Posts
President Obama’s speech on Thursday night as the finale to the DNC was a rousing talk about the differences in the two very different choices that America has to choose between in November.
New York Times Editorial Board:
President Obama’s dilemma has always been that he has been far more successful a president than his opponents claim, but far less successful than he needs to be at making voters see that. Powerful speeches by former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden and others did a lot to fix that impression during the convention. But it was up to Mr. Obama to make the case for another term, with a speech that was every bit as fraught with uncertainty and risk as his 2008 convention address.Just as he did then, Mr. Obama rose to the occasion.
Timothy Egan-The New York Times:
Obama delivered an acceptance speech full of punch, muscle and pop — the Democratic Party showing some rare brawn on their closing day and no small amount of testosterone. It was not a night for poetry. On foreign foes, dead and alive, on veterans, active and retired, on American economic nationalism – even down to the U.S.A chants – Obama’s Democrats occupied the old space once held by mainstream Republicans. It’s empty, after all: why not seize that ground?Last week, Romney offered platitudes and mush. Many Obama fence-straddlers were afraid the president would do the same. He certainly didn’t offer enough specifics to satisfy all, nor enough to break the race open. But he laid down some markers, and they’re durable enough to carry him through to November. [...]
The haters will never budge. This speech was not for them. It is just a few thousand voters, in perhaps no more than a half-dozen states – the grumpy undecideds, tough nuts all, those lucky, much-stroked bastards – who had to be moved one way or the other Thursday night. In choosing a meaty framing of the issues, rather than a soaring reach for tears and ahhs, Obama won enough begrudging approval from the select independents to live for another day and probably another term.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times:
The next four years are likely to be much better than the last four years — unless misguided policies create another mess. [...] The policies we actually got were far from adequate. Debt relief, in particular, has been a bust — and you can argue that this was, in large part, because the Obama administration never took it seriously.The Boston Globe Editorial Board:But, that said, Mr. Obama did push through policies — the auto bailout and the Recovery Act — that made the slump a lot less awful than it might have been. And despite Mitt Romney’s attempt to rewrite history on the bailout, the fact is that Republicans bitterly opposed both measures, as well as everything else the president has proposed.
So Bill Clinton basically had it right: For all the pain America has suffered on his watch, Mr. Obama can fairly claim to have helped the country get through a very bad patch, from which it is starting to emerge.
The Democratic Party this week displayed an unusual confidence in its values — an ideal of equal opportunity and sacrifice — that provided a fitting rebuttal to the views expressed by the Republicans last week.The Washington Post Editorial Board:GOP leaders had arranged their convention in Tampa around the conviction that individual enterprise, as embodied in the phrase “I built it,” is the only true path to prosperity. In contrast, President Obama’s acceptance speech, which touched on many issues, only soared when he got to his notion of citizenship: “the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations.” Along the way, he showed how fully he now inhabits the office of president, paying tribute to fallen heroes and attesting to the goodness of average Americans. But like Republican nominee Mitt Romney, he didn’t offer a compelling game plan for how to achieve those ideals, especially in the face of the deadlock in Congress.
The reality buried in both men’s arguments is that voters themselves can provide a path forward. In a clear clash of values and visions, the winner will be able to claim a mandate that will almost certainly compel action by Congress, whichever party controls the two chambers. That’s the welcome result of a convention season that put on display two parties that know what they believe.
Addressing his party’s convention in Charlotte, Mr. Obama acknowledged problems that Republican nominee Mitt Romney ignored or dismissed in his own acceptance speech, such as the impact of global warming. He offered more specific goals than did Mr. Romney, many of which he had previously set: doubling U.S. exports, training 2 million workers at community colleges, recruiting 100,000 math and science teachers. Those, and a few new goals — creating 1 million manufacturing jobs over four years, cutting oil imports in half by 2020, cutting in half the growth in college tuition — are laudable. But Mr. Obama did not explain how he would achieve them or prepare the country for the difficult choices they would demand.An acceptance speech is not a State of the Union laundry list of specific proposals. Its role is to set out a vision of the country’s future path. Mr. Obama was correct that he and Mr. Romney have dramatically different visions of government’s role, and that the Republican prescription of tax cuts to address any woe has left the country in terrible shape. Mr. Romney has been inexcusably vague in outlining his program, fiscal and otherwise, and he did nothing to mend this deficiency in his acceptance speech. But Mr. Obama’s speech also fell short — of his own proclaimed standards.
Greg Sargent at The Washington Post:
On Tuesday, Michelle Obama talked about who Barack Obama is and where he came from. On Wednesday, Bill Clinton talked about where the country and the economy have been and how we struggled to get to where we are now. As Chuck Schumer put it earlier today, those two performances teed up Barack Obama to devote tonight’s speech to talking about the future.In a bit of a surprise, Obama’s speech — which had little in the way of soaring rhetoric and stuck to a direct and sometimes pleading tone — spent little time defending his economic record. That task has already been handled ably by Clinton, and Obama wanted the focus to be on a far broader range of issues. The centerpiece of the speech was the idea of “citizenship” and shared responsibility — a gamble that voters will not cast their vote on the current economy alone but on which candidate is offering a more compelling moral vision of America's true identity and future.
The DNC was by far the superior event between the two party’s and unless Obama and his party come unglued, November is his. Of course, I’d say that the Republican Party is in overdrive trying to figure out how to steal this election because if they lose this one. the white man vote will be much less in 2016.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment