The grandchildren are in bed — the littlest found excuses to get up four times, but he’s good-naturedly settled down now. The girls, a bit older, are settling.
So I’ll take a look at the convention now:
I’m just sitting here hoping Madeleine Albright will say “indispensable nation.” I love it when she does that… pic.twitter.com/dh1NIYbbhs
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) July 27, 2016
But the main event tonight is Bill Clinton, and my expectations are high.
As I said four years ago, his 2012 speech was the best political speech of this young century.
So can he do the same for his wife? He’d better….
I’ll be commenting on Twitter. Maybe I’ll post them below, since so few of y’all do Twitter. Join in if you’d like…
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[caption id="attachment_64937" align="alignnone" width="601"]
Bill Clinton in 2012.[/caption]
Bill got the job done — no question. But his speech didn’t light MY fire the way the one he delivered in 20102 did. Some examples of what THAT one was so awesome, from my Tweets that night four years ago:
I’ve never heard anyone make the case for Barack Obama this well.
As I said — he got the job done tonight. He gave back to Hillary, and Lord knows she deserves it from him. But no. It wasn’t as awesome as 2012.
The awesome thing about the 2012 speech, more than anything, was the communitarianism — “We’re all in this together,” said Elvis back then.
“We’re all in this together,”
I wish I understood what this means in the context of government. It’s certainly not in effect now. Never has been and never will be because, if I think I understand what you mean, everybody does their part. It can’t be just about paying taxes because not everyone does that — and many of those that do, for the most part, would prefer to pay less based on what they see the government do. It can’t be about selfless volunteerism because very, very, few people do that.
So, what makes you a communitarian? What do you do that is different from everyone else? And how is it different from the sentiments expressed in this saying: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.
It means I believe “We’re all in this together.” 🙂
I saw them both, I thought they were both very effective at the job he was trying to do. The 2012 speech had to be different because Clinton didn’t have the personal history component to work with and because she hadn’t won the primary. This time I thought the story telling appropriate. The “Those of us with more yesterdays than tomorrows” line was elegant. As The Donald might say, it was bigly elegant. 🙂
Both Clinton’s and Reagan’s speeches were fascinating to watch when they were President. Both of those guys did an excellent job of getting their respective messages across.
Did Bill humanize Hillary? Eh, I sorta doubt it. I don’t know if Bill is really the guy to carry the water on love, marriage, and commitment. Those issues aren’t really his “core competency”, if you know what I mean.
From a purely objective standpoint, I think Bill would have been more effective talking about his policies from the 90s. Everyone loved the 90s economy, and he has credibility there, whether that’s fair or unfair.
Now, it falls to Obama to give the policy speech. You’re mileage may vary, but if I were Hillary, I’d rather have the policy argument given by Bill, who can charm independents. Obama sort of has this single method of speaking where it’s real grandiose and he gazes into the middle distance heroically when he tells us how great things are nowadays.
If I were Hillary, I’d go with Bill doing his folksy policy stuff that is very relatable.
I don’t really care either way, so this is just my objective thought on the subject. I don’t have a candidate for POTUS running this cycle.
I think it would have sounded pretty boorish for Bill, in the Tuesday night prospective First Lady slot, to have spent the time bragging on his policy successes.
He would have been roundly criticized for putting the spotlight on anyone but Hillary.
Now if OBAMA did that — talking about how great the economy was last time a Clinton was president, and balanced budgets and the like — it might sound better.
Yeah, but not bragging on his successes. He could have talked about how his economic policies are Hillary’s policies, and how her policies are super. He could have focused it on her. He’s a master at talking, don’t tell me he couldn’t do that. But yeah, he would have needed to make it focused on her, not him.
I will be surprised if Obama talks about anyone but himself. How’s he’s done so much and Hillary can continue to change things going forward.
My conservative friends really have a low opinion of POTUS…
Bet you a beer he spends more time on Hillary than himself.
We have a bet! I volunteer to hold the beer…
For this bet to be meaningful, it has to have a quantifiable thing. You want to bet the word “Hillary” (and the associated pronouns) appear more frequently than the word “Obama” (and the associated pronouns)?
If you didn’t start watching until Madeleine Albright, then you missed Steve Benjamin’s uncomfortable little speech sandwiched in between Lena Dunham/America Ferrera and Barbara Boxer. For two minutes he got called up to the big leagues, but he made absolutely no impression. I imagine a lot of the networks just talked over him anyway, though.
Earlier, Mr. Sanders was, despite real problems with the Democratic Party, was patriotic, loyal, and generous enough to energetically call for the “unanimous” vote for Hillary. Then Bill comes on, and humanizes her while lauding her abilities. I think the two of them did a heckova lot to help her.
What is wrong with Bill Clinton, he looks like he’s nearly dead. If you watch it he has tremors in his hands like he has Parkinson’s Disease. If Hillary does win the election I think she’ll be a widow before her term ends.
All in all, I think it’s been a good convention thus far, despite *certain* people’s juvenile antics. Matt Yglesias reports that while some Sanders delegates are young and understandably personally overinvested in the candidate and underinvested in the party, others are old sixties radicals who are playing the same guerrilla theater games that so disgusted me with the left when I was young. Bernie himself had to play a complicated game, throwing red meat to his claque while still bringing them along, and he seems to have done it with most of them, for which I’m grateful (I’m also grateful to Sarah Silverman!).
A word (OK, much more than a word, but this is an issue close to my heart) on the trade issue: I agree that the demonization of TPP is bizarre. Most of the top economists I pay attention to regard its employment impact on this country as minimal; the chief purpose of the treaty is to make sure that the rules of trade in the Pacific region don’t get corrupted by Chinese priorities. The big problem with it is that it seems to be extending what are already overly broad protections for so-called intellectual property beyond our borders; this may be good for Big Entertainment and Big Pharma, but not so good for poor people who need access to cheap drugs. For that reason, people like Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein are on balance leery of the agreement.
But the trade issue is much bigger than TPP. Manufacturing employment in this country fell off a cliff in the first decade of this century; SC lost 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs, 30 percent before the Great Recession even hit. There’s been a rebound since then, but manufacturing employment still hasn’t returned to pre-Great Recession levels as of 2015. New economic work by people such as the MIT economist David Autor has shown that this collapse has a great deal to do with the opening of Chinese competition, and that it has disproportionately hurt small-town and rural labor markets that have difficulty adjusting. It accounts for much of the recent troubling shrinkage of labor-force participation, and may well have a lot to do with the startling rise in mortality among middle-aged working-class whites, among other things.
I’m enough of a neoliberal to believe that globalization is still, on balance, a good thing. It has reduced global human poverty spectacularly–something that, as someone who spends a week every year in Guatemala with some of the poorest people on the planet, greatly appreciate. Moreover, ever since I began studying southern industrialization in my twenties I’ve been convinced that the South’s dependence on low-human-capital industry would be deleterious to its welfare in the long run; it gives me no comfort to have been proven right, but frankly the dominance of the textile industry was a blight of which SC is well rid. But the collapse in manufacturing employment has left in its train a raft of problems that *neither* party has adequately addressed. And now comes Trump–who’s actually addressing them, but in the most godawful way imaginable–by promising that going to war with the rest of the world will restore the lost world of communities underwritten by steady factory jobs that will never come back. Democrats need to come up with a better approach; but they haven’t yet.
Which leads me to the one passage in Bill Clinton’s speech that I actually applauded: “She became the de facto economic development officer for the area outside of New York City. She worked for farmers, for wine-makers, for small businesses and manufacturers. For upstate cities and rural areas that needed more ideas and more new investment to create new jobs. Something we have to do again in small town and rural America, in neighborhoods that have been left behind in our cities, in Indian country, and yes, in coal country.” Bully for him; that’s the Bill Clinton I liked in the 1980s, a guy who realized that the problems of southern development needed to be dealt with in ways that transcended smokestack-chasing. But I wait for delivery each day until 3.
I don’t understand the Elvis deal, Elvis didn’t sleep with nearly as many women.
You’re kidding, right?
Not to cast aspersions on the character of the King, but…
“…but frankly the dominance of the textile industry was a blight of which SC is well rid.” David Carlton
I will take umbrage with your comment David and do so vigorously. Do you have any idea of the number of people in South Carolina and across the country who depended on the textile industry to earn a living? Do you have any concept of what it takes to produce one garment from developing the fibers that are turned into thread and then woven into a fabric that is then used to produce a garment, sheets, towels, and hundreds of other products made of cloth, natural or synthetic? Do you?
No, all some see is a cut and sew operation with mostly women sitting at a sewing machine for 8 to 10 hours a day earning low wages. What most who have never been involved with the industry do not realize that most of the cut and sew operations had incentives to make production that paid more than the minimum wage. And, for so many who did not have an education and wanted to work, these “lowly” jobs provided just that, work and income. I know first hand because my Mom worked in the textile industry for several years and her income went a long way to help support us along with our Dad’s income. And, I spent a few years in the industry and can speak from experience that the industry was destroyed by NAFTA, Republicans and Democrats alike.
Consider how many chemical companies produced the basic products that went into synthetic fabrics so that were essential to the garment and textile industry and consider the fact that most of them were not located in South Carolina but scattered across the nation. Consider how many textile related industries were located in major cities like New York and other fashion centers. How do you think the fabrics and garments were transported from the chemical plants to the plants that made the thread that made the fabric that made the garment or product that took the product to a distribution center and then to a retail outlet? It was not just the cut and sew plants that closed down or was affected, it encompassed a wide range of businesses as well.
Yes, some took advantage of the employees but most did not and if one was willing to work, they could earn a decent wage and most received some benefits along the way.
“She worked for farmers, for wine-makers, for small businesses and manufacturers.” Wine-makers? Really? I am throwing a red flag on that line of BS and BS is exactly what it is. Not throwing the red flag on you but on Bill Clinton and his bogus claim about Hillary.
Neither one, Bill or Hillary, has created one job for a blue collar worker unless one considers janitorial work, setting up chairs for a speech, and serving wine (the product of the wine-makers she helped 🙁 ) as the equivalent of “creating meaningful employment” for all the poor souls who don’t get one damn penny from the Clinton Global Initiave bought and paid for by speeches and donations from dubious characters across the globe.
I hold Trump to the same standard as I do Hillary which is setting the bar at least 6 inches in the ground so don’t think I am a Trump supporter. Words are actually failing me when trying to describe this man and the extreme danger he poses if he actually wins. And he just might because the public dislikes both so much, neither one has a favorable rating over 30% and Clinton is not saying anything any better that we can trust. Pathetic.
Take this how you will but it really ticks me off when elitist comments are made about how great it is that the textile industry has disappeared from the American scene are made in complete arrogance and ignorance.