He's not going to the GOP convention, according to CNN, which is to be congratulated for hiring somebody who can write tart:

A Wall Street Journal-NBC News Poll from June showed that while 31 percent of Americans had a positive opinion of President Bush, only 23 percent had the same feeling for Cheney.

Cheney may be the only non-incarcerated politician in America who's less popular than President Bush.

Here's a clip of Obama today in Berea, Ohio, rightly accusing the Republicans of lying about his energy program when they reduce it to tire inflating. He's indignant but not irate. He plays at disbelief that his opponent could be so crass. He sounds like a triumphant man, a man who knows he's in the right and yet has been kicked in the kneecap--ineffectually--by losers. His tone says, Can you believe this? "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant." The crowd jumped to its feet.

He's right, of course, but also, I suspect, effective. I suppose somebody could argue that when he says the Republicans would be better off consulting energy experts than dwelling on Britney and Paris, there are voters with whom this won't go over so well. The populace is supposed to detest experts. They're, you know, elitist, and so must the president be if he wants to talk to them. For myself, I would be happy if he kept striking this gong. Imagine: "John McCain is the man who hugged George Bush--the president who thought he could do without the Iraq experts, the man who could do without the hurricane experts, the man who turned the whole government over to lobbyists instead of people who know what America needs. John McCain and George Bush--two privileged men who think they have a right to sneer at people who know something. The leaders of the Ignorance Party."

Read more »

Thank you, Michael. It's good to have these speeches within paper covers--Humphrey with McGovern, Hoover right next to FDR. And the latter juxtaposition is where I'll start my little meditation on the significance of great speeches, and also their limits.

I don't think I've ever read a Hoover speech before. You know, this one, a week before he beat Al Smith, isn't half bad. Of course, a tribute to rugged individualism sounded better on October 23, 1928 than it would have on July 2, 1932, when Roosevelt gave his great "New Deal" speech. But for all its stuffiness, it hangs together. It addresses the voters as grown-ups. It makes an argument. It And--bonus!--it even embraces liberalism as "a force truly of the spirit." This liberalism, Hoover insists, "is no system of laissez faire." (French yet!)

But the difference between Hoover's speech and Roosevelt's is not just four years of crash, unemployment and social misery. It's also the difference between an uninspired speech and an inspired one. Roosevelt makes an argument, of course, but he's witty, too: Trickle-down theory "belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776." He's clear about who the adversaries are: not the "Republican Party" but the "Republican leadership" (Barack Obama, are you listening?). He's sparing with metaphor but trenchant when he indulges: "During the past ten years a Nation of 120,000,000 people has been led by the Republican leaders to erect an impregnable barbed wire entanglement around its borders through the instrumentality of tariffs which has isolated us from all the other human beings in all the rest of the round world."

Read more »