Barack and Michelle Obama in 2008. Photo (cc) by Luke Vargas.
Twenty years ago, when the Democratic National Convention gathered in Boston, a young senator named Barack Obama delivered the speech that launched him to the presidency.
I was covering the convention for The Boston Phoenix, but I wasn’t in the hall. No regrets — I reported from four national conventions, and I thought the best way I could serve our audience was to spend as little time in the building as possible, focusing instead on alternative events, protests, what the media were up to and the like. Still, that was a big one to miss.
I didn’t miss Barack Obama’s speech last night, nor Michelle Obama’s, even if it was from the comfort of our TV room. Wow. Observers are trying to decide who delivered the better of what were two magnificent addresses. I thought hers was a superior piece of pure oratory but that his did more to advance the cause of getting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz elected. The two addresses complemented each other perfectly.
And soaring though their rhetoric was, it was pretty amusing to see the former president go there for what I believe was the first time since Marco Rubio made some awkward remarks about the size of Donald Trump’s, uh, hands.
Doug Emhoff’s speech was folksy and effective. All in all, it was another strong night for the Democrats.
Early print deadlines meant that three of our national newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today, have no coverage of President Biden’s keynote address. All of them, needless to say, go big with Biden’s speech online. It makes you wonder who’s still bothering with the legacy press’ shrinking print editions.
A fourth national paper, the business-focused Wall Street Journal, did manage to get Biden’s speech on page one, though it’s not the lead. Locally, The Boston Globe leads with the president as well. I have to assume that’s a late edition.
Biden was supposed to go on at about 10:30 p.m., but the Democrats veered off schedule and he didn’t start for another hour. They’d better fix that — the last thing the party wants is for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s acceptance speech on Wednesday and Vice President Kamala Harris’ on Thursday to get pushed out of prime time.
Stop talking at me
God bless C-SPAN. We tuned in around 9 p.m. and chose PBS, figuring the “NewsHour” crew would strike a good balance between carrying the speeches and offering a little bit of commentary and analysis. We were wrong. We missed Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s speech entirely. And when we finally switched over, we discovered that PBS had cut away from Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, a major figure in the party.
At least PBS carried New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose fiery populism was probably the highlight of the evening, though Hillary Clinton’s address conjured up all sorts of emotions. Yes, it should have been her.
I’m not going to try to assess Biden’s speech except to agree with other observers that I respect his successful presidency and am grateful that his deep sense of patriotism led him to step aside, even though it was evident that he’s still angry he was forced to make that move.
New Haven crew hits Chicago
Normally I like to see local news organizations stay mission-focused when big national events occur. But I’ll cut the New Haven Independent some slack. After all, founder Paul Bass is no longer the editor, and he’s as knowledgeable about politics as anyone I know.
Bass and staff reporter Nora Grace-Flood are in Chicago while Babz Rawls Ivy, the morning host at the Independent-affiliated radio station, WNHH-LP, is back in New Haven offering some commentary. Oakland-based cartoonist Fred Noland of the Independent Review Crew is in Chicago as well, though he hasn’t started drawing yet.
And it’s not all national. Here’s a funny story, with video and photos, about Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar squaring off with New Haven Democrats about the virtues of New Haven apizza versus Chicago-style deep-dish pizza.
The Washington Post: The early print bird misses the keynoteUSA Today: Protests but no convention coverage above the foldThe Wall Street Journal: Biden’s speech, yes, but wow, Edgar Bronfman!The Boston Globe: The president makes page one
I knew about his reign of terror in the 1950s, when he falsely accused government officials, Hollywood figures and others of being communists, ruining lives and leading to the still-used ephithet “McCarthyism.”
What I didn’t know was that he consorted with and defended actual Nazis — that is, German war criminals and their surprisingly numerous supporters in the U.S. And that there are some echoes down to the present day.
That’s the main takeaway from the second season of “Ultra,” a podcast series hosted by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. It’s good stuff, and you should listen to it if you get a chance. It’s a wide-ranging look at Nazis and their sympathizers in the U.S. after World War II — a follow-up to the first season, which examined the Nazi movement before and during the war.
And though “Ultra” features a wide cast of characters, the focus is on McCarthy, who defended German soldiers who massacred U.S. troops after they had already surrendered and whose entire Senate career was what you might call Nazi-adjacent.
Two interesting tidbits:
Although Richard Nixon graciously conceded after losing the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, behind the scenes both he and top Republican officials gave at least tacit support to efforts by extreme right-wing forces to overturn the results in several states and hand the election to Nixon.
And Trump thug Steve Bannon, currently behind bars, has favorably cited an Italian fascist who in turn wrote the introduction for “Imperium,” a Nazi screed written by American fascist Francis Yockey, a shadowy fugitive throughout “Ultra” who kills himself after he is finally taken into custody by the FBI.
The reference to Bannon is the only direct tie Maddow makes to Donald Trump and his ongoing efforts to subvert democracy. But the Trump parallels are clear throughout, as they were during the first season.
If there’s a hopeful takeaway from “Ultra,” it’s this: We’ve defeated fascism in the U.S. before, and we can do it again.
A week ago today, The Washington Post reported (free link) that Donald Trump may have helped fuel his 2016 presidential campaign with an illegal, last-minute infusion of $10 million from the Egyptian government.
The FBI investigated the money trail but was called off the case by Attorney General Bill Barr — the same Bill Barr whose lies about the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia helped warp public perceptions.
So far, there has been very little follow-up — not by the Post and, most significant, not by The New York Times. I have to assume that the Post, at least, is still digging. But this story, if all the dots can be connected, amounts to a massive scandal that in saner times would drive a candidate out of the race.
Of course the media are to blame for not pushing this story. But so is the Democratic Party, which is guilty of malpractice for not opening an investigation in the Senate immediately. What makes a story stick is repetition — and without prominent Democrats coming out every day and giving journalists something to report on, it quickly withers away.
Today is not just the one-week anniversary of the Post’s Egypt story. It’s also the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as president, a consequence of the Watergate scandal, which was pushed relentlessly by the press (especially the Post), elected officials and the courts.
And here’s a parallel that is worth pondering. Four years ago, Boston lawyer and journalist James Barron wrote that the Watergate break-in may well have been an attempt to steal documents from Democratic Party headquarters showing that Nixon had taken $549,000 from the Greek government in order to help finance his 1968 campaign.
Barron tells the story in his book “The Greek Connection: The Life of Elias Demetracopoulos and the Untold Story of Watergate.” Demetracopoulos, a liberal Greek journalist, tried to warn people in the U.S. that the right-wing junta then running his country had paid off Nixon, but his efforts came to naught.
In shades of today’s somnolent Democrats, Barron writes that party chair Larry O’Brien didn’t tell President Lyndon Johnson what he knew and turned down frantic requests from Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s campaign to use it in political ads. The Boston Globe tried to get at the story, but then-Globe reporter Christopher Lydon was unable to pierce the veil. In an interview for GBH News, Barron told me:
Watergate is a metaphor for abuse of power during the Nixon years. The scandal didn’t begin with the planning for the June 1972 break-in. Its roots are in the illegal financing of the 1968 election, the potential disclosure of which caused, in the words of the historian Stanley Kutler, the “most anxiety” in the Nixon administration “for the longest period of time.”…
There is strong circumstantial evidence that at least part of what the burglars were directed to find was whatever derogatory information the Democrats had on Nixon, especially financial documents related to foreign contributions.
These days, of course, Trump would just go running to Sean Hannity, and what should be a campaign-ending scandal, if proved, would simply degenerate into another muddle over the mainstream media and “fake news.” But that doesn’t mean journalists and Democrats shouldn’t be pounding away at this every day.
Anti-Sisi demonstration in London. Photo (cc) 2015 by Alisdare Hickson.
I want to make sure you have access to this astonishing story (free link) in The Washington Post reporting that Donald Trump may have boosted his 2016 presidential campaign with a last-minute, highly illegal $10 million payment from Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi.
The story, by Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig, includes all kinds of provocative details: a meeting between Trump and Sisi in September 2016; a mysterious cash withdrawal of $10 million from an Egyptian bank; and Trump’s decision to put $10 million of his own money into his campaign, possibly in the expectation that he could pay it back with Egyptian money.
The FBI spent several years investigating the allegations but were eventually shut down by none other than Attorney General Bill Barr, whose lies about the Mueller report contributed to a public perception that there was less to the Russia collusion claims than was actually the case.
We watched Kamala Harris’ speech in Atlanta on YouTube, and it was extraordinary — her pitch-perfect message casting liberalism as patriotism, her taunting of Donald Trump, and the sheer joy she brought to the proceedings. I was impressed with her body language and comfort level as well. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this for a long time, and I just hope it can continue.
Gin Dumcius of CommonWealth Beacon reports on a ludicrous custom: legislators offering amendments to bills and then quickly withdrawing them, apparently for the sole purpose of drawing attention to a pet cause.
The New York Times has been doing tremendous work on the failures of the Secret Service and local law enforcement that led to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13. The latest (free link) shows that officials had multiple warning signs that should have led them to shut down the rally before Trump ever took the stage. It was truly a failure of epic proportions.
Last week the Times published a visual investigation with similar conclusions: the shooter had been spotted and seemed suspicious enough to have attracted the notice of security officers. They lost track of him. And they allowed the rally to go ahead, leading to the death of a retired firefighter and serious injury to two other attendees.
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris. Photo (cc) 2019 by Gage Skidmore.
My Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman writes for WBUR’s Cognoscenti about the challenges facing the media in covering Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, arguing that we ought to be wary of discussing Harris’ “viability” — a “vague term [that] is often code for a lingering — and likely inaccurate — perception that women are somehow less electable than men.” She continues:
The viability question comes packaged with observations about a candidate’s “likability,” “broad appeal” and “strength.” Can she win over moderate suburban voters? Does she look presidential? Is she authentic? These factors do matter, especially when the narrow path to victory winds through a few swing states — think back to 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and lost the election — but they also carry a specific type of misogyny, one that’s cloaked as pragmatism and deeply internalized across the political spectrum.
Meg’s conclusion: The media have gotten better, as shown by their mostly non-gendered coverage of Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign. But Vice President Harris, who has a genuine chance of becoming the first female president, presents a larger and trickier test.
President Biden in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Photo via the Biden White House.
I found President Biden’s address Wednesday night to be sad and moving. His theme was democracy and how we can preserve it. His 2020 victory over Donald Trump saved us from authoritarianism to an extent that no one realized when they cast their ballots. After all, it was only afterwards that Trump launched his effort to steal the election by any means necessary, including fomenting violence in the halls of Congress.
Biden proved not to be up to the challenge of defeating Trump again. Fortunately, by stepping aside and handing off his campaign to Vice President Kamala Harris, he has energized the anti-Trump movement and given it a chance of prevailing this November, though there are no guarantees.
There was nothing in Biden’s 11-minute Oval Office speech that would make anyone doubt the wisdom of his decision to end his re-election campaign. His voice was hoarse and halting, and before you blame COVID, keep in mind that this is the Biden we have come to know in recent months. Louise Aronson, a gerontologist who was one of the formerly anonymous physicians interviewed by The New Yorker last week, observed for The Atlantic (free link) that “his voice was weak, he stumbled occasionally over his prepared remarks, and his physical presence was diminished from what it once was.” She added:
Part of what was so excruciating about watching Biden hold on to his hope of winning a second term was seeing someone struggle to accept that their best-case scenario might be impossible. Variations of this situation play out daily in clinics and hospitals, and if you have a shred of empathy, it’s always heartbreaking. Yet few such difficult conversations — or the loud silences that too often take the place of these conversations — happen so publicly. Watching this one reminded me how unwelcome they are in American life, even in the offices of physicians delivering bad news.
The historian Heather Cox Richardson has a thorough overview of Biden’s address, writing that he joins George Washington in his willingness to walk away and John Adams in presiding over a peaceful transition. “Like them, Biden gave up the pursuit of power for himself in order to demonstrate the importance of democracy,” Richardson said. “After the speech, the White House served ice cream to the Bidens and hundreds of White House staffers in the Rose Garden.”
And I’m sorry, but I have to single out Peter Baker of The New York Times for a particularly sour “news analysis” (I’m not wasting a gift link on it). Here’s an excerpt that is very much in keeping with the rest of what he wrote:
What there was not much of was introspection about how he had gotten to this moment of indignity. He may be focused on the soul of America, but he revealed little of his own. Indeed, if there has been much soul searching over these past days and weeks of personal and political trauma that led to this reluctant end of his storied half-century political career, the search has been called off. Or at least the results were not reported.
I don’t think Baker would have been satisfied unless Biden confessed he was becoming senile and thanked the Times for pointing it out. Baker takes an enormous amount of grief from liberal readers for his resolute both-sides-ism, and I often find the criticism to be overwrought. This time, though, any brickbats directed his way are well deserved.
Wednesday’s address was not a farewell for Biden. After all, he’ll be president until next January, and I’m sure he’ll be out on the campaign trail with Harris. Still, it marked the latest in a series of closing acts for the president beginning with his Sunday announcement. We are going to miss this good and decent man.
