Sen. Ted Kennedy made gave a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention tonight and did in about 10 minutes what it’s taken his party all summer to do: Give life to its general election message.
Kennedy is the heart of the liberalism that has defined the Democratic Party for 75 years. He’s referred to as the “lion” of the Senate—not only by virtue of the nine terms he’s spent in America’s highest lawmaking body, which make him the third-longest serving senator in the body, but also by virtue of his indefatigable determination, even in the face of a malignant brain tumor that has forced him into experimental treatment and has kept him out of the Senate for most of the past four months, to have a leading role in this history-making convention.
According to the talking heads narrating the event for us, convention organizers weren’t sure, even in the last few minutes leading up to the speech, whether Kennedy would be strong enough to deliver his remarks. CNN reported that Kennedy’s family had arranged for him to have a chair or stool of some sort available while he spoke.
As he did with the advice of his doctors who had advised him not to travel to Denver, he pushed it away.
On the heels of an emotional video tribute that recounted the service of and his relationship with his three older brothers—one of whom was killed in World War II, the other two of whom were assassinated before the world—Kennedy took the stage with all the vigor of a healthy man, determined to deliver a message that would bring the leaders of his party to their feet.
And he did.
Kennedy delivered a speech stamped with the Kennedy trademark, direct in its tone and heavy with the happy burdens of moral obligations that he believes Americans owe one another. But what was most remarkable about it, in the mind and eye of this humble blogger, was the reaction the party faithful had to it.
Here they have one of their longest-serving senators, the last living member of the generation of brothers that gave America two war heros, three United States senators, an attorney general and a president of the Unitest States. He is aged; he is ailing. Convention delegates knew, even as they watched an animated Kennedy fire away in vintage style, this is likely the last opportunity they’ll have as a party to thank him for his lifetime of service to their cause and their country.
For me, as a 31-year-old political observer who only has first-hand knowledge of one of those Kennedy brothers, it was almost surreal to watch. I have studied the lives of his brothers since even before I was an adult; the disquietude I felt, even as a 10-year-old, as I stood in Dealey Plaza was as deep then as it is unforgettable today. But there was something about watching Ted Kennedy tonight that, for the first time, made me feel that I had experienced some part of that famous Kennedy mystique.
Regardless of what you think of their politics (and virtually no one is tepid when it comes to their politics), the Kennedys are an American political institution. Their impact on this nation cannot be overstated. Their involvement in public service, in politics, in governance and in affecting change on so many issues throughout the last 50 years leaves a legacy that is unmatched in modern American history.
Kennedy used the final paragraph of his speech to signal a sea change in Democratic politics. Not only did he hand the leadership mantle of leadership of the party to Barack Obama and his generation, but in doing so, in the words of Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, he bypassed another American political family that at one time had seemed to be heir to that mantle: Bill and Hillary Clinton.
And Kennedy channeled his late brother, the president, as he did it:
This November, the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans. So, with Barack Obama and for you and for me, our country will be committed to his cause. The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on.
It was one of those moments for which conventions are still useful: The very weight of history unfolding before your eyes.
See also:
The transcript, audio and video of President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural Address, which included this famous statement:
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
(FULL DISCLOSURE ALERT! I am one of Phelps’ nearly 1.4 million Facebook “fans”—but I’m a bigger fan of another guy named Phelps.)
Michael Phelps isn’t yet 35, the constitutional age floor for executive office, but it’s never too early to wonder: Would a Phelps candidacy, and his 30-second spots of a different, more commercial kind, rekindle the Fairness Doctrine debate?
And we’re not even talking about those ubiquitous, iconic Wheaties boxes ...
If Michael Phelps wants a future in politics, it’s his for the taking—he could swim to victory on waves of earned media.
With all those gold medals, he’d be a consultant’s fondest dream.
From the With Friends Like This, Who Needs Enemies file:
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell had a message for Democratic convention goers Sunday, even though it came in an interview with USA Today:
“Yeah, she wants to run again,“ Rendell said Sunday morning.
“She,“ of course, is Hillary Clinton, and let’s just put it this way: He wasn’t announcing her participation in a charity 5K.
Rendell detailed his thoughts on how Clinton became more at ease on the campaign trail as the primary season wore on. And he added some commentary on Barack Obama’s newly minted VP pick, Joe Biden:
“Joe is only known by political insiders, by the eastern half of Pennsylvania and by Delaware,“ Rendell said. “That’s his base.“
But Rendell said Americans would quickly warm up to the “straight talker” once they learn more about him. Rendell said Biden’s credentials on foreign policy, his ability to work the “middle of the road” politically and even his propensity to speak very bluntly will help Obama, an Illinois Democrat, in the end.
“Even his mistakes, you shake your head and you have a tendency to say ‘Gosh,‘ “ Rendell said. “But that’s Joe.“
Are they painting Biden and his penchant for eyebrow-raising sound bites as the political equivalent of “Manny being Manny?“
Anyway, Rendell was delivering a clear message to Democrats, and it’s no coincidence his comments were made on the eve of the convention: Don’t get too worked up about Obama; Hillary isn’t going anywhere.
Whoo hoo! A ringing endorsement for party unity! I can just see convention participants now, barrelling down the streets to spread the good news of Obama-Biden ‘08.
Check out this iReport video sent in to CNN by someone on the streets of Denver outside the Democratic National Convention. Pay particular attention to the last line captured by the video:
CNN identifies the man on the left as Mitch Mallett of Florida—Manatee County, Florida, to be exact—where I was born and raised and where I worked in politics until moving to Auburn in July 2006.
Mitch Mallett sells pre-paid legal services and is a member of the Manatee County Democratic Executive Committee. He also hosts a radio show on WWPR 1490 AM. He calls the show, “It’s Your Gavel,“ and he calls himself “The Practical Liberal.“ His tag line is, “Remember, Every Gavel is a Mallett, but not every Mallett is a Gavel. It’s Your Gavel, you have the power, you be the Judge, you decide.“
Um ... ok.
On his web site, Mallett offers thoughtful, in-depth political analysis, like, “President, the war isn’t about you — or golf” and “Go To Hell Mr. President…& Shut The Hell UP!“!“
The banner across his web site borrows a quote from President Clinton: “When people ask you why you’re a Democrat, say, ‘Because I believe in equal opportunity, shared responsibility, and an inclusive community.‘ And I think politics should be used to put people first.“
So, just to review, Mitch Mallett calls himself a “practical liberal” who believes in “an inclusive community.“
That brings us back to the video.
Did you catch that last line? It’s Mallett, rhetorically asking his companions with incredulity as he dismisses the Hillary Clinton-supporting Independent before him, “But you’re not even Democrat, so why’re we talking to her?“
Yes, it is very practical to alienate Independents—especially women who supported Hillary Clinton. And dismissing voters’ concerns because they don’t have a D after their names? That’s the very definition of inclusiveness.
Mitch Mallett: Practical, inclusive liberal.
I’m guessing Barack Obama is hoping the rest of his fellow Democrats have a wider definition of that phrase.
Well, it’s been 48 hours since the world learned that Barack Obama was going with Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate.
(As an aside, I want you to know that I NEVER DID get that text message from Obama that was supposed to make me one of “the first to know.“ I actually found out from CNN’s John King just before 1 a.m. Saturday. I did, however, get an e-mail from Barack ... at 9:15 a.m., fully six and a quarter hours after his campaign sent the text message confirming the news. I wonder: Did the campaign have technical difficulties with its new database? Or did it just purge the numbers it couldn’t match with donors to ensure that only supporters are on the list? The latter wouldn’t be a bad idea.)
Anyway, the pick seems to have most Democrats and Republicans alike scratching their heads. On one hand, it doesn’t seem surprising in hindsight that Obama would go with someone like himself: After all, Biden is a blustery fellow who is known for his—shall we say, expansive oratorical reputation. We got a glimpse of that in Biden’s speech on Saturday. But on the other hand, the pick seemed to befuddle Democrats who appeared to have trouble explaining it—especially when John McCain’s campaign was at the ready with an ad using Biden’s own words against Obama and complimenting McCain.
As to the most notable objection to Biden’s selection, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano gave the best retort I’ve heard to how a candidate of change can credibly run with a candidate who’s spent 35 years in the Senate:
Oh, this is the way I interpret it, which is Obama is perfectly capable of effecting change. And what he is doing is picking someone to be with him that can help him accomplish that change.
And someone who can help him accomplish that change is someone like Senator Biden, who’s been chair of two of the most influential committees in the Senate, who is very knowledgeable in the fields of foreign relations, in particular, to help him accomplish the change that he seeks.
Well put. But I still don’t know whether that explanation will fly. I tend to agree with Ron Fournier’s analysis for the Associated Press:
The picks say something profound about Obama: For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn’t beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative - a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.
CNN’s Ed Hornick writes that Obama’s selection of Biden brings “old-school cred” (credibility) to the ticket. But that statement seems to hinge on Biden’s chairmanships of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees and his criticisms of the Bush Administration’s foreign policies—“most notably the war in Iraq,“ Hornick writes—even though Biden voted for that war.
I’ve held off on writing about this because I wanted to give myself some time to digest the pick before I went off analyzing it on the blog. So after watching the roll-out for myself on Saturday and hearing folks from all sides on different cable TV channels and reading stuff on the web and thinking about it myself, I have to give the Biden selection ...
... a C-minus.
On the plus side, Obama gets that foreign relations experience that everyone has complained he lacks. But the weight of that “experience” is countered by the fact that Biden, while he’s chaired those committees and questioned witnesses and (presumably) had access to national security information—including intelligence—he still voted for the War in Iraq.
Here’s why that’s a big deal: Obama’s dig against McCain (and, incidentally, against Hillary Clinton in the primary) was that even though they had more years in the Senate than he did, he had better judgment than they did when it came to Iraq. Judgment trumps experience, Obama said, and Obama had better judgment, McCain’s and Clinton’s experience notwithstanding.
Now Obama is running with someone who actually has more experience than McCain, yet still demonstrated the same judgment as McCain?
So which is it, Obama? Judgment or experience? You’re giving us mixed signals here.
And to that point, I think it’s worth noting that the Obama-Biden ticket boasts exactly zero executive experience. It’s one thing to sit on a committee and ask questions, or to take a government-funded trip to another part of the world, or to hold press conferences to attack America’s foreign policy. It’s something else entirely to have to appoint those people who are questioned, to make those policies that are critiqued and to have to make those decisions yourself.
It may be that the McCain ticket ends up with no executive experience (if McCain picks odds-on favorite and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, it won’t)—and if it does, it will be worth mentioning again.
If we’re just looking at demographics (and you know how much I hate doing this—it’s like a science project), Biden does give Obama help with working-class white Catholic voters in places like Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Michigan and Ohio and all the other places where Clinton wiped Obama out, sometimes by 40 points or more. But, again, while Biden presumably shores up the North, he isn’t going to help at all in the South.
Did you know that until Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue was sworn in in January 2003, the Peach State hadn’t had a Republican governor since 1872? No, that’s not a typo—it really had been since 1872. And North Carolina’s current governor, Mike Easley, is a Democrat; the Tarheel State has only had three GOP chiefs since January 1877.
I only say that to say, you can’t capitalize on opportunities like those—you can’t make Georgia and North Carolina competitive—with a guy like Joe Biden, even if he is from Scranton, Pa.
Finally, with regard to Saturday’s roll-out, I have to give it a C-minus, as well. (I would go with the dreaded D designation, but, hey—the weather was good.) Obama’s speech was all over the map. He did a fairly good job of delineating Biden’s personal story, but he never did seem comfortable or seem to find his groove. And what was with him slipping up and introducing Biden as “the next president ... vice president of the United States?“ That sort of slip is completely uncharacteristic of Obama, and that reinforces the notion that there was something amiss that kept him from being able to relax.
And then you had Biden himself. His one great moment Saturday was the line about how McCain didn’t have to sit around the kitchen table wondering about his budget; McCain’s hardest decision is “which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at,“ he said to raucous applause. And the pundits have acknowledged that Obama has in Biden a willing and quite capable attack dog. But from the moment he appeared from his self-imposed exile after receiving the call from Obama Thursday night that he was the guy, he just seemed to be trying too hard to fit. He jogged up the stairs and across the platform. He crowed about how “drop-dead gorgeous” his wife, Jill, is. (Sweet, yes; appropriate, no.) He referred to Obama as “Barack America,“ for goodness’ sake. That’s not going to help people who are already concerned about Obama’s perceived Obama-centric ego.
I read Dana Milbank’s Washington Post piece from back in 2006 where Milbank documented the boredom that permeated the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings on Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court. When it was his turn to question the justice-to-be (Alito’s confirmation was all but assured), Biden blabbered on and on, asking but one lone question in the first 12 minutes of his allotted 30. For all his opposition to a filibuster, Biden ended up filibustering—himself.
And then there was that day last year when Biden himself announced for president. You would think that a guy known as much for talking as Biden is would be right at home with the press on the day when it is all about him. Alas, no; Biden found himself backtracking on his remarks about Obama and even calling his rival to apologize—and all this before the sun had set on his very first day in the race.
This has to have become one of the most oft-repeated passages on the Web this weekend, but I think there’s a good reason for it: Peggy Noonan wrote about Biden in the midst of those Alito hearings:
The great thing about Joe Biden during the Alito hearings, the reason he is, to me, actually endearing, is that as he speaks, as he goes on and on and spins his long statements, hypotheticals, and free associations—as he demonstrates yet again, as he did in the Roberts hearings and even the Thomas hearings, that he is incapable of staying on the river of a thought, and is constantly lured down tributaries from which he can never quite work his way back—you can see him batting the little paddles of his mind against the weeds, trying desperately to return to the river but not remembering where it is, or where it was going. I love him. He’s human, like a garrulous uncle after a drink.
Noonan meant her comments as a compliment of sorts. She could not have known it then, but she may have provided the best description of the iceberg that now looms before Obama’s titanic ambition.
The bottom line is that, as Fournier said, Joe Biden talks too much. In handicapping the ticket this weekend, one pundit estimated that there will be four separate times in the next 11 weeks when Biden will “open mouth, insert foot.“ (I wonder if these odds-makings will turn into some secret drinking game among national political reporters and watchers.)
Isn’t there some irony in the possibility that, for all the shine and glamour and the almost other-worldliness quality Barack Obama and his grand speeches have elicited, his campaign for the White House could be derailed by a well-meaning but clumsy-tongued sidekick?
