I had planned a post on McCain’s running mate in anticipation of this morning’s decision.  But, I write this as I head to bed in California, still needing to find a flight to Minneapolis.  And given the time difference we may well know the nominee before I wake up.

Unlike some Republicans, I wouldn’t be upset if the 2008 presumptive Republican presidential nominee tapped the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee, Joe Lieberman.  Lieberman gets the most pressing issue facing our country at this time and would not waver in the War on Terror.  National interest trumps party loyalty for me.

While I wouldn’t be upset by Lieberman, I am rooting for Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty who seems the best of the candidates most frequently mentioned.  He has been a pretty effective Governor, sometimes working with Democratic majorities in the state legislature, but frequently vetoing their spendthrift legislation.  And while he is pro-life, thus pleasing social conservatives, he does not walk in lockstep with the far right.  Indeed, while conservative, he is far from doctrinaire.

I have been impressed with former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s performance in debates since I saw the exchange last January in New Hampshire.  Even after John McCain bested him in the Republican primaries, he has campaigned zealously on behalf of his one-time rival, handling tough questions from reporters with intelligence and grace.  He has a good command of the issues and would give Joe Biden a run for his money in the Vice-presidential debate.

But, there’s just something about him that doesn’t feel right.  I agree with Glenn Reynolds who writes, “Romney just feels wrong to me, I’m not sure why. He’s got a good resume and he seems like a nice guy, but he comes across as a bit plastic, the opposite of the “straight talk” brand, I guess.”

None of the other candidates under consideration really leap out.  There seems to be a lot of speculation on the Corner that it’ll be Pawlenty.  That would make me happy and please Hugh Hewitt who says it’s either going to be the Minnesota Governor or the former Massachusetts Chief Executive.

It’s just too bad that the ideal candidate has the wrong last name for this election.

In the few times I have watched Barack Obama speak, I’ve observed how well, like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, he responds to the audience. Perhaps because I’ve seen Reagan speak up close on more than one occasion and because of my great reverence for the man, I think he connected with any audience better than those two Democrats.

If the audience responded to a particular line, he would pause, smile or otherwise gesture as the rhetoric required and wait until the audience was ready for him to continue. The applause would reach its crescendo and begun to taper off before perhaps with a different tone or just renewed vigor, he would continue.

In such a manner did Barack Obama address the Democratic Convention four years ago. Tonight, while his voice remained as mellifluous as ever, he himself seemed rushed as if eager to finish the speech before the 11:00 newscasts on the East Coast.

Indeed, he talked right over the audience as they were applauding one of his best lines in the whole address:

I don’t know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine. These are my heroes. Theirs are the stories that shaped me. And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as president of the United States.

It was a good way to address the most effective ad of the McCain campaign. He should have savored the moment, paused, let the audience roar its approval, then pick up again, perhaps repeating part of that passage.

(Maybe he realized he needed to slow down because he did allow for some dramatic pauses toward the end of the speech.)

It wasn’t just his rushed delivery, it was also his movement. He kept turning his head this way and that, not to address a particular person in the audience — or a particular section of the stadium, but as if a speech instructor had told him to look around the room as he spoke. It seemed he heeded the advice rather than follow his own instincts which tend to serve him well in such circumstances.

At times, he shouted his speech as if he felt that were the only way he could make himself heard in such a venue.  And, as I observed in posting my initial thoughts on the speech, he seemed, at times, very angry.

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In his speech tonight, Barack Obama referred to his party as “the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy.”

Did he leave anyone out?

I mean, you know like the only Democrat save FDR to win two consecutive terms since Andrew Jackson?

. . . in order to let people reflect more on Obama’s speech?

I just watched Barack Obama accept the Democratic nomination with a friend from the Illinois Senator’s party. He agreed with my evaluation that the normally eloquent speaker was not “as smooth” as he normally is, but asked that I add that his style tonight “in now way detracted from” his support for his party’s nominee.

Obama seemed angry and almost never smiled. This speech lacked the cadences of a typical Obama speech. Of his addresses that I have seen, this was one of the worst. He seemed at times to rush it, sticking on some words while eating others.

UPDATE: Just scanning the commentary at the Corner. I’m not the only one who thought he sounded angry. Mark Hemingway writes, “There’s a fine line between indignant and angry, and Obama is swerving back and forth all over it.” And like me, Kathleen Parker is “missing the soaring rhetoric.”

More later, off to dinner with that good and kind Democrat. But, well, I don’t think of him as a Democrat, but as a friend.

UP-UPDATE: If Obama’s campaign is trusting in the power of the candidate’s oratory, he didn’t deliver tonight.

UP-UP-UPDATE: As I was preparing to leave for dinner, I did catch Juan Williams’ commentary on Fox and pretty much agree with him. The speech was more “prose than poetry.” It lacked catch phrases, no memorable lines. It as a “laundry list” which was not quite satisfying. He didn’t play to the emotion of the crowd.

I would add that Obama’s boilerplate about change and a new kind of politics was just that, boilerplate. Sounded tired. We’d heard that so many times before. Kind of ironic, I guess, about the line about a new kind of politics sounding old. And a discourse on change sounding very much the same.

UP-UP-UP-UPDATE: No surprise here: Media Cheers Obama Speech. More UP-DATES below the jump. (more…)

One reporter describied the backdrop for Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver as resembling the Parthenon, “the ancient Greek temple of the goddess Athena.”  Given that the Greek goddess is the subject of my neglected dissertation and my interest in politics, I find myself uniquely qualified to write about this.  

Others have weighed it, noting how this set was “built by the same cheesy set team that put together Britney Spears’ last tour.” So the set reinforces that he’s no ordinary politician, but a celebrity instead.  And like most celebrities having delusions of being more than just an actor playing a part a singer entertaining a crowd.

Now, does he style himself some kind of deity worthy of the adoration enjoyed by the owl-eyed goddess?

I mean, there are parallels between our political conventions and the Panathenaia, the great celebration in classical Athens honoring the city’s patroness.  Each were held every four years, with a variety of events held over a period of several days, with one great culminating event.  For our political conventions, it’s the nominee’s acceptance speech.  For the Athenians, it was the presentation of the peplos to Athena.

And what is a peplos, you ask?  It was the garment Greek women wore in those days.  But, this was no ordinary peplos.  Nine months before the Panathenaia, the arrhephoroi, young girls between the ages of seven and eleven, began weaving the robe.  Later, other women, the ergastinai, would take over the production of the garment, yet with the continued assistance of the younger girls.*

I wonder if we could compare the ergastinai to some of Obama’s female supporters one of whom said today that his visit to a women’s luncheon today “was like the clouds parted and the sun was shining in.”  

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I’ve long believed that the government should remain neutral on gay issues, neither discriminating against us nor offering us preferential treatment.  To that end, I won’t be upset should John McCain, in his acceptance speech next week, fail to address our community.

Gay activists, however, insist politicians reach out to us and identify us by name.  So, I was wondering, how will they react should, in his convention speech tonight, Barack Obama, their party’s nominee not specifically reference gays?

The draft Democratic platform failed to mention gays or lesbians specifically.  The final draft still does not address our community by name, but was tweaked to include this language:

We support the full inclusion of all families, including same-sex couples, in the life of our nation, and support equal responsibility, benefits and protections.

Emphasis added.

Gay activists have praised the platform while noting the omission of the “g” word.

I wonder if gay activists will be as effusive in their praise should Obama be similarly silent tonight. My prediction: they will. Because for them, it’s not so much about promoting gay people as it is about electing Democrats.

UPDATE: Watching the speech now, he mentioned us, saying that while there are differences on same-sex marriage, we should agree that our “gay and lesbian brothers and sisters” should be allowed to visit a loved one in the hospital.

UP-UPDATE:  Patrick Range McDonald thinks that for gays, Obama’s speech was quite historic.  Read the whole thing.

As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic presidential nomination tonight, he should hope that the speeches of his rival for that position and her husband have helped assuaged her supporters’ concerns of about his candidacy. It seems he himself did little to reach out to them in the nearly three months between Hillary’s withdrawal from the race and this week’s convention.

Shortly after the McCain campaign released ad featuring a woman elected as a delegate for Hillary Clinton who nows backs his bid for the White House, I read:

After Clinton conceded the race, [Debra] Bartoshevich said she could not support Obama and threw her support to McCain. The state party stripped her of her status as a delegate last month.
McCain seized on her story, meeting with Bartoshevich for coffee when he campaigned in Racine last month.

A shrewd move on McCain’s part. I wondered why, unlike his Republican rival, Obama made no effort to reach out to this Democrat to attempt to persuade her to support her party’s nominee. Wondered indeed if he made any effort to meet with any of her delegates — or to otherwise sit down with rank-and-file Hillary supporters. (A few google searches turned up nothing.)

Perhaps he thinks he can solve anything with the power of his oratory and the force of his personality. As if speeches alone can address the concerns voters have about the the Democratic nominee and his associates.

And here’s the ad, yet another Hillary supporter coming out for John McCain:

watch?v=597YG23mAWs

When I traveled cross-country last fall, a close friend who lives in our nation’s capital observed that one of the great challenges in my life has been the tension between my interest in politics and my passion for literature (or, as I would put it, in myths, movies, novels or poems).

Well, because of family travels this summer, I’ve not had as much time to focus on that latter passion as I would like, particularly at it involves my graduate studies.  I have fallen behind (way behind) on research for my dissertation.

Were it not for that, I would definitely be headed to St. Paul for the GOP Convention next week.  

But, with encouragement from other bloggers and one pundit, I’m now on the fence again.  It would be great to see a political convention up close — and to meet so many bloggers whom I read and with whom I have corresponded.  

I’ll let you know if I should go.  If you plan on attending, please let me know.  Maybe we could arrange a cocktail hour for GayPatriot readers.

ADDENDUM: Should I go, it will be in a weird capacity, both as an advocate and a journalist, an advocate because I favor John McCain’s election as president and a journalist, because if I go, I’ll be covering it for this blog.

In his speech last night, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden opened up his ticket not only to attacks on his party’s presidential nominee’s weakness on foreign policy but also to charges that he is (yet again) misrepresenting the historical record.

It seems sometimes when Democrats criticize the president’s foreign policy, they’re recycling talking points from 2005 or 2006.  Or maybe it’s just that they can’t think up new arguments to respond to changing circumstances.

Biden claimed that “our country is less secure and more isolated than at any time in recent history.”  

As the numerous terrorist attacks on US targets during (and immediately after) the Clinton Administration show, that’s hardly the case.  If the Democrat thinks we’re more isolated, he obviously hasn’t been following the election returns in foreign lands over the past three years.

Since German voters rejected Gerhard Schroeder in September 2005, we’ve seen anti-Bush governments voted out in Canada and France while a pro-American Prime Minister, once defeated, has been returned to office in Italy.  And until his reelection earlier this year, that man, Silvio Berluscon had (in 2006) been the only pro-American leader voted out of office in a major industrialized nation since Bush’s reelection in 2004.

In short, Biden’s comment shows how clueless he is in the field where he is supposed to be an expert.  The only reason we’re perceived as isolated in foreign affairs is because the media dwelled on the very public opposition then-French President Jacques Chirac and then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder made to U.S. plans to liberate Iraq, something Biden then supported.

And just as Biden has switched his views on that liberation in response to shifting public opinion, so too did those nations switch their governments in response to public opinion.  Both nations are now led by governments more favorably disposed to the United States of America and with whom the incumbent president has a good working relationship.

Last night, while watching coverage of the Democratic Convention, I noticed how yet again, the organizers were passing around signs featuring the name of the current speaker, then it was those vertical signs with “Biden.”  The night before it had been signs with “Hillary,” and the night before that “Michelle.”

I recall the first political conventions I watched on TV when you looked out into the audience and saw a great variety of signs, some mass-produced, others handmade.

In recent years, there seems to have been a focus (in both parties) on making sure everyone in the audience is waving the exact same sign.  Looks fake to me, almost like a rally in a Communist country when such things existed in mass quantities (Communist countries that is).

When the entire audience is waving the same sign, they all look like automatons. Makes the convention look more like a media stunt rather than a rally of delegates enthusiastic about their candidate and eager to rally ’round him in the coming campaign.

Now it just looks like they’re extras on a movie set who will move on to some other project as soon as the media leaves town.

Last night was clearly a good night for the Democrats.  Bill Clinton was in his element and (from the portions I saw of his remarks) delivered a very effective speech.  

I watched all of Biden’s speech (rebroadcast on FoxNews just before midnight my time) and thought the first half was moving and powerful, but the second half seemed mean and focused only on attacking John McCain.  I’m not the first to say it, but will join those who thought it as poor form* for him to call the presumptive Republican nominee his friend, then to question his judgment on foreign policy.

So that brings me to the list of the Obama Campaign’s biggest blunders.  I’ll start with that:

1. Biden questioning McCain’s foreign policy judgment, opens Democrats up to variety of GOP broadsides next week in St. Paul.
2. Obama’s delivering a campaign-style speech on foreign soil.
3. Handling Hillary.  He should have included her in his running mate deliberations.  And reached out to her more often in the days between the last primary and this week’s convention.
4. Running the ad attempting to distance himself from Bill Ayers and attacking conservatives raising the issue.  All this does is draw more attention to the Illinois Democrat’s connection with the avowed terrorist.
5. Holding his acceptance speech at Invesco Field.  Again raises the issue of his arrogance and sense of self-importance while the Greek Temple setting opens him to further mockery (more on that anon, I hope).  Even senior Democrats think this is a “high-risk endeavor.“

These blunders won’t necessarily sink his campaign. A good speech tonight could help offset some of them as could a strong fall campaign. Or similar blunders from the McCain camp.

UPDATE:  Via Reader Peter Hughes, I learn of another blunder.  According to Dick Morris, the Democrats are concentrating their fire on the wrong man: “They are so anxious to run against Bush, their animosity is so pent up, that they persist in running against a man who is not seeking a third term.”  As Glenn Reynolds would say, “Read the whole thing!”

*UP-UPDATE: In this vein, Victor David Hanson writes:

I think his personal attack on his former friend McCain’s judgment and character was a terrible mistake-it only invites comparison of Biden’s ethical meltdowns with made-up bios, plagiarism, and unethical interrogations of Supreme Court nominees with McCain’s past service; and, more importantly, will take the gloves off in the race, and earn candid like appraisals of Barack Obama and Biden.

Check out these interesting critiques of liberal intolerance towards gay conservatives from two perhaps more liberal-minded blogs:

[M]any intolerant gay liberals really don’t care so much about how gay Republicans feel about “issues utterly unrelated to gay rights,” except to assume unfairly that their motivation is probably selfish (i.e., lower taxes) rather than not (i.e., national security, foreign policy, etc.).

The real source of their trouble is their singular focus on gay civil rights as an issue that ought to trump every other, so much so that they bear real feelings of betrayal and outright hatred for any one of “our own” who support politicians or even political parties on the other side of that issue. (No doubt that singular focus is easier when they just so happen to agree with Democrats on most every other issue.) [...]

The problem with the witch hunt at Manhunt, to slightly restate Jamie’s point, is too many on the gay left who believe that because of how the parties stand on gay rights, to be gay and Republican is a betrayal not to be tolerated, especially if you support individual politicians like McCain who have a rotten gay rights record.
- Chris Crain

[C]ampaign rhetoric and partisan posturing aside, Obama is not perfect and McCain is not a homophobe…

Does our community have room for, as example, my gay African-American Democratic friend who is concerned that Barack Obama does not have adequate experience or maturity for this position? Is there a place for my gay Republican friend who thinks that McCain is a move in the right direction by the Republican Party and who wants to vote to support this improvement? What about women who believe that Hillary Clinton was treated grossly unfair by DNC operatives?

Or are gay activist correct in demanding that those who do not give unqualified support for the Democratic Party candidate are traitors and should be reviled and punished?
- Timothy Kincaid, Box Turtle Bulletin

Most of the comments responding to these posts are about what I expect, but both Crain and Kincaid demonstrate a remarkable understanding of gay conservatives and our concerns that I for one find to be refreshing.

– John (Average Gay Joe)

Which is really weird to say. Yet, the beauty of this lil’ gem from the Democrat primaries is that her comments apply not only to Obama, but also his running mate Joe Biden:

Well, I think that if your candidacy is going to be about words, then they should be your own words. That’s, I think, a very simple proposition. And you know — you know, lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox.

– Hillary Clinton (2/21/08)

I foresee a new ad from the McCain Campaign utilizing this slogan: “Obama & Biden: Change you can Xerox”!

– John (Average Gay Joe)

As Bill Clinton prepares to address the delegates of the party he led to two consecutive electoral victories, he’ll be addressing a caucus not entirely unified behind the man who bested his wife for the Democratic nomination.  Part of the reason Democrats have has such difficulty coming together is the shadow he still casts over the party.

At their last such gathering, the party chairman was Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton loyalist whom the former president succeeded in installing as he was leaving office.  Most presidents exited the stage gracefully, ceding control of their party to the next generation of leadership. This one determined to hang on.

I think part of the hatred of his wife stems from the frustration of party activists that their family is trying to take over the DNC.   They resent him in part from steering their party away from its leftist moorings, the moorings they taken such pains to establish in the 1970s and 1980s.

It’s not just the Clintons’ continued presence in their party which causes these divisions.  It’s also the tension which the Clinton ascendancy represents, between his pragmatism and their left-wing ideology.  Clinton knew that ideology couldn’t win elections.  But, some of the left would rather be “right” in their view than win.  Or maybe they’re so deluded that they believe they can only win by moving left.

But, the reality is that Republicans win when they stick to their conservative principles.  And Democrats who lose when they affirm their left-wing ones.

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For as long as people have been criticizing Hillary Clinton, we’ve been hearing her supporters retort that the only reason we dislike the former First Lady is because we can’t stand (or fear) strong women.  Which means that some of my friends, acquaintances and family members are self-haters.  But, then, we gay Republicans know it’s par for the course for our ideological adversaries to call “self-hating” those whose views they refuse to understand.

In my case, it doesn’t even help when I remind these Hillary lovers of my reverence for Margaret Thatcher, quite possibly the most successful female leader in the West since the Sixteenth Century.  It seems, however, Mrs. Thatcher’s politics render her gender irrelevant.

The biggest contrast between that great woman, indeed and other successful female leaders and Mrs. Clinton is that they did not dwell on their gender, merely show by the power of their personality and the nature of their accomplishments that they could do they job better than a man.  As Jay Nordlinger asks:

Did Margaret Thatcher ever go on and on about how she was a woman? Or kvetch about glass ceilings? Did Indira Gandhi? Did Golda Meir? Didn’t they all just get on with it? I thought that Mrs. Clinton’s stress on her sex was unseemly — made her seem kind of affirmative-actiony, rather than a person who stands on her own two feet

Why is it that those on the left must dwell on someone’s membership in a supposedly persecuted (and therefore in need of protection) class.  Shouldn’t the goal be to make those differences incidental, that we not be judged by our gender, our race or sexual orientation, but our qualities as a human being?
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Perhaps I shouldn’t write about HIllary’s speech last night to the Democratic National Convention as I had other obligations.  From what I’ve read in the blogopshere, most seem to regard it as a good speech which did what she needed to do, both to help her party’s nominee and to lay the groundwork for her expected 2012 bid for the White House.

Michael Barone offered the best critique of the address (no surprise there).  He called it “Good, but not quite very good.“  He noted the absence of any kind of

description of Barack Obama. What kind of man is he? One who supports the same positions she does. Has she looked deep into his heart and found something worthy? No evidence here that she had. Would he be a good commander-in-chief? Not a word on that, as the McCain campaign quickly and gleefully noted.

(Via Instapundit).

With this speech, she can now “tell Obamaites that she made the case for Obama and brought the convention cheering to its feet. She can say that she told her supporters in the most explicit language possible to work hard for his election.”

But, I doubt it will do much to win over some of the most diehard Obama supporters, many of whom hate her.  Indeed, as I’ve learned in researching my posts earlier this year on the Democratic contest (and reading our comments section), even talking to Democratic friends and family members (at least two of whom voted for Obama not so much because they liked him, but because they wanted to defeat her), the former First Lady has many enemies within her own party.

There’s something else. While people praised her delivery, the speech lacked the poetry and the passion of her recent rival’s addresses. Indeed, shat struck me in watching the few clips of the speech I did see was how wooden were her gestures and how flat her voice.   Unlike her husband, she doesn’t have a great range of intonation.  If she wants to do better in ’12, she’ll have to work on that in the next four years.

In reading the speech I was struck with how, well, how Clintonian it was.  Barone called it  “carefully tailored” while Rich Lowry imagined “Bill and Hillary, when the speech was being drafted, putting the stuff about Obama on a scale, and calibrating it word for word, syllable by syllable, until they had reached the perfect bare minimum about Obama.”

UPDATE:  Calling Hillary’s speech, “the best of her career,” Peggy Nooan writes that toward “Obama she was exactly as gracious as she is capable of being.”  As with anything by this gifted columnist, just read the whole thing.

I have never really gotten the fasciation my gay peers have with the pop star who calls herself Madonna.  Unlike Barbra Streisand, a true diva, Madonna is little more than a musical cipher, shrewdly adapting her style to the prevailing trends in popular music.  

She has stayed atop the charts for so long (longer indeed than almost any other pop star) not for her own gifts nor for her unique way of singing a song (like Barbra), but for her intelligence and public relations savvy.  She knows how to cater to the audience; she’ll do whatever it takes to get media attention.

Madonna has always been the Bill Clinton of pop music.  Just as he does whatever it takes to appeal to voters, so too would she do whatever it takes to appeal to music-lovers.  In contrast to Ronald Reagan, Clinton is not known for his commitment to a core set of political principles.  Nor is the pop star known for her pioneering any musical style or perfecting any particular genre.

As Katherine Berry put it yesterday in Pajamas:”For two decades now, Madonna’s fame has stemmed more from her antics than any actual talent, singing or otherwise” (via Instapundit who thinks the pop star’s too old to be having a mid-life crisis). And now the faux diva has figured out another way to get attention.  

Launching his Sticky & Sweet Tour in the United Kingdom, she compared the presumptive Republican president to a whole slew of tyrants.  She knows the world media loves any criticism of American politicians with an (R) after their names:During the four-act show in Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, a video interlude showed images of destruction, global warming, Adolf Hitler, Zimbabwe‘s authoritarian President Robert Mugabe and – you guessed it – McCain.

In another sequence that was shown later, the images were meant to be positive. Madonna showed pics of slain Beatle John Lennon, former Vice President Al Gore, Mahatma Gandhi and presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

Smart woman, she knows the way to get attention.  It probably doesn’t matter to the very material girl that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned her use of Hitler’s image as “inappropriate and offensive.“  She just revels in the media attention.

The woman may lack taste or any standard of decency of fair play, but she knows how to stay in the limelight. As do some aging politicians of her party.

Kind of reminds me of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

UPDATE:  Roger wonders if Madonna is secretly helping McCain.

As I’ve been read John McCain’s political autobiography, Worth the Fighting For: The Education of an American Maverick, and the Heroes Who Inspired Him, (in anticipation of next week’s convention) and pondering a post on Bill Clinton’s legacy to his party (in anticipation of tonight’s speech), I had some thoughts on leadership.

Me being me, I initially hesitated to write about them because I’d rather my posts be more “essayistic.”  But, I perhaps should show greater appreciation for this medium which has given me a forum for my views for the past (nigh on) four years.

In a blog, I don’t need to write a well-organized essay, just kind of throw out my ideas.

So, here they are:

• A true leader inspires by example.
• A leader convinces others to go some place where they need (should?) go, not where there want to go.  The crowd does not sway him, but he sways the crowd, yet he must know how to appeal to them should he wish to change their minds.
• A leader is undaunted by opposition and holds true (stands fast) in the face of it, shifting course only when necessary to accomplish a broader goal, but never losing sight of his core principles.

I dare say there’s more to leadership than just those four qualities, but these notions came to mind as I as reading that book and pondering the Clinton post.

For every reference to his party’s presidential nominee in his speech tonight to the Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton will reference himself at least three times.

Maybe I’m being conservative on this one.