Wednesday, August 27, 2008 - Posts
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Next week, the Republican Party will rally around the theme “Putting Country First.”
Pundits have railed against the theme’s implicit suggestion—and other more explicit ones—that Barack Obama is a selfish elitist. But tonight, John Kerry was the first surrogate to address it head-on to a national audience.
“How desperate to tell the son of a single mother who chose community service over money and privilege that he doesn’t put America first,” Kerry said. “No one can question Barack Obama’s patriotism.”
Convention themes set up the message and tone for the rest of the campaign. But the Dems have yet to sync theirs up. Mark Warner sang vague praises of innovation and future vs. past. Joe Biden talked about his working-class upbringing. One of tonight’s speakers actually used the O-word to describe McCain and the Republicans. (They put the “old” in “GOP.”) We’ve heard the refrain “Barack Obama is right, and John McCain is wrong” a few times now. Maybe they’ll pull all these ideas together with Obama’s speech tomorrow night. But if they want to deliver a pre-emptive strike against the RNC theme—an attack in itself—they’ll have to address the patriotism charges head-on.
Michelle Obama, whose past comments have been construed as unpatriotic, cut right to the chase last night: “I love my country.” If he's going to pre-empt McCain's message, Barack Obama may have to do the same. In his surprise appearance tonight, he took the first step: "President Bill Clinton reminded us of what it’s like when you’ve got a president who actually puts people first." Expect more to come.
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Click on the links below to see the sources from which Joe Biden lifted his DNC speech!
“Beau, I love you. I am so proud of you. Proud of the son you are. Proud of the father you’ve become. …
“It is an honor to share this stage tonight with President Clinton. And last night, it was moving to watch Hillary, one of the great leaders of our party, a woman who has made history and will continue to make history: my colleague and my friend, Senator Hillary Clinton. …”
And that's just the beginning. Start Googling!
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Sen. Hillary Clinton stepped to the microphone during the roll-call vote at the Democratic Convention and made a motion that Sen. Barack Obama be selected by acclamation as the party's presidential nominee. Watch what happened next.
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From where the press sits inside the Pepsi Center, here at the Democratic Convention, reporters have a clear view of a teleprompter facing the speaker from across the hall. Watching it gets addictive, keeping track of when the speaker wanders off-script, misses a word, or gets thrown off by applause not accounted for in the text.
Following the teleprompter also makes the speech itself sound tinny and disjointed. The smaller screen only carries a couple of lines, making speeches seem like an endless series of Twitter posts by Democratic speechwriters—crowd pleasers strung together by hurried points on policy.
To simulate that effect, here is Hillary Clinton’s speech from last night, chopped down to just the major applause lines. Judge for yourself: Is the final effect all that different?
"Thank you all very much. I am so honored to be here tonight. I'm here tonight as a proud supporter of Barack Obama.
"And whether you voted for me or you voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose. [Y]ou haven't worked so hard over the last 18 months or endured the last eight years to suffer through more failed leadership. No way, no how, no McCain. Barack Obama is my candidate, and he must be our president.
"You taught me so much, and you made me laugh, and, yes, you even made me cry. To my supporters, to my champions, to my sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
"I ran to stand up for all those who have been invisible to their government for eight long years. Those are the reasons I ran for president, and those are the reasons I support Barack Obama for president.
"[Obama] built his campaign on a fundamental belief that change in this country must start from the ground up, not the top down. Democrats know how to do this. As I recall, we did it before with President Clinton and the Democrats. And Barack will have with him a terrific partner in Michelle Obama. And Americans are fortunate that Joe Biden will be at Barack Obama's side.
"[I]t makes perfect sense that George Bush and John McCain will be together next week in the Twin Cities, because these days they're awfully hard to tell apart.
"And after so many decades, 88 years ago on this very day, the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, became enshrined in our Constitution. And, remember, before we can keep going, we've got to get going by electing Barack Obama the next president of the United States. Thank you. God bless you, and Godspeed."
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Tim Wu sends this dispatch from the Democratic National Convention:
Think yoga and you imagine limber, young people breathing softly. Politics, meanwhile, conjures up the exact opposite image: unhealthy old stiff people screaming at each other.
That's why it might be a surprise to find that yoga has a presence at the Democratic National Convention. "Yoga," said one of Google's political advisers, "is everywhere." Every day in the Big Tent—a sort of holding tank for bloggers—yoga practice is on the morning schedule. But the true epicenter of convention yoga is the Oasis, a lounge that is the brainchild of yogi Seanne Corn, a 41-year-old who looks 26, and one of her students, Arianna Huffington.
The convention itself is a microcosm of the human struggle with desire: Most spend their days in an endless pursuit of the best credentials, party tickets, and celebrity encounters. But Huffington says she is looking for something more transcendent: "inter-connectedness," or so she told me, a little before taking a break to have a feet rubbed while she poked at her BlackBerry.
Can politics learn anything from yoga? "That we are all one," said Corn, and that "everything that is happening to us is a manifestation of our collective thoughts." A bit like democracy, except you just have to think instead of voting. Can yoga help the Obama/Clinton divide? "Individual healing," says Corn, "is necessary to heal the collective."
Unfortunately for Corn, her efforts to create an alternative vibe in the center of American political culture was, on Tuesday afternoon, running into a few problems. Crowds of men clad in blue blazers, shoulders bent from too much BlackBerry use, began to take over. The number of guests actually choosing to practice yoga was few, with the exception of one online magazine editor being gently pulled apart in a side room. Given a choice, most preferred the hobnob over the downward dog.
And despite its transcendent aspirations, the Oasis does seem to have something of a nonkarmic obsession with reporting on the celebrities who visit the place via the Huffington Post. It would seem that at least one of Buddhism's eight worldly concerns—the desire for fame—remains unconquered.
Yet to their credit, the volunteer yoga teachers and masseuses fought back and re-established a less striving vibe. There were headstands. A man clad in monk's robes conducted a meditation. Someone began to play a guitar. I asked Meaghan deRoos, a yoga teacher who helped me with my headstand practice, whether there was one thing she'd hope the center could accomplish. "Yes," she said. "Getting people to breathe."
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