Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
While it's too early to start choosing Cabinet positions, Democratic strategists say the "fundamentals" of the race favor Kerry. In a pre-convention memo to Democrats, pollster Stan Greenberg and strategist James Carville said that a desire to "change the dynamics surrounding the economy and Iraq" will "likely leave Bush at grave risk of defeat."
It's not clear whether this week's convention -- or next month's Republican Convention in New York -- will have much effect on what Greenberg and Carville call the "stable" nature of this presidential race. Instant polls will be out in the next few days, and the press will focus on whether Kerry's convention "bounce" was big enough. For weeks, the rival campaigns have been playing the expectations game: Bush-Cheney predicts a huge bounce, setting the Democrats up for the appearance of failure; Kerry-Edwards predicts a tiny bounce, setting themselves up to declare that even a minor bump in the polls shows that Americans are finally getting comfortable with John Kerry.
Even before the convention began, the media decided that nothing of interest could happen in Boston. They weren't entirely wrong. By and large, Democrats have remained safely "on message" -- talking up Kerry's "stronger at home, respected in the world" theme and criticizing the Bush record more often with humor than rancor. This was not the Democrats' version of the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston, when Pat Buchanan declared a "culture war" from the podium. There were flashes of appropriate anger in Boston, but nothing that begs to be cut and pasted into a Republican campaign ad about how Democrats are out of touch with the mainstream. Al Gore didn't roar, and Howard Dean didn't scream; he read the climax of his speech "you have the power, you have the power, you have the power" -- like he was reading a grocery list.
With no easy targets for right-wing outrage, Republicans and their talking-head friends zeroed in on a couple of "controversial" moments -- Teresa Heinz Kerry's "shove it" comment, Al Sharpton's anti-Bush rave-up Wednesday night -- and a silly photograph of John Kerry in something that looked like a bunny suit.
Thursday afternoon on the Fleet Center's "Radio Row," DNC chair Terry McAuliffe talked with reporters after taping a segment for Sean Hannity's show. McAuliffe could barely speak, his voice hoarse after a week of schmoozing donors and spinning reporters, so his aides didn't want him to talk. But a reporter got in a single question -- not about the Democrats' chances in November, not about the speech Kerry was about to give, not about the suspiciously timed announcement of the arrest of an al-Qaida suspect in Pakistan. "Yesterday at the Schubert Theater," the reporter shouted, "Alec Baldwin said the Republican Party was 'hijacked by fundamentalist wackos.' ... How do you react to him using that kind of speech at a DNC-sponsored event?"
With boom mics hanging overhead and reporters dutifully taking down every word, McAuliffe said that Alec Baldwin could speak for himself. "You know what? Dick Cheney went on the floor of the U.S. Senate and told a senator to go 'blank' himself, so you know, I'm sorry, I'm not going to get too outraged about Alec Baldwin when the incumbent vice president of the United States of America uses language I can't use in front of my five children."
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said the focus on trivia reflects the desperation the Republicans are feeling in the wake of a successful Democratic Convention. "You know that the Republicans are nervous when they go after Teresa Heinz for saying 'shove it' to somebody or John Kerry for appearing in an outfit. They are trying desperately to change the subject away from what's on Americans' minds."
And anyway, Reich said, it wouldn't be a Democratic Convention if people didn't speak their minds, at least sometimes. "With the Republican Party, everybody marches in lockstep. Well, we never do. We are not authoritarian by nature. We are not that disciplined."
That might be true of the Democrats generally, but it's not the case with the Kerry campaign. The campaign vetted the speech of every convention speaker, removing words and phrases that didn't align with the official message. One example: Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell told Salon on Thursday the Kerry campaign deleted from his speech a line where he would have said the Bush administration's energy policy was written "by big oil and for big oil." "I didn't think that was so harsh," Rendell said, and in fact Kerry said things much harsher. In a line that would have made Michael Moore proud, Kerry said that he wants "an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation" and not on "the Saudi royal family." But no matter, Rendell's line was deleted.
The speech the Kerry campaign loaded into the teleprompter for Sharpton was short and passion-free; the printout of the Charlie Rangel speech the campaign distributed to reporters didn't include his riff about being "mad as hell." Sharpton and Rangel were freelancing; virtually everyone else toed the Kerry line, on stage and off.
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