Thoughts on Obama's acceptance speech

A few random, unorganized observations about Obama's acceptance speech:

- Obviously, everyone has known for a while now that he was going to become the first black person to accept a Presidential nomination for a major party. But it wasn't until I got to work yesterday that it really started to hit me. Last night was a huge, transformative moment in American history. I am still trying to wrap my head around the magnitude of it. Am I crazy for wondering if this is as big a deal as Jackie Robinson breaking baseball's color barrier? Or is it crazy not to think that a black man running for leader of the free world is an even bigger deal than Jackie Robinson's feat?

- The historical significance of Obama becoming the nominee underscores how brilliant it was for his campaign to focus so heavily on the mantra of "Change." The mere act of a President Obama sitting down at the desk in the Oval Office for the first time would immediately represent one of the most significant changes in the history of American politics. If a President Obama could deliver even an average presidency (and by average I mean substantially more effective than Bush, whose ranking might match his "43" order number) - he's lived up to the hype.

- I was impressed by how stern and serious Obama was, as compared to his standard stump speech, and that was exactly how he needed to be. His goal was to convince Democrats and swing voters who are on the fence that he is ready to lead, and he did a good job of projecting that.

- The speech seemed to start off a little slow, but it seemed intentionally restrained, and the intensity seemed to build over the course of speech until it rose to the level of being a great one.

- I loved when Obama ended a discussion of his family's middle-class values by saying "I don't know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine." It made that ad seem so incredibly desperate and embarrassing.

- One of the main reasons Obama has appealed to me is that his philosophy seems pretty similar to mine. He doesn't seem phased by admitting that life is complicated, and that there are elements of truth in various different approaches to any given issue. Last night he discussed how Democrats have to remember that funding worthy programs doesn't solve all of our problems, echoing a common campaign line about how parents have to be the ones to turn off the TV and ensure that a kid is doing her homework. He ended this segment by saying: "Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility - that's the essence of America's promise." In this regard, Obama carries the mantle of Bill Clinton's "New Democrat" approach, and it is strange that he hasn't gotten more credit for the centrist/third way nature of many of his policy proposals.

- This line showed that Obama is going to punch back: "If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next commander in chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have." As far as I'm concerned, it's fair game once your opponent has taken some of the shots McCain has. Now, during the next week or so, everyone out there who is not a political junkee will be hearing about McCain's legendary temper for the first time. The combination of his neoconservative foreign policy outlook, his horrible temper, and strange behavior like the "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" moment could combine to create an insurmountable hurdle for McCain.

- Finally, Pat Buchanan says that Obama's speech was the greatest convention acceptance speech he's ever heard. Say what you will about most of his policy stances, but Buchanan is a hell of political analyst, and understands American politics as well as anyone. And if anything, the fact that Buchanan has often been outside of the mainstream is probably one reason he comes across as more honest than most analysts. I agree with him completely that this was a "deeply centrist speech." The clip would be worth watching merely for the expression on his liberal counterpart Rachel Maddow's face.

Bill Clinton comes around

Bill Clinton was great tonight, especially when he pointed out that critics had also said he was too young and inexperienced when he ran in 1992. (Obama is actually forty-seven, a year older than Clinton was when he won).

Biden's introduction bolstered the argument I've been making that Biden's appeal to older white Democrats may be almost as important as his foreign policy cred. His middle-class Catholic upbringing and often-imperfect life story (childhood stuttering, the tragic loss of his wife and daughter right after his first Senate race, and though it wasn't mentioned, his failed 1988 Presidential bid) serve as excellent foils for Obama's multicultural background and his meteoric rise. Biden comes across as incredibly real and human, and his beaming mother probably won the ticket some votes on her own.

Hillary hits a home run

Hillary Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention was right on target, including pretty much everything she needed to say. The most important part was when she asked her die-hard supporters what the rest of us have wanted to say for several months:

"I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?" [CNN]

Part of me keeps asking: "wait, isn't this what anyone else in her position would have been saying for the last two months, instead of letting this whole rift fester?" Can you imagine how the party and the media would have treated Obama if he had come in second and acted the same way? As Ben Smith noted, the negativity coming from the Clinton camp and its surrogates in the days leading up to the speech made it a "study in the virtue of low expectations."

But whether or not one thinks Clinton should have handled the last two months differently, she deserves credit for a great speech last night. And after all, the next two months are much more important than the last two. If she and Bill keep fighting for the Obama-Biden ticket the way she did last night, all of the strife will be forgotten, and their roles among the Democratic Party's leadership will be restored.

Selected Biden articles

I don't have time for an extended discussion of the many ways Biden strengthens the Democratic ticket (and I already gave some of them last week), but I wanted to link to a couple of articles that help convey Biden's experience, and especially his foreign policy expertise. The long New Yorker article, from 2004, is the must-read article of the three - an extended George Packer piece on soft power and the potential for a reinvigorated liberal approach to foreign policy. The WSJ op-ed features the former US ambassador to Romania's take on Biden. Finally, David Brooks made the case for Biden in his NYT column from the morning before the announcement, and for once, he was right about what would happen.

"A Democratic World: Can liberals take foreign policy back from the Republicans?" [New Yorker]
"On Diplomacy, Biden Knows Who or How" [Wall Street Journal]
"Hoping It's Biden" [New York Times]

UPDATED 8/28/08:

Long interview about foreign policy from 2004 [Talking Points Memo]
WIRED on Biden: strong on civil liberties, but very pro-Hollywood in the copyright wars [WIRED]

Who's the out-of-touch elitist now?

Potential VP Tim Kaine ridiculed John McCain today for not being able to answer when reporters asked him how many houses he owns. Painting McCain as a quintessential Country Club Republican is probably the Dems' best counterattack to the charge that Obama is elitist or out-of-touch with working class Americans (which was already an iffy approach for McCain, giving the historical economic status of most black Americans).

This approach would also help focus the campaign on GOP economic policies that favor the extremely wealthy, like shifting the tax burden to the middle class and the deregulation of the home loan market. And it shouldn't be too hard to brand McCain with the Country Club Republican label once the media starts to cover the candidates' financial statements - how many of the "mavericks" you know are independently wealthy because they married into a family fortune?

Real pictures from Georgia

My instinct has been to side with Georgia in this thing, given my extreme level of distrust for Vladimir Putin and anything he says and/or does. WIRED has some disturbing pictures from the conflict . . . and their take on the conflict is not very sympathetic to the Russian side.

"Brutal Pictures Emerge from Georgia" [WIRED]

Why Joe Biden should be Obama's VP

The rumors seem to have Senators Bayh and Biden, and Governor Kaine, as the top three VP choices. I think all three could bring what Obama needs most. A couple weeks back, in a post which was mostly dedicated to discussing why Obama should not pick Sam Nunn, I conceded that someone like Nunn could help Obama with one of the things he needs most: "he could help reassure older white Democrats that Obama will look out for their interests, too, and not just those of the black and younger white voters who constitute his base."

Bayh, Biden and Kaine are different from each other in several ways, and each has his own strengths and weaknesses. But I think that all three could help reassure older white Democrats who are a little leery of voting for Obama (whether because of his race, or because of attempts to paint him as a radical/secret Muslim/whatever else the GOP comes up with).

Personally, I would love to see Biden in the VP slot. His most obvious strength is that he's a legitimate foreign policy heavyweight, and would fit in perfectly with the Obama campaign's emphasis on soft power. Just as importantly, picking a household name like Biden would probably be Obama's best option for assuring older white Democrats that "Change We Can Believe In" doesn't involve ignoring older voters like them. Everyone loves to attack Biden for being too "gaffe-prone," but most of his "gaffes" have involved not being politically correct enough (like his botched comment about Obama, which wasn't mean-spirited at all), and call me crazy, but I don't think failing to be politically correct enough is why the Democratic Party has lost the last two Presidential elections.

And for some reason, no one seems to give Biden credit for the punches he does land - which include some of the best stuff Democrats have had to offer during the Bush years. Am I the only one who remembers his quote from the Abu Ghraib hearings? Biden, one of the only Senators with a son or daughter serving in the military, attacked the administration on the grounds that using torture would end up hurting our own troops: "That's why we have these treaties. So when Americans are captured, they are not tortured. That's the reason, in case anybody forgets it."

During this year's presidential campaign, he hit Rudy Giuliani with this devastating critique: "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence - a noun, a verb, and 9/11." I thought that was the best political counterattack I've heard in years (and I was in NYC on 9/11, and it was the worst day of my life, so please don't waste your time sending me an email whining that I'm insensitive, or that Biden is somehow).

I think Bayh and Kaine could be great VP choices, too, especially since their states are in play. But of the three, Joe Biden would do the most 1) to repudiate the Republican Party's failed approach to foreign policy, and 2) to shore up support among the older white Democrats who have become the key to this election. Finally, I would love to see Biden facing off on issues like Iraq, Iran, and the Russia-Georgia conflict against whichever young, pretty-boy businessman-turned-governor McCain picks as his VP.

Suskind drops intel forgery bombshell

If this allegation is true - and Suskind has been a pretty reliable reporter - this is the single worst thing the Bush administration did to exaggerate the case for the Iraq War:

"The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001," Suskind writes. "It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link." [Politico]

We have known for several years that members of the administration cherry-picked evidence and even cited documents they knew were forged, but the allegation that the US government actually forged pieces of intelligence is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

"Book says White House ordered forgery" [Politico]
"A White House Forgery Scandal" [Washington Post]