president’s dunderheaded black-and-white view of the world was and remains, says Luttwak, exactly the right slogan and the right attitude.
Please vent your spleen below.
There is, it seems, a yawning chasm between what US voters think their presidential candidates know about the world, and what they actually know.
In a July poll asking which candidate had better knowledge of world affairs, McCain came out with a 63-26 advantage.
This is in spite of the fact that Obama one of the few senators to vote against the Iraq war, on the basis that it would spark a long and bloody Shia-Sunni struggle, and now proposes a troop withdrawal timetable which the Iraqi government is in complete agreement with (neither of which his opponent can claim). Obama also took the initiative on Zimbabwe over a year ago: in June 2007, he sponsored a senate resolution condemning Mugabe’s disregard for democratic processes and calling for action to prevent further violence before the election.
Meanwhile, McCain has consistently failed to show he knows the difference between Shias and a Sunnis, still thinks there is a country called Czechoslovakia, and is worried about problems on the “Iraq/Pakistan border.” (No such border exists.) One wonders if wilful ignorance is the only criteria needed for a “strong foreign policy rating.”
Barack Obama’s ability to raise money from literally millions of supporters online has already, and justifiably, attained the status of legend: it’s the kind of watershed in campaigning that only comes along once in a generation. Despite all the coverage, however, I hadn’t quite realised how impressive his online edge over Hillary Clinton has been over the last twelve months until I typed both their names into google trends. The result, which portrays as a graph the number of times each of their names has been entered into google as a search term, can be seen here.
Then again, if all Hillary’s supporters could spell, we might have seen something rather different…
Obviously, the Democratic primary contest has hogged the bulk of the US news cycle. Still, google’s current Obama/McCain match-up must be of concern to Republicans: it shows a worse-than two-to-one deficit online. George Bush, meanwhile and predictably enough, trails both candidates. And don’t even ask about Gordon Brown, who as far as the internet is concerned has barely crept ahead of a certain predecessor even after a year in power.
Here’s a challenge, though. Can you think of another politican who might rival Obama in the google stakes; or is he truly the world’s most sought-after political figure? Come to think of it, is there someone else whom Obama-mania may be toppling from even His lofty perch?
In this month’s lead opinion, David Frum—former special assistant to George W Bush—looks back at the internal politics of the Bush administration in the light of Scott McClellan’s incendiary recent memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong with Washington (PublicAffairs).
McClellan cuts, Frum argues, a sad and sympathetic figure despite the bitter tone of his memoir. Here was a man clearly deficient in his job as White House press secretary, yet compelled to discharge his duty day after day; an official at once supported and ensnared by his bullying, chummy and ruthless commander-in-chief, who selected his inner circles on the basis of loyalty rather than competence.
It was a cynical form of failure. As Frum explains, the gravest internal defects of the Bush administration were the products of conscious design. Yet in trying to correct these, Bush’s successor faces perhaps the most problematic paradox of government—that there is no wholly successful way of running a White House.
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