So I dosed off during Bill Clinton’s speech and woke up in the middle of Piers Morgan. So I got to see the rest of Clinton’s speech. AND:
Piers incredibly effusive about the Democratic speeches. It was explained that the platform unpleasantness didn’t occur on “center stage” and so didn’t count in some way. Piers himself said that maybe the Republicans had a case on THE ECONOMY, but once we return to WOMEN’S RIGHTS common decency favors the Democrats. Look how EXTREME the Republican platform is! NO EXCEPTIONS.
It goes without saying that the partisan analysis didn’t include reflections on how the Democratic platform is also more extreme than ever on abortion. A fair-and-balanced analysis would have included some account of the reasons for the extremism, from the point of view of the median American, of both party platforms.
We can whine about this partisanship or say, as Pete explains, that the Democrats are getting away with murder because the Republicans said NOTHING at their convention to structure debate on life and related issues. The Republicans should have been calling attention to the extremism of ROE, to the hyper-extremism of Obama, to the domination of the platform committees by those who aren’t even about saying that abortion should be rare. The Republicans must know that, despite all the Democratic prattling about women’s rights, that the median American—including the median American woman—is gradually becoming more pro-life.
No doubt the median American isn’t thrilled with the extremism of either platform. But it’s getting clearer which kind of extremism the median American finds more repulsive. So I think the Republicans aren’t hurt if the median voter comes to understand that both parties have become, in a way, equally extreme.
The Republican emphasis should be on getting abortion etc. away from the Courts and the bureaucrats and in the hands of the American people deliberating through their legislatures. So Romney should have said a good deal about what kind of judges he would appoint. THAT, after all, is (along with protecting the freedom of institutional religion) much of what the president can do on the life front right now.
Clinton’s speech was an effectively conversational, if somewhat ironic and self-promoting, defense of Obama on the economy. The big point was that Democrats over the decades have been better for prosperity than the Republicans. Especially ME! It’s just taking a little longer—due to disastrous effects of Bushian incompetence—for the Clintonian side of Obama to kick in.
The speech did have a loony ending about Americans sacrificing their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for a more perfect union.
