Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG

Today's Web Grab

You might enjoy:

• Tyler Cowen in Marginal Revolution: Drill, drill, drill?: the economics of drilling
• Jeffrey Ressner in Politico: Murphy, Juno, Jamie Lynn and Bristol
• Martin Bright in Bright's Blog: Charles Clarke, the New Statesman and the future of the Labour Party
• James Forsyth in Coffee House: The Brownites really can't play the expectations game
• Oliver Kamm's Blog: Science and its discontents

John McCain: Look behind you

The country music went without a hitch. The spotlight on McCain worked flawlessly. But what on earth was going on with the enormous television screen behind the speakers at the Republican Convention?

The projector managed the omnipresent flag, great American lakes and, of course, George W. Bush just fine. But then John McCain got on stage and our senses were assailed by a strange green glow.

As The Plank points out in this intriguing post:

The much-noted green background behind John McCain during part of his speech was in fact the verdant lawn in front of an imposing edifice, as you can see in this wide shot. One of McCain's many dwellings? No, it turns out it's the Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, California.

Walter Reed Middle School? Hmmmm. Mistake Number 1. As the Plank hypothesises, it should surely have been Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

And mistake number 2? Well, that sickly green background does no-one any favours.

What's in a word? The convention speeches

It's all over. Two weeks of speeches from Republicans and Democrats. Two weeks of barnstorming messages, scathing critiques and a whole new interest in the phrase 'hockey mom.'

One way to sort through the messages is by a numerical breakdown of the candidate's words. The New York Times presents us with a nice graphic on the subject.

Among the takeaway points:

• Obama mentioned McCain 21 times in his speech. McCain referenced him on just 9 occasions.
• Obama brought up Bush 8 times. McCain just once - and then he was talking about Laura.
• Change scored high as a talking point on both agendas - 16 times for Obama, 9 for McCain.

And here are some Comment Central comparisons.

• Obama hits hard on America/Americans using it 54 times to McCain's 31.
• Obama also draws out 'promise' (32 times to McCain's 2).
• But McCain gets into the 'fight'ing spirit. The word crops up 25 times in his speech. Obama used it just twice.

Magazine Rack - Issue 300

You might enjoy:

• The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Russians are coming
• Matt Walker in New Scientist: Did the Romans destroy Europe's HIV resistance?
• Joe Klein in Time: McCain's valedictory
• Marko Attila Hoare in Prospect: The dangers of appeasement

A Book to Read - What it Takes

I realise this is going to seem odd, but I am about to advise you to read a 1,000 page long book covering the 1988 Presidential primaries.

While thinking about Joe Biden I reached for one of my favourite political campaign books - Richard Ben Cramer's What it Takes. I remembered that it had a full history of Biden's 1988 effort. And as I leafed through it I recalled again what a great book it was.

Cramer followed all the main candidates - Bush, Dole, Dukakis, Gephardt, Hart and Biden - through the primaries and wrote a fabulous history - detailed, witty and perceptive.

What makes this book worth reading twenty years after the events it covers is not the odd insight into Biden. It is that Cramer was the first to show what life is like inside the bubble. The relationship between the candidate and their myriad advisers (Bob Shrum, or Shrummy as he is called, is particularly memorable) is lovingly chronicled.

It is still hard all these years later to find another book that describes American politics as well as What It Takes. 

What Clarence Thomas thinks of Joe Biden

A couple of days back I quoted from Ted Sorensen's memoirs, citing his opinion that in a town full of hypocrites there was no one in Washington quite like Joe Biden.

A few readers advised me that Clarence Thomas had exactly the same experience. And they were right. Here is the story from Justice Thomas:

Senator Biden was the first questioner. Instead of the softball questions he’d promised to ask, he threw a beanball straight at my head, quoting from a speech that I’d given four years earlier at the Pacific Legal Foundation and challenging me to defend what I’d said: “ ‘I find attractive the arguments of scholars such as Stephen Macedo, who defend an activist Supreme Court that would . . . strike down laws restricting property right.’ ”

That caught me off guard, and I had no recollection of making so atypical a statement, which shook me up even more. “Now, it would seem to me what you were talking about,” Senator Biden went on to say, “is you find attractive the fact that they are activists and they would like to strike down existing laws that impact on restricting the use of property rights, because you know, that is what they write about.”

Since I didn’t remember making the statement in the first place, I didn’t know how to respond to it. All I could say in reply was that “it has been quite some time since I have read Professor Macedo. . . . But I don’t believe that in my writings I have indicated that we should have an activist Supreme Court or that we should have any form of activism on the Supreme Court.”

It was, I knew, a weak answer. Fortunately, though, the young lawyers who had helped prepare me for the hearings had loaded all of my speeches into a computer, and at the first break in the proceedings they looked this one up.

The senator, they found, had wrenched my words out of context. I looked at the text of my speech and saw that the passage he’d read out loud had been immediately followed by two other sentences: “But the libertarian argument overlooks the place of the Supreme Court in a scheme of separation of powers. One does not strengthen self-government and the rule of law by having the non-democratic branch of the government make policy.”

The point I’d been making was the opposite of the one that Senator Biden claimed I had made.

Throughout my life I’ve often found truth embedded in the lyrics of my favorite records. At Yale, for example, I’d listened often to “Smiling Faces Sometimes,” a song by the Undisputed Truth that warns of the dangers of trusting the hypocrites who “pretend to be your friend” while secretly planning to do you wrong.

Now I knew I’d met one of them: Senator Biden’s smooth, insincere promises that he would treat me fairly were nothing but talk. Instead of relaxing, I’d have to keep my guard up.

I am enjoying these. Anybody else got any Biden stories?

Larry David announces that he suffers from cancer

Friday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• Gerard Baker: Sarah Palin: it's go west, towards the future of conservatism
• Alice Thomson: Tragic Georgiana is the wrong role model
• James Bartholomew: Down wiv school: children are best educated at home
• Damien Whitworth: Sarah Palin's wilderness, where the cops don't bother you
• Mark Henderson: The Large Hadron Collider: how the press demeans science
• Hugo Rifkind: The right to bear arms and the right to bearskins
• Valerie Grove: Celebrity culture is killing the serious biography
• Peter Riddell: There are plotters, but there’s no credible plot - yet
• Leading Article: Not for burning
• Leading Article: The future is still orange
• Leading Article: Less jaw-jaw, more awe-awe
• Leading Article: A U-Turn on Devolution

And from the rest of the papers...

• Iain Martin: (The Telegraph) - Labour rebels are trapped by indecision
• John Kampfner: (The Telegraph) - Without ideas, the Tories are doomed
• Charles Clover: (The Telegraph) - Pit-bull Palin, enemy of the greens, could be McCain's Achilles heel
• Leading Article: (The Telegraph) - Labour's civil war is harming Britain
• Simon Jenkins: (The Guardian) - The great hope of local politics has become Margaret Thatcher in a kilt
• Michael Tomasky: (The Guardian) - Wake me when it's over
• Sunder Katwala: (The Guardian) - A stay of execution for Brown
• Leading Article: (The Guardian) - Tyranny of the red lines
• Dominic Lawson: (The Independent) - How to squeeze the Russians
• Mary Dejevsky: (The Independent) - The dilemma for those of us who supported Hillary
• David Cameron: (The Independent) - We cannot impose democracy at the barrel of a gun
• Leading Article: (The Independent) - This is not a plot. It is a groundswell of discontent
• Andrew Alexander: (The Daily Mail) - The spectre to give Osborne sleepless nights
• Philip Stephens: (Financial Times) - McCain’s embrace of Palin reignites culture wars

And from around the world...

• David Brooks: (The New York Times) - A glimpse of the new
• Ellen Crosby: (The Washington Post) - The Support the Palins Really Need
• Editorial: (The Washington Post) - A Maverick's Appeal
• Peggy Noonan: (The Wall Street Journal) - 'A servant's heart'
• Andrew Natsios: (International Herald Tribune) - The legacy that will endure
• Akiva Eldar: (Haaretz) - The sin of haughtiness

Today's Web Grab

You might enjoy:

• Oliver Willis in The Huffington Post: The "other" base
• Madeleine Bunting in Comment is Free: Where have all the top girls gone?
• Corey Dade in Washington Wire: Biden Praises Palin for ‘Amazing Speech’
• The Economist in Democracy in America: The man who wasn't there
• Libby Purves in Faith Central: Oxford row over call to prayer: Christians apologize

The exploitation of Margaret Thatcher

Forgive me if I raise something that has been troubling me for a while.

While I was on holiday, I read Carol Thatcher's moving account of Margaret Thatcher's deteriorating mental health. What Carol had to say did not come as a huge surprise, since, in broad outline, it has been known in political circles for some time.

But it made me think once again of the extraordinary photocall involving Lady Thatcher and Gordon Brown.

At the time, aware, to a limited extent, of her deterioration I was very angry that she had been exploited like that. Now I am more so.

I am still not completely clear whether it was a failure to protect her properly at a crucial moment, or simple political ruthlessness on someone's part.

The fact remains that a very sick woman was allowed to make a very powerful political statement that she would not have wished to make had she been fully aware of what was going on.

The image of her with a Labour Prime Minister she would not possibly have approved of, if capable of approving of things, is indelible and damaging to her reputation.

Now we know the full sad truth - that Lady Thatcher often cannot even remember that Denis has died - it becomes clear that this was gross exploitation. How was it allowed to happen?