Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Right Man To Head The Party Redux

“This is not a roomful of Democratic party regulars,” Dean opened, and the crowd roared its agreement. So he introduced them to Will Rogers’ standard party punchline, ‘I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.’ But Dean didn’t play it for laughs. ‘Everybody always laughs at that, but we’ll laugh ourselves right out of existence,’ he warned, if Democrats and progressives don’t do the serious work of organizing a base.

“It’s not enough to vote, I want you to run for office,” he told the crowd. ‘If you can’t run for office, if you’re a single mother, give three hours a week to someone else’s campaign. Cough up five, 10, 25 dollars.’ He stopped short of former campaign manager Joe Trippi’s call for John Kerry to abandon the public financing system and rely on a small-donor Internet base, but he did say “the best campaign finance reform is raising money from small donors. That’s how we take this country back.”

[…]

In his second speech, Dean whipped the crowd into a cheering frenzy by noting that “Bill Clinton was the only guy to balance the budget. If it takes a liberal to balance the budget, well then we need a liberal in the White House, because you can’t trust this government with your money.” And it was hard not to marvel at this lefty crowd cheering over a balanced budget.

But Dean also respected the group’s desire to build its own infrastructure, not merely become foot soldiers for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. He lauded both men, and asked the crowd to “put your heart and soul into electing them,” but he also insisted they do more than work for the top of the ticket. “We have to undo 20 years of neglecting the Democratic party infrastructure,” he said.

I truly believe that if Howard Dean can be persuaded to take over the chairmanship of the Democratic Party he could change everything. He is really a wholesale politician and as such can actually make the party be more responsive to the grassroots, but even more importantly in my book, he can begin the necessary liberal education project that can change the way this country thinks about politics.

If politicians can win as liberals they will run as liberals. We have some serious work to do to make that possible and it’s going to take more than just saying words that we liberals all like to hear. If Dean can persuade people to run for office at the local level and the state level and begin to change the cultural identification so many Americans feel toward conservative “values based” politics then he will have more long term influence than he would have had as president.

Imagine

Here’s a thought experiment. If Michael Moore had just been dumped by USA Today for writing the words hirsute, somewhat fragrant, red-state pie wagons they call “women” at the Republican National Convention” and was replaced by Al Franken who was all over television as a “commentator,” do you think the Republicans would insist that the mediawhores ask him about it every single time he appeared? Would they demand that he denounce and disavow Moore’s comments and require him to apologize constantly?

Yeah. I thought so.

Stale Re-Runs

I am starting to get the strong feeling that the Republicans have run out of steam. They seem to be reduced to reaching for smear campaigns from the past — Teresa as Hitlery, JFK as Dukakis. Not a lot of creative character assassination going on here and that’s their stock in trade. Do you suppose they’ve just run out of ideas on how to destroy a Democrats’ record and personal history?

This is weak:

GOP Aims to Pull a ‘Dukakis’ on Kerry:

The GOP effort to pull a ‘Dukakis’ on Kerry is shifting into high gear.

In 1988, Republicans were able to turn Michael Dukakis from a Democratic presidential front-runner into a caricature soundly beaten by President Bush (news – web sites)’s father.

Key elements of that transformation were a constant drumbeat of criticism of Dukakis’ alleged ‘liberal record’ as governor of Massachusetts and a photo of Dukakis riding in a tank while wearing a helmet. At the time, Republican strategists for Bush’s father compared the governor in the tank helmet to ‘Rocky the Flying Squirrel.’

Asked the significance of the photo of Kerry in the anti-contamination suit, Republican chairman Ed Gillespie smiled broadly and said, ‘We just thought it was a great photo.’

[…]

“We had Michael Moore in the presidential box, someone who said Americans are stupid,” Coleman said. “Michael Moore sits with President Jimmy Carter in his box. Is that the foreign policy coming out of this convention? Does that demonstrate the party’s commitment to make tough decisions?”

While Republicans praised Clinton’s speech Monday night, they turned on the Democrats Tuesday and claimed they were making false statements about the Bush White House record. The Republicans said Democrats are exaggerating the threats to Social Security (news – web sites), Medicare and a federal program that put extra police on the streets.

“You can say these things with a smile on your face, sound like you have a positive message,” said Texas Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams, adding that statements distorting Bush’s record are “still a falsehood.”

Republicans say Clinton’s successful Monday night speech will make things harder for Kerry on Thursday when he accepts the nomination.

“It’s going to be difficult for Kerry to wrest control of these folks from the thrall of Bill Clinton (news – web sites),” said veteran GOP strategist Rich Galen.

Big Ben

 

Who knew that Ben Affleck was actually articulate and politically savvy? I think a political star may be being born.  The whores are having orgasms — and I’m talking about the straight guys on Chris Matthews’ show. (It isn’t a pretty picture.)

Affleck said that like GWB he’s benefitting from the soft bigotry of low expectations.  But, he’s actually very good.

A  member of the audience asked him what he thought of the F9/11 “My Pet Goat” footage and he said that he thought Bush reacted with horror just as he did when he saw what happened.  But, the footage was disturbing because you would certainly expect your leaders to spring into action when they heard such news. Very nice.

 

Bad Babes

Sam Rosenfeld at the American Prospect online notices the developing controvery that Spite Grrrl Kit Sellye is flogging about remarks Teresa Heinz Kerry made over thirty years ago. This, of course, is on top of the shocking, shocking treatment of that poor editorial writer who has been stalking her for years.

Then earlier, I heard Lil’ Tuckie Carlson reveal the stunning news that Tom Vilsack’s wife Christie made some disturbing remarks a decade ago.

Needless to say, it’s clear that the Mighty Wurlitzer has cranked up the noise to expose those icky, nasty Democratic women. Schneider on CNN did a comparison between the good lil’ woman Laura and the bad bitch Hillary. Apparently, the wives of politicians are not supposed to be political. (To which Abigail Adams rose from the grave and told Schneider to “shove it.”)

I’m guessing there’s been some polling that showed people don’t know quite what to think of Teresa and so they’ve trotted out the standard Hitlery script.

Doesn’t anyone ever get tired of hearing the same old shit?

 

Florida Memories

I have to say that I like all the attention being given to the 2000 election debacle. CNN is showing a lot of footage (even inappropriately during Gore’s speech last night) and I think that helps people remember that Junior got in on a hummer in his baby brother’s state. This is good.

And, I’m sure it’s driving the wingnuts crazy. They hate being reminded that the only way they can win presidential elections anymore is by cheating. (Not that it will stop them from doing what they have to do, of course.)

 

 

Rhetorical Magician

Sidney Blumenthal does a nice job of deconstructing Clinton’s speech and I think gets to the heart of why it worked. Clinton has a natural instinct for framing an argument.

By means of rhetorical alchemy, Clinton transformed himself into no less than Bush: Like Bush, he pointed out that he was a dodger of military service in Vietnam and a rich man gaining lucrative tax benefits instead of sacrificing along with everyone else during a war. Clinton played on Clinton hatred by turning it on its head, a magic act performed with deadpan delivery. The audience was in on the joke from the beginning.

Clinton disdained the very idea of personal attack through a humorous aside: ‘And you might remember that when I was in office, on occasion, the Republicans were kind of mean to me. But as soon as I got out and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them. It was amazing. I never thought I’d be so well cared for by the president and the Republicans in Congress.’ By making himself his own straw man, Clinton could ridicule at will. The greater the self-deprecation, the deeper the stiletto thrust in Bush.

I would be very interested in hearing Clinton’s thoughts on political rhetoric. He’s awfully good at it — and reading the moment in which it’s delivered — and yet I’ve never heard him speak at any length about it. Maybe it’s not something he can actually explain. But, nonetheless, aspiring politicians should definitely study what he does. He’s the best in my lifetime.

And speaking of Clinton, No More Mr Nice Blog helpfully spares me the necessity of writing this post (which I had put off and am now glad I did.) When I read Gary Wills’ generally good review of My Life, I too was astounded by his assertion that had Gore taken office following Clinton’s impeachment and conviction that he would have had a honeymoon and transformed the debate in the liberal direction because that’s what happened to Lyndon Johnson.

Hah! Maybe on the moon, but here on planet earth, Republicans don’t give honeymoons anymore — they go for the jugular. Where does this wide eyed credulity come from?

NMMNB correctly asks:

Is Wills nuts?

Look, you don’t have to believe that the Republicans would have tried to impeach Gore if they’d succeeded in driving Clinton from office — although Wills’s NYRB colleague Elizabeth Drew, unlike Wills a full-time Washington reporter, insisted at the time that that was the case. You just have to look at the GOP’s behavior throughout the Clinton presidency, starting long before the Republicans attained a majority in both Houses of Congress. Alan Ehrenhalt nailed it in a 1998 op-ed:

It was on Election Night 1992, not very far into the evening, that the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, hinted at the way his party planned to conduct itself in the months ahead: it would filibuster any significant legislation the new Democratic President proposed, forcing him to obtain 60 votes for Senate passage.

…it worked. Little that the President proposed became law in the two years that he operated with Democratic majorities. There was no health care reform, no economic stimulus package…. the procedural consequences turned out to be grave: Congressional Republicans were tempted by success into even more dangerous constitutional mischief.

In the fall of 1995, emboldened by new majorities in both the House and the Senate, they forced the closure of the Federal Government. For all the millions of words that have been written about this event then and since, the reality of it has rarely been portrayed in succinct terms. This was not a political showdown — it was an attempted constitutional coup….

And on and on into the serial fishing expeditions that led to Clinton’s impeachment.

I don’t know what is wrong with Gary Wills that he still hasn’t figured it out, but I certainly hope that most Democrats have. The Republican party does not play by any rules. It is foolish to ever think otherwise.

Convention Blog Recommendation

Check out Steve Garfield’s Video Blog. He’s got speeches you don’t get to see on TV, interviews with unusual people and a real insiders look at the convention. It brings to life all those other blogger’s tales of too many people and not enough diet coke. (Notice how much it’s just like any other trade show — the trade being politics instead of software or shoes.)

You can watch a piece of the veteran’s speech by Wesley Clark that I referenced below. It really is a stem-winder.

This is a very original convention blog. I give it two thumbs up!

Too Much Goodness

I think this post by Josh Marshall is very insightful. I’d heard this new theme being thrown about a day or two ago — that Junior has been too successful to win a second term. Why, he might as well as already have had his second term he’s been so ambitious and so successful at achieving his ambitions. Americans are just plain worn out from all that success. They need a break. Once they get their break, though, they’ll be ready for more.

Yeah. After the Democrats clean up all the “successes” they’ve left in huge steaming piles all over the world.

This is actually rather transparently pathetic. As Josh points out:

Rather than taking it on its merits, though, I have a different take on this argument. It’s a rhetorical or logical reasoning halfway house on the way to a realization of how badly the president has screwed up what one might generously call his ambitious plans. As with Kubler-Ross’s grinding five stages of grief, first we have denial. Then anger. And with this argument we have something akin to that tipping-point stage of ‘bargaining’ — the sensible pundits’ first tip-toe out onto a serious consideration of the impact of the president’s term of office.

I think that’s about right. The right-wing pundits went way out on a limb with this guy — even ridiculously comparing him to Churchill and Lincoln. They have to crawl quite a distance to get back down to earth.

 

National Security Democrats

Andrew Sullivan’s impression of the first night of the convention is very interesting. And it’s interesting because he seems genuinely surprised that Democrats are talking about national security and behaving as if they sincerely care about it. He is almost shocked to find that Dems simply think they have a better idea about how to ensure our national security rather than that they just aren’t interested.

Do most Republicans actually believe that Democrats don’t care about their own safety? Has the knee jerk belief in Dem weakness and perfidy gone so far as to now think that we don’t even care about our children’s lives? I suppose it has…

If you listen to nothing but right wing talk you are bound to believe that Democrats are one step away from endorsing bin Laden for president. (Nothing the libertine sex fiends of the Democratic party love more than a fundamentalist theocracy… oh, wait.) We are portrayed as actively hating this country to the point where we would actually wish for more terrorist attacks. Why wouldn’t someone be surprised to see that our party is actually quite serious about national security? We are whining cowards who capitulate at the least little bit of a threat from anyone (which is why we want to take away their guns and their Bibles.)

I’m hoping that Sullivan, who for all his faults is not a cynic, represents a small slice of libertarian and moderate Republicans who can see that the Dems may do better on national security and foreign policy than these wild-eyed radicals. Our seriousness on this issue I have long believed was key — not just to winning the election but to actually beginning to bring this threat under control. Perhaps Kerry’s boring, yet serious image will actually contribute to that notion.