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Stories tagged with “Democratic National Convention”

NEWS FLASH

Poll: Obama Approval Up 7 Points After DNC | President Obama’s approval rating climbed to 52 percent, his highest rating in many months, according to Gallup’s latest poll. The last three days of the Democratic National Convention gave him a 7 percent bump in approval over three days, with a 3 percent hike in just the past 24 hours. Mitt Romney received no bump in the polls from the RNC, dropping from 47 percent before the convention to 46 percent. The DNC also surpassed the RNC in ratings; even competing with the opening night of NFL football, more people tuned in to Bill Clinton’s DNC speech than the second half of the Cowboys-Giants game.

LGBT

Zach Wahls And President Obama Round Out Democrats’ Embrace Of LGBT Equality

By Zack Ford on Sep 7, 2012 at 9:11 am

The final night of the Democratic National Convention again featured many celebrations of LGBT equality, not to mention speeches by openly gay individuals such as Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI). President Obama himself reiterated his support for marriage equality, Vice President Joe Biden condemned intolerance, and many other speakers applauded the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and other advancements of LGBT equality. In fact, there was a video dedicated entirely to the LGBT community, complete with photographs of pride parades and same-sex couples. Watch it:

Zach Wahls, rockstar spokesperson for children of same-sex couples everywhere, spoke briefly to the convention, calling out Mitt Romney for implying that some families were more “real” than others:

WAHLS: Governor Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage because every child deserves a mother and a father. I think every child deserves a family as loving and committed as mine. Because the sense of family comes from the commitment we make to each other to work through the hard times so we can enjoy the good ones. It comes from the love that binds us; that’s what makes a family. Mr. Romney, my family is just as real as yours.

Watch it:

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Election

‘It’s Arithmetic’: The Best Of Bill Clinton’s DNC Speech, In One Infographic

By Adam Peck on Sep 6, 2012 at 2:52 pm

Last night, President Bill Clinton formally nominated President Obama for a second term at the Time Warner Center in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina in a fiery, energetic speech that had the DNC crowd roaring from the moment he stepped on stage.

For nearly 50 minutes, Clinton reminded voters of the challenges Obama inherited in 2009, and highlighted the ways in which the administration and Democrats in congress helped put the economy on a path towards recovery. To drive home the point, Clinton employed a running tally of both the Obama White House’s and the Republican party’s record on private sector jobs over the last 50 years:

Security

MSNBC Host: Democrats’ Jerusalem Move Was ‘Craven Capitulation,’ ‘It’s Bad Policy’

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 6, 2012 at 12:30 pm

MSNBC host Chris Hayes

The Democratic Party re-inserted language into its platform yesterday that declares Jerusalem as the capital of Israel after howls from Republicans suggesting that its omission meant the Democrats aren’t sufficiently pro-Israel. As many have noted, the actual process of amending the platform yesterday was a bit of a mess. President Obama himself reportedly asked that it be inserted while convention chair and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa awkwardly ignored the wishes of at least half the delegates and rubber stamped the change.

Seeming to try to sift through the pandering and political theatre yesterday on MSNBC, some of the network’s hosts thought it was good that Obama embraced the DNC platform and made it his own, as compared to Mitt Romney, who had previously distanced himself from some of the GOP’s more distasteful elements. But fellow host Chris Hayes challenged his colleagues and the entire charade and noted that the Democratic platform isn’t even-handed on the Israel-Palestine issue:

HAYES: Can we just say, I’ll just say for myself, it’s a substantively terrible decision. It’s bad policy alright. It’s a craven capitulation and it’s a craven capitulation that empowers the worst elements in the people that are working on this issue. If you read this platform, there is not a single condition put on Israel, in the Israel-Palestine section, there’s conditions put on the Palestinians that they must renounce — they must accept Israel’s right to exist, etc. There’s nothing said about the settlements.

And if the American government policy is actually that Jerusalem is the capital and the American government wants move the embassy to Jerusalem, there have been plenty of opportunities for both Republicans and Democrats to do that and they have not done it because it’s a terrible idea from the perspective of actually getting a lasting peace between these two peoples.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, as this blog also noted yesterday, in 1995 Congress passed a measure mandating that the U.S. move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and every U.S. president since has refused to implement it on grounds that such a move would severely damage the peace process and the two-state solution. As Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann wrote yesterday at the Daily Beast, the whole faux-controversy is all about politics:

It has become politically suicidal to refrain from declaring loyalty to an undivided Jerusalem in which no one, save the ignorant and the true believers on the fringes, genuinely believe. Parties, party platforms, and even Presidential candidates pander to what they, correctly or incorrectly, perceive to be “the Jewish vote,” advocating policies—like transferring the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—that no responsible president, regardless of party, will carry out. The discourse on Jerusalem within the political arena in the United States is a charade, and all but the deluded and the devout know it.

“Those of us who deal with Jerusalem relate to presidential elections in the United States much as Floridians do to the hurricane season,” Seidemann writes, “we board up our windows, hunker down, hope for the best, and wait for the season to pass (when possible, maintaining a sense of humor).”

Alyssa

Bill Clinton Gives Us Nostalgia For What We Never Had

By Zack Beauchamp on Sep 6, 2012 at 10:31 am

Since this is a culture blog, I’m going to leave the policy and political analysis of President Clinton’s barnburner DNC speech to others (see Daniel Larison, Jonathan Cohn, and James Fallows for some good examples). But one of the reasons that Clinton’s speech succeeded in the way that it did was the cultural cache surrounding Bill Clinton and the era where he was more relevant. As Duncan Black points out, this was the last era in memory where Americans felt thoroughly optimistic about the future of our country:

Whether or not he deserves any credit – and he certainly deserves a lot of credit for some bad things – what I think has been lost is the fact that the latter half of the Clinton years were good times. Good times in a way that that hadn’t been experienced since the late 60s or so. I don’t just mean in terms of purely quantifiable things – though the numbers there are good – it was also the case that there was a real sense of optimism. America, we’re back, bitches! It wasn’t all a horror story in the previous couple decades, but “morning in America” ads aside, there was a feeling of stagnation.

What struck me about Black’s observation was that I felt similarly — despite the fact that I was 12 when Bill Clinton left office. My generation became politically aware around September 11th; we matured alongside the Iraq war and the financial crisis. We’re the generation of crisis politics, and looking back at the trappings of the 90s — the comparatively insignificant politics, the silly clothes, the sunny art — makes us acutely aware of the contented America we missed out on. Watching the quintessential 90s President deliver an address about a better future is the ultimate exercise in the displaced nostalgia pervades American culture in the 2010s. Clinton’s address sometimes felt like the political equivalent of watching Downton Abbey and Mad Men to escape to an enthralling past, or using Instagram to get an instantaneous sense of having “been there, man.” And, for a few minutes last night, it seemed like we were.

Security

Clinton Calls Out Romney For Planning To Boost Military Spending With No Plan To Pay For It

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 6, 2012 at 10:07 am

Last night during his speech to the Democratic National Convention, President Clinton called out Mitt Romney’s reckless plan to increase military spending. “The Republican argument against the president’s re-election was actually pretty simple — pretty snappy,” Clinton said, “It went something like this: We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.” The former president then noted that all Romney and the GOP plan to do is go back to Bush era policies and boost military spending without paying for it:

They convinced me they were honorable people who believed what they said and they’re going to keep every commitment they’ve made. We just got to make sure the American people know what those commitments are — (cheers, applause) — because in order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn’t say very much about the ideas they’ve offered over the last two years.

They couldn’t because they want to the same old policies that got us in trouble in the first place. They want to cut taxes for high- income Americans, even more than President Bush did. They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts. They want to actually increase defense spending over a decade $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend it on. And they want to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor children.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, Clinton is right. If elected president, Mitt Romney plans to increase military spending by $2.1 trillion and he has not said how he would pay for it. Back in July, top Romney foreign policy adviser Richard Williamson was asked repeatedly how Romney would pay for the increase but Williamson just dodged the questions and had no real answer.

Election

Associated Press ‘Fact Checks’ Clinton’s Speech By Bringing Up Monica Lewinsky

By Aviva Shen on Sep 6, 2012 at 10:03 am

Bill Clinton’s 48-minute speech at the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night was, as FactCheck.org put it, “a fact-checker’s nightmare: lots of effort required to run down his many statistics and factual claims, producing little for us to write about.”

Clinton’s numbers checked out, according to most fact-checking outlets, including Politifact, which has been accused of unfair exaggeration by liberals before. Though he frequently departed from the script, the former president correctly cited the statistics on Obama’s job growth, decreasing health costs since 2010, and the stimulus tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.

Yet one outlet disagreed with the general consensus: the Associated Press. The AP fact-check said Clinton “either cherry-picked facts or mischaracterized the opposition.” It even “fact-checked” Clinton’s offhand reference to the Romney campaign’s dishonesty by bringing up Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal:

CLINTON: “Their campaign pollster said, ‘We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.’ Now that is true. I couldn’t have said it better myself — I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.”

THE FACTS: Clinton, who famously finger-wagged a denial on national television about his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky and was subsequently impeached in the House on a perjury charge, has had his own uncomfortable moments over telling the truth. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Clinton told television viewers. Later, after he was forced to testify to a grand jury, Clinton said his statements were “legally accurate” but also allowed that he “misled people, including even my wife.”

During its fact-check of this claim, the AP article had to ignore the Romney campaign’s dishonest attack on Obama’s welfare work requirements, which even Republican governors have questioned. It also fails to consider the campaign’s habit of deliberately editing Obama out of context, as they did in Romney’s first ad, which attributed the line, “If we talk about the economy, we’re going to lose,” to Obama when he was actually mimicking the McCain campaign in 2008. Also missing is the fact that the Republican National Convention last week was based on a distortion of Obama’s “you didn’t build that” quote. ThinkProgress has compiled a comprehensive catalog of Romney’s lies on virtually every issue he’s had to discuss.

Rather than attempt to debunk Clinton’s attack on the campaign’s dishonesty, the AP could only imply that Clinton cannot criticize any false claims because of his past scandal. And, to make the attack seem more credible, it is presented as “THE FACTS.”

Update

Mike Oreskes, AP’s U.S. news senior managing editor, is defending the Lewinsky reference: “The reference was not about that woman, Miss Lewinsky. It was about facts. Clinton challenged the Republicans for their attitude toward facts. We were simply pointing out that as president Clinton had his own challenges in this area.”

Health

Conservatives Bash Sandra Fluke’s Convention Speech, Parroting Limbaugh’s Sexist Attacks

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Sep 6, 2012 at 9:40 am

Despite the widespread outcry against Rush Limbaugh’s and Bill O’Reilly’s sexist smears against Sandra Fluke earlier this year — when they claimed she was a “slut” who wants the government to pay for her “social life” — other far-right commentators haven’t quite grasped why these types of attacks are offensive. After Fluke took to the stage of the Democratic National Convention last night to articulate the issues at stake in the ongoing War on Women, conservative media took to Twitter to bash her for “whining” about needing free birth control for the activities that go on in her “bedroom”:


Aside from misrepresenting Fluke’s point that women should not have to pay more than men do for essential preventative health services, including contraception, these smears degrade Fluke as a woman. In fact, Fluke speaks for the one in three American women who report struggling to afford birth control, and does not need to apologize for either her sexuality or her demand for equitable health care. And although some commentators decried Fluke for “only” talking about birth control rather than addressing other political themes, as if contraception is merely a petty and personal issue, access to health services like contraception is inextricably linked to economic issues.

LGBT

California Assembly Speaker: ‘We Fight For’ The LGBT Community

By Zack Ford on Sep 6, 2012 at 9:06 am

California Assembly Speaker John Pérez (D)

Last night’s speakers at the Democratic National Convention once again included many mentions of the LGBT community. Boston Mayor Tom Menino (D) boasted, “You know what we call same-sex couples? Our friends. Our brothers and sisters.” Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) called out conservatives: “From marriage equality to voting rights, someone will fight against expanding the rights enjoyed by some Americans to all Americans.” And California Assembly Speaker John Pérez (D), who is openly gay, identified that many LGBT people still experience employment discrimination across the country:

PÉREZ: In too many states, even some folks who have a job wake up every morning worrying that they may lose their job simply for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. We fight for them. [...]

[Obama] helped repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ giving LGBT Americans the opportunity to openly and proudly serve our nation in uniform. And he’s standing up for the right of those of us in LGBT community to say, ‘I do.’

Watch it:

Though many convention speakers have recognized the LGBT community, Pérez was the first to identify transgender people by name.

Politics

Bill Clinton Takes On Paul Ryan: ‘It Takes Some Brass’

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Sep 5, 2012 at 11:34 pm

Bill Clinton singlehandedly dismantled the Romney-Ryan campaign narrative that President Obama is trying to put an end to Medicare at the Democratic Convention Wednesday night, pointing out that it is in fact the Romney-Ryan proposal for Medicare that would permanently change the program to a depreciating voucher system. “It takes some brass,” Clinton said, “to attack a guy for doing what you did”:

First, Both Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan attacked the President for allegedly robbing medicare of $716 billion. But it is not true.[...]

So, President Obama and the Democrats did not weaken Medicare. They strengthened Medicare. When Congressman Ryan looked into that TV camera and attacked President Obama’s Medicare savings as “the biggest, coldest power play,” I did not know whether to laugh or cry. Key cuts that $716 billion is exactly to the dollar the same amount of medicare savings that he had in his own budget. It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.

Watch it:

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