Where Were You Four Years Ago?
Josh Marshall was dead on. Kerry was on fire last night.
This is not taking away from Bill Clinton who could not have delivered more. Bill Clinton didn’t just throw his support behind Obama, he offered a full throated endorsement. There was a lot good in Clinton’s speech, but the bit that really stuck was when he brought up Obama’s inexperience and youth, and all the animosity, all the tension, everything was driven away in two words; “Sound familiar?”
Bill knocked it out of the park.
Nor is this to detract from Joe Biden, who also knocked it out of the park. Joe, introduced by his son, provided a complete image of himself. Watching his mother watch Joe accept the vice presidential nomination is one of those moments that you want to kind of capture and save in a box you keep in your closet and pull out every once in a while just because.
And Joe showed why he was picked, doing what I have been wanting the Obama campaign to do for a while now, and not just make the foreign policy argument, but actually start hitting the McCain campaign over and over again that Obama makes a call on foreign policy, and eventually he gets proven right. Watch:
But I’m sorry, Kerry wasn’t on fire last night, he was fire last night.
If this was the John Kerry that ran for president four years ago, we would be working on his re-election. There’s no question about it.
It’s Official: Barack Obama Is the First African-American Presidential Nominee
Thank you, Hillary Clinton:
Although there was some suspense over how the nomination process would play out, in the end, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton released her delegates before the roll call to vote for Mr. Obama and announced that she was voting for Mr. Obama and his running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware.
At the urging of Mrs. Clinton, the New York delegation cast its votes for Mr. Obama, and at 4:48 p.m. local time, Mrs. Clinton called on the Democratic National Convention to end the roll call and nominate him by acclamation.
“With eyes firmly fixed on the future in the spirit of unity, with the goal of victory, with faith in our party and country, let’s declare together in one voice, right here and right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president,” Mrs. Clinton said.
“I move that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois be selected by this convention by acclamation as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.”
Why Tonight is the Most Important Night of the Convention
The big name speeches tonight are going to be the new Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden, and former President Bill Clinton; that’s a big enough billing alone to indicate the importance of the night. But the mere star power is not what will make this the most important night of the convention.
Democrats, Ready Your Breakfast and Eat Hardy…#DNC08
If you think Hillary was hitting on all cylinders, tonight we get Bubba and Biden.
This Ain’t the 2004 Convention
I want to make this dead clear. If you think this is going to be a repeat of the hands off 2004 convention, if you think that we’re in danger of repeating the same mistake the Kerry campaign made four years ago, you obviously didn’t watch Governor Brian Schweitzer’s speech last night.
Let me fix that for you.
The Speech of a Lifetime
As I and about every other armchair political analyst out there pointed out yesterday, the expectations for Hillary Clinton’s speech were astronomical, the standards she had to meet were stratospheric, and she would need wings to accomplish the lofty and often mutually exclusive tasks set before her.
Thankfully, Mrs. Clinton apparently already knows how to fly.
Hillary Clinton Speech Liveblog
Well, Mrs. Clinton should be taking the stage in just a little while, and so I’m getting a jump and setting things up for the liveblogging now. Just like our debate liveblogs through the primary cycle, we’re going to do our liveblogging in the comments section so everyone is not only free to join, but actually encouraged to do so.
All we ask is that you keep your language relatively clean, and be respectful.
So, we’re going to go ahead and try and cover both Hillary Clinton’s and Mark Warner’s speeches. I hope you’ll join us!
A Little Liveblogging Anyone?
Okay, last minute announcement. I just got chatting with Mike who’s making his way home now. It’s looking like we’re going to liveblog Hillary’s speech, and maybe we’ll cover Mark Warner, so keep your eyes out, I’ll be putting up the liveblogging post here in just a few minutes.
The Attack Women of the Democratic Party UPDATE I
Well, for any of you who thought that the Democratic convention was in danger of turning into a Kerry-esque lovefest, I think it was just made clear about a half hour ago that would not be the case. Interestingly enough, it was Janet Napolitano who was leading the charge.
McCain Uses Hillary Clinton’s 3 a.m. Ad To Attack Obama
Just as we all knew he would, McCain has picked up Hillary Clinton’s 3 a.m. ad to attack Obama’s foreign policy experience:
Denver: Love and…
About last night…
The general consensus of last night was that Michelle knocked her speech out of the park. There seems to be little regarding anything else.
There is no try Begala, only do
Um, sorry to be blunt but no shit Begala.
I have a suggestion, how about you forgoe what I assume is a hefty “consulting” fee and help your party do just that instead of standing on the sidelines sniping.
More Proof McCain is Unhinged…
His senior foreign policy adviser lobbied against stopping terrorists from buying guns. No I am not kidding.
Newsweek reports that, according to registration documents filed by Scheuenemann’s lobbying firm, Orion Strategies, Scheunemann lobbied on behalf of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) against a bill that aims to close a gun-control loophole that inhibits the government from stopping people on terrorist watch-lists from buying guns.
Is Leach the Canary in the GOP Coal Mine?
Living in Canuckistan has it’s down sides, one of which is the lack of US news coverage in the evening pacific time. I had only two televised choices to catch up on the goings-on at the Democratic National Convention last night, MSNBC’s replay of the events or CNN’s whatever the hell it is CNN thinks they are doing. As you can imagine I chose the former and as such was left with only the highlights of Michelle Obama’s and Ted Kennedy’s speechs. Lucky for me, CSPAN has fantastic online coverage of the convention (insert shameless plug for one of our blogads here) and I was able to catch what seems to me to be the most underreported story of day one, Jim Leach’s GOP defection speech.
“A Flamethrower in a Fireworks Factory”
That’s what a John McCain presidency would be, according to Glasgow Herald political correspondent Iain MacWhirter:
One Last Magnificent Performance
Despite Politico’s rather breathless article today touting what it claims are tensions “boiling” between Hillary and Bill Clinton and their top supporters, I suspect it’s overplayed. The tone of the piece — starting with the overheated title (”Exclusive: Obama-Clinton Feud Reignites”) and continuing with Jim VandeHei’s stern video warning “Don’t buy it [claims of unity]; there is soooo much tension still between these two candidates.” — is that of a sportscaster at a hotly contested World Series game — or, as TBogg puts it, like the Gossip Girls “reporting from the lockers by the girls gym … three days before the prom.”
BooMan focuses on the reports of Bill Clinton’s unhappiness with the assigned topic for his convention speech on Wednesday:
I don’t doubt that Bill is having a harder time reconciling himself to the primary loss than Hillary. Hillary was not impeached. It was Bill that had the great emotional need for redemption and acceptance that a restoration would bring. It must be painful for him to realize that there will be no full redemption. In some ways, Bill Clinton is a partly innocent victim of the failures of the Democratic Party as an opposition party during the Bush years.
He’s only partly innocent because it was his wing of the party that was the most egregiously spineless and accommodating. To use but one example, it was Lanny Davis (as the only Democrat serving on President Bush’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Board) who gave the administration a clean bill of health on their warrantless wiretapping programs.
The Bush administration’s poor stewardship of the economy and their atrocious foreign policy have both served to highlight the weaknesses in the Clinton Administration’s policies, while squandering or reversing the strengths. This, too, has done lasting (and not fully deserved) damage to the Clinton legacy. Bill Clinton is very disturbed by the tarnish on his record, and he’s frustrated that he won’t have the opportunity to work on buffing it to a new shine.
But, if you think about it, the best, and perhaps last, opportunity to repair the damage will be in his speech at the convention. A gracious and effective speech can do wonders. Remember Al Gore’s concession speech in 2000? That’s the kind of template Bill Clinton should be looking at when he thinks about the impression he wants to leave for posterity. I know Bill Clinton has one last magnificent performance left in him. I hope he seizes the chance.
Amen to that.
DNC ‘08 Tweet Watch: Baiting Bill Donohue Edition
Trojan, the condom manufacturer, has set up shop near the press mags. They’re handing out condoms.