But She Just Isn't Likeable

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) did a workmanlike job in her speech last night on the second day of the Democratic National Convention. But she didn’t make you want to like her. She evidently appeals to women of a certain age for whom the defining aspects of life are the Seneca Falls convention and the Nineteenth Amendment. They are the women who believe in the glass ceiling and male chauvinism.

(Back in the 1970s the women in my office thought it would be a wonderful idea to give me a Male Chauvinist Pig tie. What can you do with that sort of thing except be a good sport?)

Pundits like Michael Barone are saying that the speech was a good preparation for 2012. Maybe it was. Or maybe Hillary Clinton will just be a Senate institution by then.

But Hillary Clinton just isn’t likeable. And that’s like starting First and Ten with a ten yard penalty when you are playing presidential politics.

Certainly if you look back over the last several presidential races, it is clear that the likeable guy always wins.

At least Hilllary Clinton outperformed the Keynote speech. That effort by Virginia Senate candidate Mark Warner was a technocratic yawn.

The big takeaway of the night was the Karl Rove line, issued on Fox News’ Strategy Room. Obama has to show that he is up to the job, said Karl, after a learned disquisition on post-convention poll bounces. What really bothers independent voters is that they just don’t think that Obama is up to the job.

But I wish that they still ran the conventions like a convention, with reports from the Platform Committee, with a formal placing of names in nomination, and a formal roll-call vote. Politics isn’t a variety show. Or at least, not quite.

Ted's a Liberal and Michelle's a Mom

That’s what we learned at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night.

It was good to see Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) out there making what is probably his last major national speech. He gave us vintage Ted, railing at us in his hortatory style, and we were grateful for it, as the great liberal lion of our generation enters a twilight of age and disease. We honor Uncle Teddy in the autumn of his life.

Michelle Obama did what she needed to do, and did it well. She spoke as a loving daughter, sister, wife, and mother. Some have criticised this—and he knows who he is—as Michelle the Stepford Wife. Well, of course. Michelle Obama had to erase the early, angry Michelle, the stereotypical angry black liberal, and she did.

Conservatives should not sneer at this but take comfort. The fact is that when Democrats talk directly to the nation they must put aside their ugly liberal anger and their nasty liberal issues, and speak to the eternal verities.

The eternal verity for a woman is love. A woman is nothing without love, nothing without her relationships. Career, glass ceilings, and all that political tommy-rot, they are nothing. Even after a generation of non-stop feminist agitation from the heights to the obscurest corners of American life the wife of a presidential candidate still has to give a speech about herself as a lover, a lover of family, of husband, and of children.

That is not something to grumble about. It is something to celebrate.

Dems Cheer Criticism of Teacher Unions!

Have our Democratic friends reached an inflection point on eduction?

Mickey Kaus reports the unimaginable from the Democratic National Convention. He went to an education event and expected the usual EdBlob talk about change, accountability, and resources. But not a word about the teachers’ unions.

Was he wrong! People started talking about how the adults’ agenda always wins against the children’s agenda.

Then Cory Booker of Newark attacked teachers unions specifically—and there was applause. In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention!

Then Booker went on.

The party would "have to admit as Democrats we have been wrong on education." Loud applause!

Well, this is good news, of course. Even though I have to admit to sour grapes. For thirty, forty, fifty years, Democrats have been standing in the school-house door blocking reform. And now, all of a sudden they say, OK. Change of plan. Now we are the party of education reform!

That’s when we have to remember that it’s not the adults and our memories of the political battles of the last generation that matter. What matters is the children.

McCain's Luck or Smarts?

How did he do it? How did Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) come from a campaign written off as dead a year ago to being the Republican presidential nominee that is level-pegging with the Democrat in a Democratic year?

It’s luck, writes Mona Charen.

Luck has been sitting on John McCain’s shoulder for 12 months and seems to be warming to her task as November approaches.

Then she goes on to count the ways. Immigration has faded; Huckabee took Romney out; Iraq turned around; energy prices are an issue; Russians in Georgia; Obama infatuation has begun to cool; the economy isn’t quite in a recession

But you can also make a good argument that McCain is one smart politician. He gracefully admitted defeat on immigration, positioned himself as the national-security candidate from the start, was right all along in Iraq, did a neat pivot on energy, and has shown himself to be good on his feet.

More and more, it looks like Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is not good on his feet. He needs to have the battlefield prepared for him, whereas McCain has shown that he can stay alive so long as there is an oasis of a townhall to attend on the morrow.

President Bill Clinton was another guy who was quick on his feet. And he seemed to have luck on his shoulder too. The trouble with Clinton was that he really didn’t know what to do with his talent and his luck. Maybe it’s just as well.

Let's Not Repeat The New Deal Follies

A couple of years ago Amity Shlaes wrote The Forgotten Man about the utter folly of US economic policy during the Great Depression.

First it was Herbert Hoover that helped prolong a necessary correction (ably assisted by the Federal Reserve System). Then it was Franklin Roosevelt starring in the ten year run of the New Deal Follies.

So if our political leaders want to avoid a repeat of that ten year disaster as the credit crunch continues, maybe they should may attention to Shlaes. There are five things to avoid, she writes in the Washington Post.

1. Don’t give in to protection
2. Don’t blame the messenger (i.e., Wall Street and business leaders)
3. Don’t increase taxes in a downturn
4. Don’t assumes that big government will bring back growth
5. Don’t be inconsistent

The problem is, of course, that our modern Democrats like to do all five of these things. They like protection, they like to demonize the private sector, they like to increase taxes, they like to increase spending, and they like to go off in all directions at once with new programs that may very likely work against each other, like agricultural subsidies and food stamps.

In fact, the way to get out of an economic jam is to free up the economy, lower taxes, lower wasteful spending, encourage business confidence, and make all your actions work together.

It works every time it is tried.

BritCons Challenge Labour on "Fairness"

Every conservative knows about “fairness.” That’s the line that our liberal friends use when they are ready to increase our taxes and give more money to their supporters, er, no, make that “the poor.”

But now the British Conservative Party has issued a dossier on the Labour Party’s record called “Unfair Britain”.

It takes the present Labour government to task for making Britain more unfair. On the Conservative Party website, the Tories accuse Labour of the following:

• The number of people in severe poverty has increased by 900,000 since 1997
• Mr. Brown’s stealth taxes mean the poorest now pay more of their income in tax than the richest
• The gap in life expectancy between rich and poor is now at its widest since the Victorian era
• Educational inequality is getting worse

The same thing is happening in the US, of course, but perhaps not as badly.

The purpose of this political flank attack is to twofold.

First of all, it promises that a Conservative government will seek “progressive” ends by Conservative means. That is, Conservatives will stop the folly of believing that only the government can guarantee fairness.

The other purpose is to continue the policy of “love-bombing” the fashionables who like to consider themselve progressive and sophisticated, certainly not one of your retired colonels writing grumpy letters to the conservative press.

It’s an important new initiative, and it continues the center-right strategy of insisting that you can’t get to progressive goals using government programs.

In his Sources of the Self philosopher Charles Taylor asserts that the objectives of the progressives are equality, dignity, and creativity. Progressives thought that they way to achieve their goals was to acquire political power to demolish the old order of privilege and superstition.

But they were wrong. Equality, dignity, and creativity need a government with a light hand. Until we get it, our modern society is going to get more and more unfair—for the very people that the “progressives” claim to represent.

Rick Warren's "Civil" Project

Most people agree that it was Roe v. Wade that created the Christian Right. The forcible introduction of abortion-on-demand as the law of the land by the Supreme Court acting as the agent of the educated elite created a spark. It blew up, first of all, into Jerry Falwell. He was the Christian that liberals loved to hate. Falwell’s political vehicle as the Moral Majority, a cadre lobbying group.

Ten years later it was Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson’s turn to enter the political arena. He ran for president in 1988 and brought millions of conservative evangelicals into the political process. Robertson became the Christian leader that liberals loved to hate.

In 2008, Falwell is dead and Robertson is old. It is time for a new generation of Christian leaders. After the Saddleback Civil Forum last Saturday night it is obvious who the top Christian leader is in America. He is Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback and author of the best-selling Purpose-driven Life.

Warren’s book The Purpose-driven Life first really came up on the national radar in a kidnap incident in 2005. Kidnapped by an escaped convict, 24-year-old widow and mother Ashley Smith sat down with him and they read the Bible and Chapter 33 of The Purpose-driven Life together. As I wrote at the time:

They read Chapter 33 together. For those of you without your own copy to refer to, Chapter 33 is titled “How Real Servants Act.” The epigraph reads: “Whoever wants to be great must become a servant.” Warren writes about how we talk a lot these days about leadership and very little about “servantship,” and that the real purpose to life is to become a good servant. The Point to Ponder at the end of the chapter is “I serve God by serving others.”

Then the convict released Ashley and she called 911. No need for counsellors, hostage negotiators, or SWAT teams. Not for a woman who read and practiced from The Purpose-driven Life.

Recently conservatives have worried about Warren as he has reached out to environmentalists and become, as he said at the Forum, friend to both Obama and McCain. Doesn’t he know what side he’s on?

Actually, after the Forum, it is liberals who should be worried. Warren clearly understands that, in order to make a difference, he has to use a different strategy than the previous generation of Falwell and Robertson. So this is how he opened the Forum:

Welcome to the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency... We believe in the separation of church and state, but we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics, because faith is just a world view, and everybody has some kind of world view. It’s important to know what they are.

See what is going on here? He is using Englightenment lingo. “World view” is a term invented by Immanuel Kant. He is saying that everyone grounds their world view, including their notions of ethics and morality, on faith. It might be a religious faith or a secular faith, but it is still a faith.

And that is what gives a pastor the right to inject himself into the presidential campaign.

I’ll tell you what I think. I think this: Liberals, be afraid; be very afraid. This chap is sophisticated. He’s playing by the liberal rules. He represents the same moral majority as Falwell and the same Christian churches as Robertson. But he’s doing it without the partisan edge.

Mark my words. Liberals will soon start to hate Rick Warren, just like they hated Falwell and Robertson. But they are heading straight for the briar patch. Because this guy is smart. He won’t produce the copy that liberals used to make Falwell and Robertson into right-wing kooks. He is presenting himself to America as a moderate, and he will force liberals into the role of the heavy.

Very shortly, liberals will start frothing at the mouth over Rick Warren.