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Michelle Obama: Barack needs four
more years
The
Democratic Party's convention opened on Tuesday
evening in Charlotte, North Carolina with a
one-two punch. First there was a rousing attack on
Mitt Romney's idea of American progress by Julian
Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, among others.
Then came that warm, loving portrait of Barack
Obama by his wife Michelle - the person who may
just be the best politician in the US right now.
J BROOKS SPECTOR was up before dawn to
watch the speeches and reflect on how they might
impact the race for the Oval Office.
Following the Republican party convention
in Tampa, Florida that
formally nominated Mitt
Romney and Paul Ryan as their candidates (with a
party platform whose positions are often a sop to
the Tea Party wing of their party) and which gave
their candidates only a very modest bump upward in
the polls, the Democrats came out guns blazing at
theirs. In an effort to parry the Republicans'
rallying cry to voters to ask themselves, "after
voting for Barack Obama in 2008, are you better
off now than you were four years ago?" the
incumbent president's party put the spotlight on
several of its best politician orators and their
servings of red meat to the partisan crowd. These
included former Ohio governor Ted Strickland,
Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, Newark mayor
Cory Booker, a reach back from beyond the grave
with a virtual Ted Kennedy, Maryland governor
Martin O'Malley, and San Antonio mayor Julian
Castro as keynote speaker.
Aside from Ted
Kennedy's video archival rip of Mitt Romney's
views on the "right to life" versus "women's right
to choose" from their race for Kennedy's old
senate seat (Mitt Romney's policy views are
multi-choice, Kennedy had retorted), Strickland
(or his speech doctor) probably deserves the blue
ribbon for the single best one-liner: "If Mitt
Romney was Santa Claus, he would have fired the
reindeer and outsourced the elves."
Overall, though, Julian Castro's keynote
speech also lived up to its advance billing. His
heartfelt tribute to the sacrifices his
grandmother and mother had made for him so he and
his twin brother (himself running for Congress in
the election) could reach for their educational
and political dreams, set up his key moment in
which he could aver that the American dream is not
just a sprint or a marathon. Rather it is a relay
race in which one generation passes on its dreams,
aspirations and better opportunities to the
generation that follows. That of course came in
tandem with Castro's jibe that if Mitt Romney had
but to ask dad for his university tuition, Castro
could say (on behalf of millions of other
Americans without Romney's familial resources),
"Say, now why didn't I think of that!" Castro
whipped up the crowd with gospel-style call and
response - shouting out each Romney position
Democrats disagree with, then getting the crowd to
enter into the spirit of the thing with a vigorous
"Mitt Romney said… No!"
The highlight of
the evening, however, was Michelle Obama's
personal tribute to her husband as a warm, caring
man - "a man we can trust" - who feels the
personal impact of the nation's travails and his
hard policy choices. Moreover, her husband's
actions and feelings as president derive from the
background and grounding in authentic, holistic
values learned from grandparents - just as she had
imbibed them from her own parents, their modest
circumstances and their strict code of hard work,
education and devotion to family. Michelle Obama
recalled her early dates with the future president
when he had met her driving a clapped-out, skedonk
car complete with holes right through the door
panels and whose coffee table in his flat had been
rescued from a rubbish tip.
Even cynical
commentators on TV networks found themselves
gushing over her speech - regardless of their
feelings for the candidate - saying she could
certainly have a successful career in politics if
she chose to do so. Her public standing represents
an extraordinary evolution to national admiration
for her work with children's health and military
families, light years from the strident image
portrayed in that infamous 2008 New Yorker article
that depicted her as an Angela Davis look-alike,
giving a fist bump to a husband in full Taliban
irregular regalia, right in the White House's Oval
Office.
Running through most of this first
night's speeches (and indeed from the Republican
convention onward) is a debate over the meaning of
the country's less than inspiring economic
statistics. Republicans argue the country has over
12 million unemployed and has lost some 5 million
jobs during Obama's watch. Democrats reply that
coming off the economic and financial meltdown and
near free-fall in the wake of the banking
collapse, some 4.5 million new jobs have been
created during the Obama administration - and
besides, a million's worth of the losses came from
local/state/federal job losses as the economic
crunch forced budget cuts in many jurisdictions.
Similarly Democrats now argue, if
unemployment is now standing at around 8.3%, this
is still lower than the figure of around 10% that
prevailed at the height of the economic crisis
that spun out of the financial freeze-up. However,
the economic statistics coming out now make it
very unlikely the president will be able to claim
any kind of meaningful economic turnaround by
election day.
In the best of
circumstances, the Democrats will be able to focus
discussion on these numbers to shape a message -
and a resulting political impetus - to let him
"finish the job", and shift much of the blame to
the Republican House of Representatives for
obstructing the stimulus policies that might have
made a difference.
Perhaps this will boil
down to how two competing slogans will become the
bedrock for the rest of the campaign - and the
subtext for the presidential and vice presidential
debates that come in October. On the one hand,
Republicans argue to undecided voters that they
should ask themselves if they are better off now
than they were four years ago. As Wednesday's
Financial Times wrote, "Mr Obama has struggled to
find a coherent economic message on the campaign
trail, coming under renewed attack on Tuesday for
his comment in a TV interview on Monday that he
would give himself an 'incomplete grade' over the
economy. 'If President Obama can't even give
himself a passing grade, why would the American
people give him another four years?' said a
spokeswoman for Mitt Romney, his Republican
challenger."
In response, Democrats answer
(as vice president Joe Biden did the other day)
that their bumper sticker must now read: "Osama
bin Laden is dead but General Motors lives" - a
twofer that attempts to speak to the Obama
administration's success in foreign policy and
international security as well as a rescue of the
economy and the auto industry from imminent
collapse.
Wednesday and Thursday will
bring more rhetorical moments as former president
Bill Clinton does his star turn, the vice
president accepts his re-nomination as the
Democrats' vice presidential candidate and the
president then gives his own acceptance speech on
Thursday to wrap up the proceedings. Then the
pollsters and spin-doctors watch to see if the
Democrats get a bounce in the polling from the
euphoria of their convention. According to the
latest polls, at the national level the two
candidates are now in a statistical dead heat with
just a small number of people telling pollsters
they are undecided. Crucial to remember, of
course, is that the election hinges on winning the
electoral votes state by state, not the popular
vote nationally. This will play out most pointedly
with a diminishing number of still-uncommitted
voters in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia,
New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Colorado, the states
which probably hold the key to this election. DM
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article is run courtesy of Daily Maverick. To
visit their site, please click here.
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