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Quote Of The Day: Michelle Obama Saved Democratic Convention

August 26th, 2008
By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

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The political Quote of the Day comes from CNN senior political analyst David Gergen, a Republican who has served as an adviser to Presidents from both parties:

The Democrats should be enormously grateful to Michelle Obama: after a very slow start to the convention, punctuated by a moving tribute to Teddy Kennedy and his own rousing speech, the first evening was in danger of becoming an entirely lost opportunity. But Michelle rescued it.

She was extraordinary, talking in ways that were both conversational — always welcome in people’s living room — but also inspiring. She spoke in ways that reached out to people of all backgrounds. Democrats should be both proud and grateful.

The problem: each party has one shot to do a convention that quickly-embeds its key campaign message the minds of a) all who watch b) journalists who cover it so the conventional wisdom can be shaped in the party’s favor, c) talk show hosts, bloggers and other commentators the next day.

Call your favorite bookie now and place money on the GOP being on-message from second one. The Kennedy speech was a special, poignant historical moment made all the more dramatic due to news that it was 50-50 whether Kennedy’s doctors would give him permission to speak. But in hard-nosed political terms, it didn’t advance the party’s vote-getting or opposition-defining agenda.

Legendary Democratic strategist James Carville says the same thing but a bit more bluntly:

Speaking on CNN, Carville said the party was too soft in its attacks on John McCain Monday night — the same mistake, Carville says, Democrats made at the 2004 convention.

“The way they planned it tonight was supposed to be sort of the personal — Michelle Obama will talk about Barack Obama personally, Ted Kennedy was a very personal, emotional speech,” Carville said. “But I guarantee on the first night of the Republican Convention, you’re going to hear talk about Barack Obama, commander-in-chief, tax cuts, et cetera, et cetera.”

“You haven’t heard about Iraq or John McCain or George W. Bush — I haven’t heard any of this. We are a country that is in a borderline recession, we are an 80 percent wrong-track country. Health care, energy — I haven’t heard anything about gas prices,” Carville also says. “Maybe we are going to look better Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But right now, we’re playing hide the message.”

Will the party move out of unintentional “hide the message” mode? Will Bill and Hillary Clinton use their speeches to advance the party cause and Obama candidacy, or will their speeches largely be most newsworthy and quoted for what they say about each other or what pundits note they don’t say about Obama?

The bottom line:

Don’t. Expect. The. Republicans. To. Under-Use. A. Single. Day.

NOTE: Due to a technical glitch when posting the code was messed up the first version and the headline came out garbled in the second. We regret the errors and they’ve been fixed.

UPDATE: MSNBC’s First Read touches on this issue as well:

For Democratic partisans and those who love feel-good convention moments, it’s hard to see how the Republicans could duplicate last night, particularly with first-night speakers George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (then again, they won’t try — instead they’ll keep their eye on the Obama ball).

FR also says this:

As we’ve noted before, Obama has three goals at this convention: 1) making contrasts with McCain, 2) filling in his biography, and 3) uniting the party. Last night, the convention attempted to begin dealing with all three issues. Early in the evening, viewers were treated to a taste of some anti-McCain speeches; of course, only C-SPAN viewers may have received the full impact of those diatribes. As for the other two goals, between Kennedy and Michelle, the campaign can claim it made progress on unity (don’t the Clinton-Obama rifts seem petty after seeing Teddy?) and on biography (Michelle O. was as pitch perfect as she can be in presenting her story, but if there’s one critique of her speech is that it was more about her than Barack, but maybe that was the point.) As for the attempts to contrast with McCain, the GOP campaign and other strategists we’ve communicated with believe McCain went a lot more unscathed than, say, Obama will be after Night One of the Republican convention.



This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under Quote of the Day, Newsweek Blogitics, Conventions, Denver Democratic National Convention, Democratic Party, Bill Clinton, 2008 Elections, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 22 Comments

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    Is it always necessary to do what conventional wisdom says? Do you have to attack, attack, attack Day 1? Or do you survey the political landscape and address what your candidate has been attacked on:

    1. His supposed hatred of America.
    2. His so-called "elitism"
    3. His "foreign-ness" (for Pete's sake)
    4. His supposed radical nature (wife included)

    I was pleasantly surprised at the way the Dems handled the first day. And Nancy Pelosi did give the "meat" that everyone wanted. And Carville has lost me. He's bitter that he can't bite someone's head off in the spotlight.
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    T-Steel,

    You beat me to it. Seriously. Your post is so right on the money. Isn't one of the points of the Obama campaign that more than a few of us are weary of that same old style of politics? Isn't that what is bringing out so many supporters for him that haven't voted before? I think so.
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    This was only the first day of the convention! The "experts" are engaging in fiction. And don't overreact to it and ancitipate a good GOP convention. All odds are against it!
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    If there is a worse public speaker (George Bush included) than Nancy Pelosi, I don’t know who it would be.

    At least she is going full speed ahead with her plan to eliminate fossil fuels and drilling by using natural gas.
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    If the Democrats were 100% negative, like the Republicans, we'd all hear about how the Dem's don't have anything to offer the country besides not-being-Republicans. When they offer a positive vision, then we hear that they are off message and not attacking enough.

    Somehow I doubt our "liberal media" will scrutinize the Republicans in the same way.
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    JWest, the only person worst than Pelosi as a public speaker, speaks next week. John McCain. "Republicains" (noted "cains") are scrambling to find a way to have him come off better than he did when he cliched the nomination. Good Luck.
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    J. West: Claire McAskill (sp?) and other "lesser lights" (more cruelly, "fluff and filler") were less moving or appealing than Pelosi. (That included Leach, who had a flat presentation and got little applause but made as good a Republican-at-the-Dem-convention-bashing-the-current-GOP speech as could be made.) Not everyone can be the headline or top-line speaker at all times every day.

    Note I am not defending Pelosi much or claiming she is a good, much less great, speaker. She stumbled a bit (as did Teddy Kennedy, but nobody cared about Ted's stumbles; they were all glad he made it to the convention and onto the stage!) and her smile and frozen hair were a bit much. (My brother is a particular non-fan of her and had more to say in her disfavor last night, but we needn't pile on here on her or on Hillary Clinton, either, prematurely.)

    I've compared this better convention to past Democratic circuses. Please consider the 1992 convention. Patricia Schoeder was simply a stupid babbler (meant in some way to represent Women [tm]? My God...)
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    Chris, you're being inaccurate and illogical again. Brake that temper. If the Dems do go mainly or wholly on the attack, yes, they'll be criticized for being like -- the GOP this year, which has been almost exclusively negative toward the Dems. If the Dems offer what "progressives" consider to be a truly positive vision (what they will do is appeal to liberals of many kinds, obviously), others will criticize their positions. It's up to libs and Dems like Begala to say the Dems aren't mean enough (when they're normally more than mean enough, often too mean, in fact).

    The liberal media (quotes correctly omitted), who have been campaigning on Obama's behalf being the mainly libs and Dems that they are, attack McCain when he blunders, and ignores him when he does nothing, at least nothing wrong at a given moment. Suppression of anything he does (or does right or well) is common -- out of sight, out of (the voters') mind. _Everyone_ has written off the McCain campaign and the GOP this year and any lackluster coverage of the GOP convention is due to disinterest when not contempt or hatred on the media's part.

    As of now, the only reason to watch the GOP convention is out of a perverse form of entertainment (Gitmo Lite) and in the morbid hope that the GOP will be left in worse, not better, shape afterward.
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    John McCain. Dynamic! Energetic! Transformational!

    OK, try again...
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