Delaware Liberal

Thursday Open Thread [7.28.16]

Delaware Dem

Andrew Sullivan on Obama’s speech:

It’s been a long and entirely unexpected journey with this extraordinary figure. I’ve doubted and panicked, I’ve hyper-ventilated and wept, I’ve worried and persevered. We did a lot of that together, you and me. But I have one thing to say: he never let us down. He kept his cool, he kept his eyes on the prize, he never embarrassed and almost always lifted us up. He is a living, walking example of American exceptionalism, of why this amazing country can still keep surprising the world.

Readers know how I feel about the Clintons. But this is not about them or me. It’s about an idea of America that is under siege and under attack from a foul, divisive, dangerous demagogue. If you backed Obama, there is no choice in this election but Clinton. This is not a election to seek refuge in a third party or to preen in purist disdain from the messy, often unsatisfying duties of politics. It is an election to keep the America that Obama has helped bring into being, and the core democratic values that have defined this experiment from the very beginning: self-government, not rule by a strongman; pluralism and compassion rather than nativism and fear; an open embrace of the world, and not a terrified flight from it.

But you know what Obama gave us tonight? He gave some of us hope. Again. That’s what he does. And we will never see his like again.

Barack Obama is the best President of the life of anyone who is reading these words. It is simply an undisputed fact. Most certainly the best President since Roosevelt, there are not many of us here were alive for FDR. If not for the Constitution, I would vote for this man three to four times.

Dylan Matthews has the winners and losers from Day 3 of the DNC—Winners: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Dad Jokes (Tim Kaine reference)–Losers: Rahm Emanuel, Michael Bloomberg, Doves, Pro-gun Democrats. His comments on the purpose and effect of Biden’s speech is important, especially to those like El Som and Jason330:

The idea that support for Trump is driven by economic anxiety rather than racism is close to a punchline at this point. It just doesn’t jibe with all the quantitative evidence from surveys of Trump voters, and it doesn’t explain why this seemingly economic-driven revolt is coming at a time when the economy is doing better than it’s done in a decade.

But the theory’s failure as an explanatory approach doesn’t mean that voters who respond to Trump’s racism might also respond to economic appeals. These are voters who won’t be persuaded if you tell them that Trump is a xenophobe, that he’s bigoted against Muslims. Those are features, not bugs, to them.

So instead of highlighting the aspects of Trump that make him so uniquely horrifying to Democrats, to reach these voters surrogates need to make an orthogonal argument, to change the subject to a topic the voters also care about and where their values are closer to Democrats’ than to Trump’s.

This was Biden’s task, and he nailed it. He did not try to convince viewers to oppose Trump on anti-racist grounds. He tried to convince them on pocketbook grounds, to convince them Trump is a fraud who does not care at all about their material needs. “He is trying to tell us he cares about the middle class,” Biden scoffed. “Give me a break. That is a bunch of malarkey.”

Libby Nelson says Joe Biden took Donald Trump’s most famous catchphrase and turned it against him:

“His lack of empathy and compassion can be summed up in that phrase he is most proud of making famous: ‘You’re fired,’” Biden said. “Think about everything you learned as a child. No matter where you were raised, how can there be pleasure in saying, ‘You’re fired’?”

Biden was doing what has been his job since President Obama added him to the ticket in 2008: trying to prove to blue-collar white Americans that the Democrats still speak their language. Those voters were Trump’s base early in the primaries, and Trump is trying to reach them in the general election — they’re his best hope for winning swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. The stakes are high.

But Biden, by now, is a virtuoso at playing variations on this theme. He went on to call Trump’s professed concern for the middle class “a bunch of malarkey” and to make an overt appeal to voters with backgrounds like his own.

Dara Lind on how Obama’s election sparked the white panic that is powering Trump:

It is not Barack Obama’s fault that Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee, any more than the proverbial hurricane is the fault of the proverbial butterfly. But just like the butterfly and the hurricane, the fact that Trump’s ascension comes at the end of the Obama era is hardly a coincidence — and it’s hard to imagine one without the other.

More specifically, Obama’s election helped pave the way for Trumpism: not the idiosyncratic and often incomprehensible campaign that Donald Trump himself is running, but the anti-immigration, anti-trade, “law and order” populist sentiment that he’s brought back into the American mainstream and that will probably outlast his (probable) loss in November.

One of the reasons Trumpism has surprised political and media elites with its passion and strength is that it draws from a deep well of anxiety about America losing its culture and values in the face of (among other things) multiculturalism. The idea that America is being both overrun and taken over by people with different values is partly inspired by reminders of difference in everyday life: seeing people in the streets who “look like” unauthorized immigrants; having to press 1 for English. But it’s also reinforced by the media, and by who represents America on the world stage.

And for the past eight years, that’s been a man of Kenyan ancestry — with, as Obama himself said during his 2004 convention speech, “a funny name.” Obama’s election was the result of the underlying demographic changes that have provoked so much anxiety that something’s being lost in America. But it was also a symbol of it.

Having Bloomberg speak was very risky. First, he could have been massively rejected by the crowd. And indeed some did boo when he had the stones to say Dems were wrong on Education and fiscal issues. But it seemed that the hall knew the point and politics of his speech, even the always ignorant BernieBros (who booed former Defense Secretary and CIA Chief Leon Panetta while he was making an anti-Trump point, which was dumb in and of itself).


Dylan Matthews says Barack Obama is the most important political figure of our time, no matter who succeeds him.

Doesn’t Tim Kaine bear a striking resemblance to our own Jason330?

Jeet Heer says the Democrats are the Party of Lincoln now. That has been true since the 60’s.

To defeat Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton is assembling a much wider popular front than even the Obama coalition. As evidenced by the Democratic National Convention, this front runs from the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders to the centrist Bill Clinton to the disaffected former Republican Michael Bloomberg. Much of the turmoil of the convention has come from the difficulty of bringing together these different factions, which still heatedly disagree on issues like trade and foreign policy.

The recurring theme of the third night in Philadelphia was that the Democrats offer a welcoming home to Republicans alienated by Trump’s antics. The speakers made a convincing case, and more importantly, they did so without offering any sort of compromise.

“Hillary Clinton has so far been putting on a better television show in Philadelphia than Donald Trump did in Cleveland,” the New York Times reports.

“Expectations had it the other way around. Mr. Trump is the bona fide television sensation, a former maestro of a hit reality series, and he had promised to bring some ‘showbiz’ to the proceedings. Yet it’s Mrs. Clinton who has had the celebrities and musical acts that ‘Tonight Show’ bookers’ dreams are made of — Alicia Keys, Meryl Streep, Paul Simon, Elizabeth Banks, Lenny Kravitz and Lena Dunham. It’s Mrs. Clinton who has had the more professionally produced show. And at least for the first two nights, it’s Mrs. Clinton who has had the bigger ratings, by several million people.”

I am sure last night blew the RNC out of the water. Tonight will too.

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