RNC mixed messaging

The ideals of “country first,” and “service” won lavish praise at the Republican National Convention last night. The realities of the Republican party and President George W. Bush got rather less respect.

Palin plays the earmark game

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin won the governorship of Alaska two years ago by campaigning as a reformer against the clique of Republican officeholders beholden to the now-indicted Sen. Ted Stevens. But as Washington Independent’s Matthew DeLong reports, Palin built her career as a small town mayor by hiring lobbyists to bring earmarked federal spending to her constituents. In February, she “submitted a request for $200 million in earmarks” to Stevens. Her claim “to being an anti-earmark crusader is a bit off,” DeLong notes.

Obama regains his balance

Up until Thursday night it had been a crowded week for the Democratic National Convention. There were too many delegates and reporters jammed into the too-small Pepsi Center. The conversations of the faithful were crowded with anxieties about slipping poll numbers, soft messaging, elusive unity, and the omnipresent Clintons. Memories of disastrous Augusts (John Kerry in 2004, Al Gore in 2000 and Michael Dukakis in 1988) pinched the party’s imagination.

Tonight those hemmed-in feelings dispersed into the breezes of mammoth Invesco Field where an adoring throng of 70,000 cheered Barack Obama as he accepted his party nomination with a speech — none too lofty and none too soft — that reinfused his historic campaign with sense of history and horizon that had seemed lacking in recent weeks.

Who owns patriotism?

While the Pepsi Center in Denver echoes with phrases like “love of country” and “only in America,” and a liberal group claims 75 percent of respondents objecting to “cheap and empty” displays of patriotism, Washington Independent blogger Ari Melber points…

Obama called the Clintons

Barack Obama called Hillary Clinton last night from a campaign stop in Montana to thank her for her speech endorsing him, according to an Obama campaign spokesman. The presumptive Democratic nominee also spoke to Bill Clinton. “One can only imagine the…

The Democrats’ Big Tent

The Big Tent is a two-story temporary structure located in Denver’s sleek Lo-Do District about ten blocks north — and a couple of degrees to the ideological left — of the Pepsi Center where the Democratic National Convention opened on Monday evening. The crowd here is slightly younger and hipper, than the delegates and volunteers and TV crews now swarming the klieg-lit arena.