This just in from the convention: Many Democrats came from humble roots.
If you watched last week’s activities in Tampa, Fla., you may have been under the impression that the Republicans had cornered the market on modest beginnings. (The Romneys had bad furniture in college!) But Michelle Obama played a trump card on Tuesday with a car “so rusted out I could actually see the pavement going by in a hole in the passenger-side door.”
When she mentioned that, I remembered that when my husband and I were in graduate school, he had a car with exactly the same problem. I wonder if the president had to park in out-of-the-way places to conceal the fact that the safety sticker on the windshield was four years out of date. If so, perhaps it’s just as well to not go into it.
Michelle was a wow, but there’s something kind of ironic about a woman wearing the best dress in the history of political conventions, one that offers a particularly flattering view of the best upper arms in the history of the female gender, giving a speech in which she earnestly explains how she is just like us.
She had a lot to say about the burden of student loans, a part of higher education that the Romneys most definitely did not share. But the first lady said almost nothing about her outside-the-home work life. One of the unremarked-upon factoids in recent political history is that the last two Democratic presidents both had their careers underwritten by lawyer spouses who served as the chief family wage-earners. Michelle didn’t officially quit her job until she moved into the White House. But that was a little off-message for the first half of the Democratic convention, which was all about moms. And roots. Particularly moms with humble roots.
The keynote speaker, Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio, had an arresting, mom-filled story about his background. He and his twin brother, Joaquín, went to school in one of the state’s most impoverished school districts, but now he’s talked about as a future governor and Joaquín seems to be on his way to Congress. (There are a lot of up-by-the-bootstraps stories in American politics, but you’d have to figure it would be Texas that would produce duplicates.) Before he started recounting the saga, Castro announced that he was there for the purpose of re-nominating Barack Obama, thus answering the crucial question of whether he’d get to the point faster than Chris Christie, who first mentioned Romney in about the 71st paragraph.
On Wednesday, the Democrats busied themselves by putting God in their platform. (The Republicans ended with asking themselves who invited Clint Eastwood. The Democrats were wondering who disinvited the Lord.) Then they began to get to the point of the whole convention with Bill Clinton, whose speech was eagerly anticipated by everyone, particularly the Obama aides who had been pacing around all day waiting to get a look at the transcript.
Most Beloved Democrat! Back again from the Alpha Doghouse, where he was consigned after trash-talking Obama during the 2008 primaries. Remember what F. Scott Fitzgerald said about there being no second acts in American lives? So wrong, Scott, so wrong. Let me introduce you to Mr. Act Twelve.
Clinton started calling himself the Comeback Kid during the 1992 primaries, but nobody could have imagined the way his comebacks would multiply like gerbils. The impeachment, nonperson in 2000, and now his unapproval rate is at 27 percent. There are pictures of kittens that get lower ratings. It’s like one of those long-running, ever-evolving TV series where the guy who starts out as the mass-murderer vampire turns into the hero by season three, then has a huge, bloody, yearlong relapse, but then by season six he’s the town sheriff and part-time minister.
Clinton is the key to the Democrats’ central narrative, which begins in 1993, when he got his party to raise taxes to get the soaring national deficits under control. It was a huge lift, and politically disastrous. The Democrats lost Congress in 1994. A freshman House member from Pennsylvania, who reluctantly gave Clinton the deciding vote, was politically ruined forever. (Her son met and married Chelsea. Really, you cannot make these Clinton stories up.)
The country got the big reward. By the time Clinton left office, trailed by yet another scandal involving presidential pardons, the unemployment rate was at 4 percent. Then he handed the country over to George W. Bush, who was egged on to cut taxes by the right wing that is now running the Republican show.
Now we’re saddled with monster deficits, and the Republicans refuse to let this president do the brave thing Bill Clinton did, and get us more revenue. Thus the campaign. Let’s bury the roots and start talking taxes.
If you watched last week’s activities in Tampa, Fla., you may have been under the impression that the Republicans had cornered the market on modest beginnings. (The Romneys had bad furniture in college!) But Michelle Obama played a trump card on Tuesday with a car “so rusted out I could actually see the pavement going by in a hole in the passenger-side door.”
When she mentioned that, I remembered that when my husband and I were in graduate school, he had a car with exactly the same problem. I wonder if the president had to park in out-of-the-way places to conceal the fact that the safety sticker on the windshield was four years out of date. If so, perhaps it’s just as well to not go into it.
Michelle was a wow, but there’s something kind of ironic about a woman wearing the best dress in the history of political conventions, one that offers a particularly flattering view of the best upper arms in the history of the female gender, giving a speech in which she earnestly explains how she is just like us.
She had a lot to say about the burden of student loans, a part of higher education that the Romneys most definitely did not share. But the first lady said almost nothing about her outside-the-home work life. One of the unremarked-upon factoids in recent political history is that the last two Democratic presidents both had their careers underwritten by lawyer spouses who served as the chief family wage-earners. Michelle didn’t officially quit her job until she moved into the White House. But that was a little off-message for the first half of the Democratic convention, which was all about moms. And roots. Particularly moms with humble roots.
The keynote speaker, Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio, had an arresting, mom-filled story about his background. He and his twin brother, Joaquín, went to school in one of the state’s most impoverished school districts, but now he’s talked about as a future governor and Joaquín seems to be on his way to Congress. (There are a lot of up-by-the-bootstraps stories in American politics, but you’d have to figure it would be Texas that would produce duplicates.) Before he started recounting the saga, Castro announced that he was there for the purpose of re-nominating Barack Obama, thus answering the crucial question of whether he’d get to the point faster than Chris Christie, who first mentioned Romney in about the 71st paragraph.
On Wednesday, the Democrats busied themselves by putting God in their platform. (The Republicans ended with asking themselves who invited Clint Eastwood. The Democrats were wondering who disinvited the Lord.) Then they began to get to the point of the whole convention with Bill Clinton, whose speech was eagerly anticipated by everyone, particularly the Obama aides who had been pacing around all day waiting to get a look at the transcript.
Most Beloved Democrat! Back again from the Alpha Doghouse, where he was consigned after trash-talking Obama during the 2008 primaries. Remember what F. Scott Fitzgerald said about there being no second acts in American lives? So wrong, Scott, so wrong. Let me introduce you to Mr. Act Twelve.
Clinton started calling himself the Comeback Kid during the 1992 primaries, but nobody could have imagined the way his comebacks would multiply like gerbils. The impeachment, nonperson in 2000, and now his unapproval rate is at 27 percent. There are pictures of kittens that get lower ratings. It’s like one of those long-running, ever-evolving TV series where the guy who starts out as the mass-murderer vampire turns into the hero by season three, then has a huge, bloody, yearlong relapse, but then by season six he’s the town sheriff and part-time minister.
Clinton is the key to the Democrats’ central narrative, which begins in 1993, when he got his party to raise taxes to get the soaring national deficits under control. It was a huge lift, and politically disastrous. The Democrats lost Congress in 1994. A freshman House member from Pennsylvania, who reluctantly gave Clinton the deciding vote, was politically ruined forever. (Her son met and married Chelsea. Really, you cannot make these Clinton stories up.)
The country got the big reward. By the time Clinton left office, trailed by yet another scandal involving presidential pardons, the unemployment rate was at 4 percent. Then he handed the country over to George W. Bush, who was egged on to cut taxes by the right wing that is now running the Republican show.
Now we’re saddled with monster deficits, and the Republicans refuse to let this president do the brave thing Bill Clinton did, and get us more revenue. Thus the campaign. Let’s bury the roots and start talking taxes.