Sorry for the not-unexpected lag in blogging - I've been working around the clock so everyone else can take off for Labor Day (er, and because I'll be off a lot soon for the upcoming Jewish holidays).
A few quick hits.
1) I turned the TV on thinking that the President's acceptance speech would be ending. Instead, he had just started talking about the war. Another great speech. I don't have time to ruminate on substance, so here's a stylistic point. President Clinton was and is, by all accounts, one of the great extemporaneous speakers of our time, and Bush is...not. Yet (except for a famous speech he gave in a Baptist church early in his presidency), Clinton's prepared speeches were almost uniformly pedestrian, while Bush has delivered a surprising number of outstanding speeches (even after adjusting for the "soft bigotry of low expectations" of which Bush takes such great advantage). And it's not just a consequence of 9/11; Bush's 2000 acceptance speech and his inauguration address compare very favorably with any of Clinton's parallels. Why the difference? I have an idea, but it'll wait for now.
2) I still think that Bush would have done well to steal some lines from Noah Millman's draft (that he prepared for free!). Had Bush used the "nuanced" line, it would've brought down the house and made the pundits swoon even more than they did, despite their best efforts. His staff almost certainly raided some blogs for the excerpt from the 1946 NYT editorial.
3) Best wishes to President Clinton and his family for a speedy recovery. If this report is true, the people who booed should be ashamed of themselves. [UPDATE: the AP report in question seems to have been retracted.]
4) I have a serious moral opposition to horse-race blogging, for reasons that I'll explain later. But let's do it just this once. A new TIME poll is out showing Bush opening up an 11-point lead over Kerry. The poll was conducted from 8/30-9/2; it doesn't specify whether any of the respondents were polled after Bush's speech last night.
Just one drink, I tell you...
(And thanks, Mickey!)
P.S. I think this piece is subscription-only, but please do check out Noam Scheiber's piece in this week's TNR about the Bush campaign's outreach to Orthodox Jews. Here are some excerpts:
The political benefit of an event targeted at haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, Jews in New York is not immediately obvious. After all, New York is a blue state, and winning every Brooklyn Orthodox vote isn't going to dent the Democratic tally here. But Jeff Ballabon, a 41-year-old Orthodox Jew and Bush Pioneer who helped organize the Brooklyn trip and the earlier briefing, argues that the events will resonate outside New York because haredim in different parts of the country are tightly connected. "They all read the same national papers," says Ballabon. "And ninety-five percent of them are published in New York. ... The Orthodox press for many is the primary source of news." The logic applies to non-haredi, modern Orthodox Jews as well. At the Bush campaign press briefing earlier in the day, Tevi Troy, an Orthodox Jewish campaign official, emphasizes that the assembled leaders, a mixture of haredi and modern Orthodox Jews, are "plugged into other cities"--"you know, people in Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Cleveland." He encourages them to "talk to your friends in other cities and tell them what the president is about."
And what's the main message?
The underbelly of the Bush campaign's pitch to these voters is the idea that, even if John Kerry, who gets a stellar rating from AIPAC, is a reliable supporter of Israel, and even if he says he'd prosecute the war on terrorism aggressively, there are structural forces within the Democratic Party that make a Kerry administration dangerous. At just about every Jewish-themed event I attended this week--and there were multiple events each day--someone has drawn attention to the rise of the antiwar, anti-Israel left within the Democratic Party. Usually, the conversation begins with Michael Moore, who has left a long trail of anti-Israel comments, continues on to MoveOn.org and former supporters of Howard Dean, and ends with the observation that, in recent years, it has been the far left of the Democratic Party, not the far right of the Republican Party, that has been awol on votes in Congress regarding Israel. "That's going to be a major theme going into the stretch run," says one Republican strategist. "The point is, who do you surround yourself with? ... [With the Kerry] campaign, the focus is on Michael Moore, Jimmy Carter." One Jewish Republican close to the White House, who occasionally serves as a Bush campaign surrogate, told me he makes this pitch explicitly. "Even if Kerry means everything he says about Israel," he tells Jewish audiences, "the question is whether his constituency--today's Democratic Party--would really let him go there."
This is a trenchant argument. I've seen no evidence that Kerry, while in the Senate, showed any sign of independent thought on matters relating to Israel. And in his case, that was a good thing: he went along with the pro-Israel bipartisan consensus of Northeastern members of both houses. But as President, he might be subject to different pressures - not just from the Michael Moore wing of the party, but perhaps more importantly from many allies with whom he's ostensibly trying to mend fences (most notably, an unnamed country whose name has more than four letters and begins with "F") and whose policies and preferences can be characterized, on a good day, as "throw Israel to the wolves." Love him or hate him, who wouldn't agree that Bush is capable of (for Bush fans) resisting pressure to change course / (for Bush haters) prone to refusing to change his mind? Kerry, to put it mildly, does not give the same impression.
