Senator Hilary Clinton has finished her address to the Democratic National Convention. My personal response: She didn’t hit it out of the park but she definitely got some extra bases and maybe batted some runs in.

I think she delivered a full-throated, crystal clear indictment of the past eight years and of John McCain’s alignment with it. It was a bit corny but I liked the line about McCain and Bush meeting in the Twin Cities because you can hardly tell them apart. Senator Clinton did a good job enunciating what the Democratic Party is for — things like universal healthcare and improved public education — as well as what the Party is against — such as military adventurism, crony capitalism, and the abandonment of civilized society to a race of all against all. I still believe that had she delivered this message consistently throughout the primaries, rather than focusing on her opponents, she would have made the hurdle and would be speaking tomorrow instead of last night.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the speech was nonetheless still mostly about her — her experiences on the trail, her motivations for running, etc. That’s to be understood and it was a historic campaign, so it can be forgiven. She spent a little too much time on that, and she did detour into the end into a polishing of the legacy of President Clinton. If you tuned in to the middle and you cut out before the last few moments, you would be forgiven for thinking this was a Clinton acceptance speech.

Unfortunately, that’s where the speech fell short, too — because there are two meanings of “flatly”. Yes, she was clear and unequivocal. But she was also surprisingly indirect. She did not mention Senator Obama’s qualifications for president; for her, the clincher is apparently merely the fact that he has the (D) after his name. While that’s not a bad reason, what the party needed was for her to embrace Obama qua Obama, not just as “the guy who barely beat me”. Most emphatically, she needed to use this vast public platform to renounce the criticisms she made in the debates … the criticisms that right now form the backbone of McCain’s attack ads. She needed to take the wind out of those sails, and she did not.

In fact, what she needed to do is something that, it would seem, a Clinton cannot do: She had to say that she was wrong. Actually, even more weakly, she had to say merely that she was mistaken — we can leave the morality of “wrong” out of it. She could have said that, since the two campaigns have begun working together, she has seen a side of him she hadn’t appreciated before. It wasn’t necessary for her to swallow her pride and say he is more qualified than she; but she had to say that he is qualified. Having explicitly made the opposite claim on videotape, she needed to dispel it. At this, she failed; and so this speech was not what it should have been.

Ironically, this makes Senator Clinton’s future even more inexorably intertwined with Senator Obama’s. If Obama goes on to become the 44th President, people will remember this speech as a pivotal test for the campaign which lifted him up and started the Democrats, at long last, into their national strategy. Clinton will be set up to become the heir apparent to Ted Kennedy as Liberal Lion of the Senate, or if she chooses, to move into a Cabinet position or, perhaps, even a Supreme Court seat — in all cases, praised for her integrity and self-denial that cemented the support of her people for the candidate. But if Obama goes down to defeat, he takes Clinton with him… because, in memory, her speech will seem tepid and hedged, at least to his fervent supporters — and there are 18 million of them, too, remember. Come 2012, the Democratic Party will be long tired of the squabbling and a third candidate will likely take the nomination, neither Obama nor Clinton.

Of course, if you only watch the mainstream media, you won’t have gotten that speech. Instead, you’ve probably be treated to more important questions, like: Why did Michelle Obama look “angry”? Who choose the pantsuit worn by Senator Clinton? Because after all, those are the questions on which the election to be leader of the free world should turn…

{Minor edits for grammar.}

For full disclosure, I am an Obama supporter, I feel he is the best candidate both in terms of electability and in terms of actual ability to do the job. I’ve watched his campaign with interest and rising enthusiasm. All of that said, I think people have to recognize that his statements in San Francisco, saying that working class people are “bitter” and so “cling” to their guns and their religion, has been a giant misstep. It was a gaffe pure and true, and he is paying the traditional price: Time spent off-message, defending and responding rather than proposing and advancing.

A lot of what he says is true, nonetheless, and if you read the context, you will see that his major sin is choosing words that can be taken many ways. And hey, it’s politics, and politics ain’t a tea party. His opponents can, and probably should, use this to their advantage in an attempt to define him for America. That doesn’t mean that I agree that his remarks were “elitist” and “talked down” to working class America. But it’s McCain’s right, or Clinton’s right, to make that case.

Obama’s main problem was his choice of the word “cling”:

And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

This would all have passed without notice if he had chosen his words better. For example, if instead of saying people “cling” to guns or religion, he could have said they “fall back on” guns and religion — the things in their life that they can control, that give comfort and surety. Why didn’t he? To be honest, because it is all too easy for a Democrat to fall into language that dismisses such beliefs as tools of cynical manipulation. Here’s the bigger question: Why is it so easy? Because for a generation and a half, one party (the Republican party) has used those beliefs as tools of cynical manipulation. Appeals to patriotism, to gun ownership, to faith, are easy and cheap and — if the record of the Republicans is any guide — meaningless.

The truth of that lies in the speed and tone of the response from both McCain and Clinton. They piously promise to protect the little guy, they publicly feel umbrage for him, they pat him on the head. They don’t speak to the concerns that Obama did, the reasons that he thinks that middle America might be “bitter”. They don’t offer any actual solutions for their distress. Instead they facilely promise to somehow recover every job that’s been lost.

Obama missteps because he tries to speak about the plight of the working class without having been a member. He doesn’t get the lingo. Fair enough. But the other two nominally-major candidates go much further. They celebrate their false membership in the working class. They too have never belonged but they appoint themselves to feel the outrage of the class.

In the end, in my opinion, that is condescending — that is “talking down” to the working class.

In the Jan 21 debate, on the subject of national security, Senator Clinton said,

And if it is indeed the classic Republican campaign, I’ve been there. I’ve done that.

See? She’s confessing that she and Bill really do steal plays from the Karl Rove playbook… she’s “done” a Republican campaign.

Wait, wait. You say that that’s not what she meant, that “clearly” she was commenting on the kind of campaigns she’s faced, not endorsing those tactics? I don’t know, it sounds a lot like parsing it to have it both ways…

(Obviously, I hope, I’m trying to draw a comparison to the freak-out that occurred when Sen. Obama noted the historical fact that Ronald Reagan was good at motivating people to vote Republican. Somehow his clear-as-day remark transmogrified into worship at the altar of Reagan. But Clinton’s comment — that her nomination would put us through the same Republican assaults we’ve suffered since, well, 1992 — apparently that’s not worthy of note.)

So Senator Obama has generated some heat by making the following remarks:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

(I’m quoting them from here.)

And a tempest has blown up in the Democratic party by some progressives that Obama should be shunned for having “praised” Reagan. Of course if you read the remarks, he didn’t actually do that. He did point out that Reagan was transformational — that the Reagan presidency moved the political stance of the country in a way that, say, the Clinton presidency did not. This statement is from praise. It’s a recognition of fact. The proof is below the fold.

As a quick example, take the following comment posted on firedoglake, ironically intended to show we should pillory Sen. Obama:

Dems have been out of power so long, even they forget what ‘centrist’ means. Right now, the center of the Democratic party is closer to what the center of the Republican party was in the 1970s. Run and govern as a damn liberal already!

Someone earlier had said,

Yea, Jane!!! We are the agents that drag the Overton Window to the Left!!!

And all I can say, it’s about damn time!!!

without noticing, apparently, the fact that shifting the Overton Window was in fact what Sen. Obama was talking about — clearly, Reagan was more successful at this than Clinton, if only because two decades later we are still bemoaning that ” the center of the Democratic party is closer to what the center of the Republican party was in the 1970s” even after Clinton’s eight years.

I don’t know why so many people seem to be missing the point. Perhaps it’s because Reagan was transformative, and now he’s become the bogeyman of the progressive movement. People apparently can’t be rational about him anymore. I am not yet an Obama supporter but this “controversy” is pushing me that way, because it highlights that he seems to be the only one who will speak to us as if we’re not stupid — as if, being adults, we can understand nuance and thus accept uncomfortable truths, such as that a president can be very effective in effecting change even if the changes he effects are bad ones. (Of course, the rabid sputtering on Obama’s left flank provided evidence that, no, the American electorate is in fact as stupid as everyone complains.)

I understand the need for mythmaking and crafting a progressive narrative to combat the conservative one. But aren’t we supposed to be the party of the reality-based community?

Shirt answer: A whole lot less than the punditocracy would like you to believe.

Long answer: Oh, my goodness, people. Could we all just stop with the wild oscillations from day to day? No one in their right mind believed the polls showing Obama up by double digits in a single week. Clinton didn’t score a “comeback” because she didn’t go away: She has been strong in NH for the past year. Until a couple of weeks ago, Clinton had a 20 point edge on Obama and yet she won the state by only 2 points. How is that a comeback?

But what about all those polls showing the “Obama bounce”? They were ludicrous to believe. It takes time for actual views to shift, but polls are sensitive to short-period trends and, especially, news coverage. All of a sudden, after winning Iowoa, Obama was everywhere on the news. Of course his numbers ticked up.

Did Clinton “save” her candidacy by shedding a tear or by performing well at the debate or by saber-rattling? No, she “saved” it by having a strong organization in a friendly state. For five days, her supporters have been yelling at us that no one should count her out — correctly. But after castigating everyone for misinterpreting Iowa, they are exultantly misinterpreting New Hampshire. Excluding the post-Iowa media insanity, things turned out about as would be expected — indeed, I think Obama did better than anyone would have said just four weeks ago. (I mourn that my guy Edwards did not stage the upset that would truly have been an upset.)

Anyone with technical experience knows you don’t trust the gauge until it’s had time to settle down. Trying to spin Obama’s bounce into a steamroller mandate was silly. Trying to spin Clinton’s just-barely-held victory in a state she’d expected to win handily into a comeback of epic proportions… well, that’s just mendacious.

OK, so today during a campaign stop Hilary Clinton apparently teared up and allowed emotion into her voice. (See here for more if you need to.) And then John Edwards replied , “I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business”. Now the blogosphere is abuzz with how unfair this has been to Senator Clinton and how if anyone else shows emotion, it’s depth but for her, it’s a breakdown and why is Edwards so mean? and…

Personally, I don’t think Clinton’s teary moment is a big deal. It’s been a long campaign, it hasn’t gone her way lately, and, win or lose, this is the capstone of her career. I think it’s entirely forgivable if she has a vulnerable moment and allows some of that to leak through. Here’s what I don’t get: Edwards has been campaigning just as long and just as hard. It’s pretty much the last act of his career, too. He’s seen Hilary crowned as the inevitable candidate and Barack as the “change” candidate, while the national press has ignored his message and focused on his haircut. Why isn’t it conceivable that his comment also reflects exhaustion and snappishness rather than a deep flaw?

I admit, I’m an Edwards supporter. But the reaction coverage seems genuinely out of line here. She was weak for a moment and let slip some tears. He was weak for a moment and snarked her. It’s passed, now, people.