What She Said

Back-to-back gold-medal nights for the American women's (political) team! It's fantastic to have the opportunity to hear and see such exceptional speaking skills and charisma on display. Frankly, I have rarely been able to stomach the convention stuff for a variety of reasons (Barack's speech last time one of several exceptions). Part of it is having access to new media and resulting commentary and thus not limited to the sycophantic and increasingly fully-suborned and paid-for Big Media. But a big part is also the truly exceptional qualities and skills of Michelle and Hillary. Maybe they ought to team up the next time around.

But at least tonight, even the idiot-box had trouble finding a way to undermine what might have been one of the greatest endorsement speeches by a left-behind candidate ever. This is Christy Hardin Smith posting from Denver at Firedoglake:

Hillary Clinton's speech is about to begin. Gov. Schweitzer of Montana was fantastic -- should have been the keynote. The intro video for Sen. Clinton is really high energy -- I'm thinking the speech is going to be revved up as well. Hold onto your hats -- will blog as much as I can.

Chelsea Clinton is narrating the intro video for Hillary Clinton. She's now taking the stage.

"Ladies and gentleman, I'm very proud to introduce my hero. And my mother. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton."

Nice melon colored suit -- pops against the blue background. She's waving to the crowd -- great background tune for her entry. Anyone know what it is?

She's beginning to speak:

Thank you all. I am so honored to be here tonight. I'm here tonight as a proud mother, as a proud Democrat. As a proud Senator from New York. A proud American.

And a proud supporter of Barack Obama.

My friends, it is time to take back the country we love. And whether you voted for me or you voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose.

We are on the same team. And none of us can afford tosit on the sidelines. This is a fight for the future and it is a fight we must win together.

I haven't spent the past thirty-five years in the trenches, advocating for children, campaigning for universal health care., helping parents balance work and family, and fighting for women's rights here at home and around the world to see another Republican in the White House squander our promise that fulfills the hope of the American people. And you haven't suffered through the last eight years to have four more years of more failed leadership.

No way. No how. No McCain.

Barack Obama is my candidate. And he must be our President.

-clip-

I had to agree with screen-pundit comment (I fear it was Mr. Malkin!) that she truly hit this one out. Kudos big time, Hillary. Very classy indeed. Chelsea likewise.

Interestingly, the same metaphor was used in best account I have read of MO's speech last night. Back-to-back baseball walk-away wins work just fine for me. What a team. Rebecca Traister has the byline at Salon:

Michelle Obama had one job on Monday night: to not be scary.

As the first black woman ever to make a beeline for the East Wing, Obama, a lawyer with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, has been dogged by an aura of suspicion: about her brains and politics and attitude and all sorts of things that stand in for both racial and gender discomfort. Early on, Maureen Dowd tagged her "emasculating"; she's been attacked over her patriotism; there were the insidious "whitey" whispers. The infamous New Yorker cover summed it up by caricaturing her as a slinky, Afro'd Angela Davis, saucily giving her man a so-called terrorist fist bump.

Which is probably why her remarks to the convention on Monday night were the opposite of political, the antithesis of the angry opener delivered by Zell Miller in New York in 2004, or for that matter, the whacked-out feminist barn-burner given by the truly exotic (and scary!) Teresa Heinz Kerry on the second night of the Democratic convention. On paper, Obama's speech was so aggressively comforting, so just-folksy, so daughterly and wifely and motherly, that it made Nancy Reagan sound like an ambitious hussy with a wandering eye.

But man, can Michelle Obama ever slam a soft pitch straight out of the park.

Dressed in a peacock green frock that was surely the hottest dress ever seen on a convention floor, Obama was introduced first in a video by her mother, who referred to her as "my baby" and then by her older brother, Craig Robinson, as "my little sister." See? She's just a baby little sister! Nothing scary about that!

Robinson, now the basketball coach at Oregon State University, bolstered the evening's theme ("Black First Lady Contenders: They're Just Like Us!") with anecdotes about how his lil' sis woke him up early on Christmas morning and memorized every episode of "The Brady Bunch." Then there was how, though she eventually quit her potentially threatening powerful law firm job, she did take something from it: "a young lawyer by the name of Barack Obama." That's right, folks, she got her M.R.S.

The written text of the Robinson-Obama siblings was nearly retro in its firm placement of Michelle in the sphere of acceptable, traditional femininity -- daughter, sister, wife and mother, rather than lawyer, administrator, intellect and political animal. It would have been hard to take were it not for the reality that Obama looks so different, and lives so differently, from so many of the people who must come out to vote for her husband in November, making it crucial to stress everything she shares with great white Middle America.

And for the fact that the woman is a killer on the stump. Throughout the campaign Obama has shown off her gift for delivery: her lilting cadence and hypnotic tone, trying out new jokes at every stop, reading her audience like a book and playing straight to whoever is in front of her.

On Monday night, in her deft hands, the potentially soggy material seemed light as air -- soft and warm, yes -- but also honest and direct and emotional. First, her discussion of her brother conveyed the closeness of their relationship, one that seems to be friendly, long-lasting and funny. After the Clintons and the Bushes, tolerable siblings might just be a refreshing change.

Then there was her tribute to her father, a filtration plant shift worker who suffered from multiple sclerosis and died in 1991, and whom she described movingly as "my rock ... our provider, our champion, our hero." "I can feel my dad looking down on us," said Obama. "Just as I've felt his presence in every grace-filled moment of my life."

Obama has talked a lot about her parents on the trail. It is from them that she gets her idea of what it used to mean to be working class in America, a life that becomes increasingly difficult in today's fractured economy, and which she described again here on Monday night. When her father was in pain from his illness, she said, "He just woke up a little earlier, and worked a little harder," hard enough to put his son and daughter through college. And when she met Barack, with his single mother and Kansas grandparents, the story goes, she recognized in them the American spirit with which she was raised. "Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values," she said, in a line she used often on the campaign trail, "that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them." Here she got a wild round of applause.

-clip-

And I also greatly enjoyed Joan Walsh's take:

I made the mistake of reading Michelle Obama's speech Monday night before she delivered it. (Rebecca Traister writes it up perfectly here.) I shrugged at the competent but less than inspiring prose, and winced a little at the campaign's obvious effort to domesticate her, to take a smart, funny lawyer-activist who's also a loving wife and mom and all but erase the public person.

Then I watched the smart, funny lawyer-activist and loving wife and mom pour herself into that speech, and I was incredibly impressed, and moved. I can't imagine the pressure Michelle Obama was under, having seen the way a less than perfectly placed adverb -- "for the first time in my adult life I am really proud of my country" -- and other inflections could define her as unpatriotic and ungrateful. There were so many ways to screw up last night, I was nervous for her -- until she started speaking.

The way she delivered the speech made the words all hers. She radiated a deep love -- for Barack Obama, her late father, her brother, her mother and of course those astonishing daughters, but also for the country. She spoke with a calm passion and conviction that were incredibly effective. We even saw a glimpse of the feisty Michelle when a little anger crept into her voice as she talked about military families "with an empty seat at the dinner table." I could only see her from behind from the media space at the Pepsi Center, but I loved the shots of her mother, Marion, while she spoke, and also the cutaways to Joe Biden, just beaming like a proud uncle. When Michelle's daughters joined her onstage and Barack showed up on the video screen, it was all over -- in a good way.

-clip-

It's never too late to put some of your remarkable eloquence to work in calling warmongers, ideologues, and hegemonists out for their war-crimes, ladies! There's a passel of them hanging around Pennsylvania Avenue these days who need a serious calling-out. Okay, maybe getting this electoral trouncing done is of pretty major importance too, but directing some of your exceptional verbal skills at the ongoing near-criminality in Washington could be of direct value, since there's McSlime visible in every direction. Between rattling of sabers we can't even afford to rent, endangered species needing to be exterminated, drilling for oil that is imperative in every possible locale, not to mention cold wars that have to be resurrected so Little-prick Dick and his boy-toy (and sidekick!) can try to distract us from their war crimes, we so need your help.

And I also loved this post from Jane Hamsher, she too doing Denver, also of Firedoglake (terrific resource, that site, we are truly beholden, Jane et al). The Jagger ref is just frosting. I hope you all remember Lamont. He was the candidate we DFHs (need I spell it out?) supported in Nutmeg State over Joe L the long-time reprobate with Truly Bad Voting Positions that were totally at odds with his constituency - who basically threw him out (alas r voters colluded with indies and cowards to barely re-elect long-time incumbent). But subsequent events have forced Joe to further expose himself and his basically far-right anti-democracy and fundamentally anti-American beliefs. As Hamsher says, it would be truly empowering to have Joe the Loserman be McSame's VP. "Hay-day" comes to mind.

Ned Lamont visited the Big Tent today. He's kinda like Mick Jagger for bloggers. With the serious possibility that Joe Lieberman will be McCain's VP choice, it was great to see Ned and celebrate the fact that together, two years ago, we kicked Joe out of the Democratic party. (We'll have video up tomorrow.)

I have to admit I'm rooting for Lieberman now to be McCain's running mate.

I've considered it carefully, and I've decided that forcing the Democratic oppo shops to research his ugly record on Alito, energy, Homeland Security oversight, etc. and show that he wasn't, in fact, "with us on everything but the war" is worth the price of having his sanctimonious puss on TV 24/7.

Of course the comity pimps of the party will still run around saying he's "a great man," but it would be satisfying to watch the party machinery forced to turn against him nonetheless and admit what we all know two years ago.

We were f*&#ing right.

And, last but not, oh you know, courtesy of once again the inimitable CHS:




My favorite button of the convention thus far. Love it!
(And, for the record, the answer is one. One house. Just one. And I'm still working on the mortgage...)