Bill is Still the Champ

What else can you say after Day 3 of the Democratic National Convention? President Bill Clinton still has his chops. He can still give a speech that keeps his listeners in the palm of his hand. What a talent! What a waste.

You can keep your John Kerrys and your Joe Bidens. They are just ordinary politicians doing their rants. Kerry showed that he was still angry that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that had the nerve to accuse him of lying just as he, over thirty years before, had accused American servicemen of atrocities. He is too humorless to understand nemesis and poetic justice. And Joe Biden? Well, he did a workmanlike job of roughing up the opposition. But who cares?

Of course, the experience of listening to Bill Clinton brought the Nineties back. What a slippery chap he is. How well he can take statistics—jobs for example—and twist them around.

Clinton boasted that in the Nineties he created 24 million jobs and in the 2000s Bush only created 5 million. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic Household Survey there were 122 million Americans employed in January 1993 and 138 million employed in January 2001. That’s 14 million jobs, Mr. President. Then in July 2008 there were 148 million jobs. That’s 10 million new jobs since President Bush took over. Considering that there was a recession that began pretty well exactly as President Bush took office, I’d say that wasn’t too bad.

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.