At Brookings William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck explain why “Trump’s acceptance speech failed to broaden his support“:

Donald Trump faced two main political challenges in his acceptance speech—unifying a badly divided party and expanding his support beyond the passionate minority that has rallied to his cause.

How did he do?

On the first challenge, pretty well. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t attack other Republicans, although it must have been tempting to say something about Ted Cruz. In fact, he has flipped his campaign in recent weeks to focus on security and law and order issues that tend to bring Republicans together, and they dominated the first and longest part of the speech. He endorsed the policy concerns of the party’s major interest groups, including the NRA…Only the corporate and financial communities came away empty-handed.  The party of business could not have been happy about Trump’s repeated opposition to almost every trade deal that has been negotiated in the past quarter century—or his declaration that the era of multilateral trade agreements is over.

Turning to the second challenge, he and his warm-up acts did in fact reach out beyond the base…Perhaps the most surprising outreach came from Trump himself when he talked about protecting the LGBTQ community against Islamic terrorism after the hateful attack in Orlando. And then Trump followed up with  an unscripted comment meant to emphasize the point: “As a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.”

…Nonetheless, his Nixonian invocation of “law and order” gave no ground to the many African-Americans who experience contemporary policing as oppressive and unfair. His stated determination to enforce the law against illegal immigration could not have swayed the millions of Latinos whose families will be directly affected.

Galson and Kamarck add that “No one believes that Mr. Trump can win with 41 percent of the vote, even if the Libertarian and Green Party candidates do much better than ever before. So he needs to move some voters in groups not naturally inclined to back his candidacy.” Further,

The broadest question is whether Trump’s dark picture of a country under threat, in decline, and undermined by elite corruption is shared by a majority of his fellow-citizens.  While most Americans are frustrated, many fewer are as angry as were most of the Republican delegates in the hall.  Are the American people prepared to lurch from hope and change to fear and loathing?

Kamarck and Galston conclude that Trump’s speech “left Republicans more reassured and unified than they had been during the first three days of their convention” although he quickly reversed whatever good he did with his response to the Khan family and his refusal to endorse JohnMcCain or Paul Ryan’s for re-election.

In his analysis of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic convention speech, Galston said,

As Hillary Clinton came to the podium to deliver her acceptance speech, a well-run Democratic convention had already accomplished a number of important political tasks.  Careful preparation, especially the incorporation of platform planks that Bernie Sanders had pushed into the Party’s platform, helped heal the breach between Sanders’ supporters and the Clinton campaign.  Well-crafted speeches by leading Democrats laid out the stakes in this year’s election and sharpened the case against Donald Trump.

..Her task was to achieve a credible balance between continuity and change—to argue that President Obama created a firm foundation for the change we must build together during the next decade…Her second challenge was to drive a wedge between change in the abstract, which 7 in 10 Americans favor, and the kind of change Donald Trump is offering, which is ill-informed, misguided, and much too risky to be worth the gamble…Her third challenge, on which much ink has been spilled, was to begin the task of reversing negative perceptions of her character—most important, that she cannot be trusted…

…Her challenge was to make a virtue of necessity by underscoring the principles (and the faith) that have guided her public life.  This strategy could also help counter a related accusation, that she is a cold-blooded pragmatist, moved by burning ambition, who lacks a moral core and changes direction in response to shifting political winds.  In the end, trust rests on authenticity.

All very difficult challenges, but Clinton, Galston argues, did well with it:

It was not an oratorical masterpiece, but it was a sturdy, workmanlike presentation of who she is, how she thinks, and what kind of president she would be…She acknowledged being a public servant who has always been more comfortable with the “servant” rather than the “public” dimensions of her work.  She affirmed the obvious: she is a policy wonk who sweats the details, as she insisted a president should.  She set forth her guiding principles and quoted the Methodist credo.  She praised the accomplishments of the Obama-Biden administration while making it clear that she is far from satisfied with the status quo.

And she raised questions about Donald Trump that go to the core of his candidacy…In one of the speech’s most notable lines, she said that “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

“By itself, a single speech cannot solve a candidate’s problems,” concludes Galston. “But it can set a sense of direction and mark out a way forward.  Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech was a good beginning—an honest presentation of self.  In that sense, it was completely authentic.  And authenticity is the basis of trust.”

All in all, both the Trump and Clinton convention speeches served the Democratic cause well enough, as Galston and Kamarch show. Trump’s meltdown since then has added momentum to Clinton’s candidacy, to the point where a Democratic landslide that could flip majority control of both houses of congress is no longer a distant dream. The most important decision Democratic strategists now face may now be  how to allocate resources between investing in House and Senate races.

A prominent member of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), lost in a primary on Tuesday. A lot of the immediate reaction made it sound like a nationally-driven counter-purge of a Tea Person by the Republican Establishment. I didn’t entirely agree, as I noted at New York:

[I]t is true that national groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Ricketts family super-pac fought a proxy war with Huelskamp’s allies in the Club for Growth and Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity in Kansas’s 1st congressional district.

But in a very real sense what Huelskamp’s defeat showed is that ideology does not always trump local factors, even in the ideological hothouse of the contemporary Republican Party. The endorsement that really lifted the challenger Roger Marshall to victory was probably one from the Kansas Farm Bureau.

Huelskamp’s district, which covers most of western Kansas, is dominated by farm and ranch interests; it famously has more cattle than people, and grows wheat, sorghum, sunflowers, and hay. So it mattered a great deal when Huelskamp, then a House freshman, was kicked off the Agriculture Committee for serial defiance of the GOP leadership. Even more eyebrows were raised when Huelskamp became one of just 12 House GOPers to vote against the last omnibus farm bill in 2013, partially because of its SNAP (food stamp) spending levels, but also because the whole bill included a lot of “corporate welfare.” The revolt against the farm bill by House tea-partyers struck at the very heart of the ancient urban-rural compact that supported agricultural programs deemed essential to places like the 1st congressional district of Kansas. In retrospect, it’s rather amazing Huelskamp survived as long as he did.

But there was another primarily local factor that contributed to Huelskamp’s demise: a backlash from Republican voters against the ideologues closely associated with Governor Sam Brownback, whose tax-cutting “experiment” in Kansas produced a fiscal disaster and a particular crisis in public education. In yesterday’s GOP primary, pro-Brownback state legislators lost ten of 16 contested seats; the Wichita Eagle called it a “brutal night for conservatives.” Reality matters, and if Tip O’Neill overstated things by saying “All politics is local,” it’s clear local issues do matter when they are in sharp conflict with ideology.

In many respects, the overriding story in Republican politics for a very long time has been the conquest of the party by conservatives who imposed a rigid ideology on themselves and others not just in the right-wing fever swamps of the Deep South or the Mountain West, but across the country. What’s happening in Kansas right now doesn’t indicate conservatives are losing their grip on the GOP; a stronger data point for that proposition would obviously be Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the national ticket. But Kansas is showing there are limits to the power of ideology.

It’s about time.

Robert Kagan’s latest Washington Post column, “There is something very wrong with Donald Trump” merits a slow, serious read, especially by Trump’s fellow Republicans. Kagan, a senior Brookings fellow and Clinton supporter, explains:

One wonders if Republican leaders have begun to realize that they may have hitched their fate and the fate of their party to a man with a disordered personality. We can leave it to the professionals to determine exactly what to call it. Suffice to say that Donald Trump’s response to the assorted speakers at the Democratic National Convention has not been rational.

Why denigrate the parents of a soldier who died serving his country in Iraq? And why keep it going for four days? Why assail the record of a decorated general who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan? Why make fun of the stature of a popular former mayor of New York? Surely Trump must know that at any convention, including his own, people get up and criticize the opposition party’s nominee. They get their shots in, just as your party got its shots in. And then you move on to the next phase of the campaign. You don’t take a crack at every single person who criticized you. And you especially don’t pick fights that you can’t possibly win, such as against a grieving Gold Star mother or a general. It’s simply not in your interest to do so.

The fact that Trump could not help himself, that he clearly did, as he said, want to “hit” everyone who spoke against him at the Democratic convention, suggests that there really is something wrong with the man. It is not just that he is incapable of empathy. It is not just that he feels he must respond to every criticism he receives by attacking and denigrating the critic, no matter how small or inconsequential the criticism. If you are a Republican, the real problem, and the thing that ought to keep you up nights as we head into the final 100 days of this campaign, is that the man cannot control himself. He cannot hold back even when it is manifestly in his interest to do so. What’s more, his psychological pathologies are ultimately self-destructive…

Kagan, of course, is not the lone ranger in suggesting that Trump may be more than a little unhinged, and in a dangerous way. See here, here and here for example. “He must attack everyone who opposes him, even after he has defeated them,” Kagan continues. “He must continue talking about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, even after Cruz has thrown in the towel. He must humiliate New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, even after Christie has lain down before him.”

Kagan’s Fellow WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson has also observed Trump’s tantrum about the Democratic convention and commented that “he’s alarmingly thin-skinned. Referring to critics who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, Trump said Thursday that he wanted to “hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin.” And: “I was going to hit one guy in particular, a very little guy.” Trump made clear Friday on Twitter that he was talking about “ ‘Little’ Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president.” (The bet here is that ‘Little Michael Bloomberg’ would likely flatten Trump in any such physical altercation).

Kagan doesn’t use the word. But millions of Trump-watchers must be thinking that this may be the first overtly sadistic presidential nominee of a major political party. Trump seems unmoved by criticism of his cruelty, or worse, maybe he likes it, since many sadists have a masochistic side. As Kagan adds, “he is unable to control his responses to criticism. He must double down every time, even if it means digging himself deeper and deeper into the hole.” Worse, adds Kagan,

And because it is a defect and not a tactic, it would continue to affect Trump’s behavior in the White House. It would determine how he dealt with other nations. It would determine how he dealt with critics at home. It would determine how he governed, how he executed the laws, how he instructed the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies under his command, how he dealt with the press, how he dealt with the opposition party and how he handled dissent within his own party. His personality defect would be the dominating factor in his presidency, just as it has been the dominating factor in his campaign. His ultimately self-destructive tendencies would play out on the biggest stage in the world, with consequences at home and abroad that one can barely begin to imagine. It would make him the closest thing the United States has ever had to a dictator, but a dictator with a dangerously unstable temperament that neither he nor anyone else can control.

Kagan believes that “his defects will destroy him before he reaches the White House. He will bring himself down, and he will bring the Republican Party and its leaders down with him.” It’s scant comfort, however, because an individual with such disturbing ‘character defects’ has risen as far atop one of the major political parties as has Trump, and that some horrific event, such as a terrorist attack, scandal or economic meltdown just might put him in charge as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation.

If Democrats needed a reason to reject complaisancy or overconfidence and get busy organizing a record GOTV effort, Kagan’s column is a good starter.

Just the headlines and links:

Donald Trump isn’t crazy

Air Force mother booed at Pence event

Donald Trump’s revisionist history of mocking a disabled reporter

From ‘Yes we can’ to ‘I alone can fix it’

Trump steers clear of the Khans, but finds other distractions: The GOP nominee attacks Hillary Clinton at a rally but interrupts himself with seemingly random thoughts and grudges.

Meet Trump’s latest political enemy: Fire marshals

Donald Trump’s praise for Vladimir Putin

America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets

Trump: Wind power ‘kills all your birds‘

Donald Trump’s Long, Fruitless Quest for Business in Russia

Harry Reid To Intel Community: Give Donald Trump Fake Briefings

Trump Defends Roger Ailes: ‘He Helped Those Women’

Trump boots baby from Virginia rally

In their New York Times article, “Donald Trump’s Draft Deferments: Four for College, One for Bad Feet,” Steve Eder and Dave Philipps report that during the Vietnam War era Trump:

…stood 6 feet 2 inches with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10.

But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels.

The diagnosis resulted in a coveted 1-Y medical deferment that fall, exempting him from military service as the United States was undertaking huge troop deployments to Southeast Asia, inducting about 300,000 men into the military that year.

The deferment was one of five Mr. Trump received during Vietnam. The others were for education.

Trump’s military deferrment history is not so different from that of many young men during the era. But Trump has called attention to himself with comments disparaging Sen. John McCain’s p.o.w. experience, explaining, “I like people who weren’t captured.”  He has also been criticized for disrespecting the grieving Khan family, who lost their son, Captain Humayun Khan, in the Iraq war.

As for Trump’s actual physical condition at the time, Philipps and Eder note,

Mr. Trump’s public statements about his draft experience sometimes conflict with his Selective Service records, and he is often hazy in recalling details.

In an interview with The New York Times last month, Mr. Trump said the bone spurs had been “temporary” — a “minor” malady that had not had a meaningful impact on him. He said he had visited a doctor who provided him a letter for draft officials, who granted him the medical exemption. He could not remember the doctor’s name.

“I had a doctor that gave me a letter — a very strong letter on the heels,” Mr. Trump said in the interview.

Associated Press’s Thomas Beaumont explains why “Kaine May Give Democrats an Edge in Swing-State Virginia” and quotes Virginia Republican strategist Chris Jankowski: “Tim Kaine is an example of putting someone on the ticket that will impact their home state…Putting him on the ticket turns Virginia from a true, toss-up state to one that leans Democratic.” Beaumont adds, “Kaine has been a fixture in a metro area that accounts for 10 percent of Virginia’s voting population, including heavily Democratic Richmond…it’s this doughnut around Richmond —- politically and culturally diverse Henrico County to the north, east and west, and whiter, GOP-leaning Chesterfield, to the south and west — where Kaine’s potential impact on the presidential ticket can really be seen…”Chesterfield is the county to watch,” said former longtime Republican state Sen. John Watkins. “If Kaine can help shave Trump’s margin to less than 10 percentage points, Clinton will win Virginia.”

Harold Meyerson argues that “The Democrats must be the party of the 99 percent” at pbs.org.: “The Democrats need to be, as the Occupy movement put it, the party of the 99 percent. Their economic agenda needs to recognize how deeply the fundamental changes in capitalism over the past four decades have wounded the American people and diminished the American middle class. They need to respond with economic reforms as far reaching as those of the New Deal were in the 1930s. This pivot in the party’s central direction need not and cannot lead it to abandon its advocacy for minority rights, but now is the time to reinvent its majoritarian program: an economics to create a more thriving and egalitarian nation.”

In Matt Viser’s Boston Globe article, “Bruising contest now heads to swing states,” he notes, “Trump is also continuing the approach that worked for him during the primary campaign, but could be risky during a general election: spending very little on television ads…As of mid-July, his campaign and super PAC supporters had reserved only $655,000 in television and radio ads, according to an analysis by Ad Age. Clinton had reserved $111 million across 10 states, with much of it concentrated in Florida and Ohio.”

At Bloomberg View Ramesh Ponnuru and Francis Wilkinson discuss “Two Views on the Democrats’ Strategy to Isolate Trump.” Wilkinson speculates about the down-ballot effects of a Trump meltdown, “Democrats didn’t like Mitt Romney one bit. But they didn’t think he was, as Trump ghostwriter Tony Schwartz went so far as to suggest about Trump, a “sociopath.” And it’s hard to imagine most Democrats getting especially anxious at the prospect of Romney controlling nuclear codes. That’s simply not the case with Trump…If you effectively make the case that Trump is a candidate better suited to the “Friday the 13th” franchise than to the leadership of the free world, that implies a question or two about the party that nominated him for president.”

At The Washington Post, Iraq war veteran Rafael Noboa y Rivera has an eloquent description of the difference between the Democratic and Republican convention that merits repetition: “…Patriotism isn’t just about wars and tanks and planes and troops. It’s about the ideas that make America great, not empty boasts that you’ll make it great again…No one who watched Clinton’s convention — least of anyone who saw Khizr Khan’s dramatic elegy of his son’s sacrifice, and consequent challenge to Trump — can doubt that Democrats are abounding in that love…Contrast that with the carnival of fear and terror we saw the preceding week in Cleveland. There, Trump and his minions painted a nightmarish hellscape of an America only one man could save. Where Obama said Americans do not seek to be ruled, Republicans prostrated themselves before Trump and implored him to rule over them. Nowhere in Cleveland was there to be found love of what America is, or what it is becoming; only fear, terror and fury. Only that, and a desperate, animal desire to restore America to a pale caricature fantasy. What patriotism was there to be found in the empty exhortations to “make America great again,” when that America explicitly doesn’t include me or my friends or anyone I know?”

Blue Nation Review’s Eric Kleefeld provides an encouraging report on the good news from appeals courts,  “Three GOP Voter-Suppression Laws Struck Down — in One Day” But Democrats should remain vigilant, because Republicans also have a history of voter suppression tricks that can be deployed independent of legal status, including: providing misleading information about polling places, intimidation of Latino voters by phony “security” guards, “voter caging,” putting few or faulty voting machines in minorty precincts, creating parking problems near polls, reducing the number of polling cites to create long lines and others. And Democrats should never forget the “Brooks Brothers Riot” and its disastrous consequences.

And despite the favorable court rulings for Democrats, there are other unresolved legal issues, as Michael Wines reports in his NYT article “Critics See Efforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters From Rolls.” As Wines notes, “…Republican legislatures and election officials in the South and elsewhere have imposed statewide restrictions on voting that could depress turnout by minorities and other Democrat-leaning groups in a crucial presidential election year…A June survey by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund found that governments in six former preclearance states have closed registration or polling places, making it harder for minorities to vote. Local jurisdictions in six more redrew districts or changed election rules in ways that diluted minorities’ votes.”

At rollcall.com Shawn Zeller gives Democrats a little something to worry about: “…Obama’s solid Electoral College win in 2012 was predicated on some narrow state wins. His margins were extremely tight in Virginia (115,910 votes), Colorado (113,099), Ohio (103,481) and New Hampshire (40,659) and the crucial state of Florida went his way by only 73,189 votes out of more than 8 million cast.” However, concludes Zeller, “Rory Cooper, a former spokesman for Eric Cantor of Virginia when Cantor was the Republican House majority leader, says Trump’s argument that he can expand the Republican presidential playing field into Democratic strongholds is hard to believe…”He is underwater with women, young people, Hispanics and with African-Americans. To make inroads in blue states, you have to make inroads into those communities,” says Cooper…”

This headline, and the story that goes with it, flags a possible turning point that will substantially reduce Trump’s acceptability to veterans and their families.

In his HuffPo article “Understanding Trump,” Psycholinguist George Lakoff, author of “Dont Think Like an Elephant” and other works, takes an in-depth look at the 2016 presidential election and finds an emblematic contest between leaders of the nurturing ‘Mommy’ and authoritarian ‘Daddy’ parties.

It’s hard to imagine a more authoritarian personality than Donald “I alone can fix it” Trump to head the ‘Daddy party.” As presidential candidates go, he is the all-time poster boy for name-calling, bellowing authoritarianism and narcissistic male chauvinism. He favors simplistic “solutions,” like building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, banning Muslim immigrants and openly using torture and assassination of family members of terrorists as political remedies. Google ‘Trump Mussolini’ and you get around 468,000 hits.

As the first woman and mother nominated presidential candidate by one of the two major parties, Clinton is quite literally a perfect fit for leader of the “Mommy party.” In addition, she has acquired a polished skill-set as a negotiator and advocate during her career roles as First Lady, Senator from New York and Secretary of State, as well as during her earlier work as an advocate for the Childrens Defense Fund. However, nurturing Moms can also be pretty tough, as Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and others who have done political battle with Clinton can attest.

The nomines of the two major parties set the stage for a full-blown Lakoffian analysis of the political messages and Lakoff provides it. Among his insights:

…In a world governed by personal responsibility and discipline, those who win deserve to win. Why does Donald Trump publicly insult other candidates and political leaders mercilessly? Quite simply, because he knows he can win an onstage TV insult game. In strict conservative eyes, that makes him a formidable winning candidate who deserves to be a winning candidate. Electoral competition is seen as a battle. Insults that stick are seen as victories — deserved victories.

Consider Trump’s statement that John McCain is not a war hero. The reasoning: McCain got shot down. Heroes are winners. They defeat big bad guys. They don’t get shot down. People who get shot down, beaten up, and stuck in a cage are losers, not winners.

The strict father logic extends further. The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality (the strict father version), and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate. The hierarchy is: God above Man, Man above Nature, The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak), The Rich above the Poor, Employers above Employees, Adults above Children, Western culture above other cultures, Am,erica above other countries. The hierarchy extends to: Men above women, Whites above Nonwhites, Christians above nonChristians, Straights above Gays.

As we await the next batch of polls to determine if and to what extent Hillary Clinton got a convention “bounce,” it’s a good time to gain some perspective on these often short-lived phenomena, as I discussed at New York.

[H]istory offers a cautionary lesson that some convention bounces are like young love in the early spring: They just don’t last. As Harry Enten shows at FiveThirtyEight, presidential candidates’ net favorability ratings often rise or plunge between the conventions and Election Day. And some famously large convention bounces were really misleading when the deal went down.

One such bounce was in fact so chimerical that it’s now puzzling it existed at all. The 1980 Democratic Convention that renominated Jimmy Carter is now remembered as a rolling disaster, which began with an effort to dump the sitting president, continued with a speech by losing primary candidate Ted Kennedy that upstaged the nominee, and then concluded with Carter chasing Kennedy around the stage pursuing in vain the traditional clasped-hands unity gesture.

But guess what? Carter’s net favorability rating rose 24 points between the beginning and end of the two conventions that year. He was unpopular earlier and unpopular on Election Day, but for a while there the sun really shined on the 39th president that year.

A more recent and less dramatic example of this dynamic was in 2008, when John McCain got a net 8-point convention advantage, drawing even with Barack Obama before both Sarah Palin and the U.S. economy imploded.

So yeah, the bounces are important, and we are all in a perfectly appropriate habit of beginning to pay attention to polling once the conventions have ended and we are truly into the general-election season. But you cannot take bounces to the bank, and particularly in a year when the conventions are relatively early, the numbers can turn on a candidate like an old love gone sour.

The full text of  Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 28, 2016, follows below.

Thank you! Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you all very, very much. Thank you for that amazing welcome. Thank you all for the great convention that we’ve had. And Chelsea, thank you. I am so proud to be your mother and so proud of the woman you’ve become. Thank you for bringing Marc into our family, and Charlotte and Aidan into the world.

And Bill, that conversation we started in the law library 45 years ago, it is still going strong.

You know that conversation has lasted through good times that filled us with joy, and hard times that tested us. And I’ve even gotten a few words in along the way.

On Tuesday night, I was so happy to see that my Explainer-in-Chief is still on the job. I’m also grateful to the rest of my family and the friends of a lifetime. To all of you whose hard work brought us here tonight. And to those of you who joined our campaign this week. Thank you.

What a remarkable week it’s been. We heard the man from Hope, Bill Clinton. And the man of Hope, Barack Obama. America is stronger because of President Obama’s leadership, and I’m better because of his friendship. We heard from our terrific vice president, the one-and-only Joe Biden, who spoke from his big heart about our party’s commitment to working people as only he can do.

And first lady Michelle Obama reminded us that our children are watching, and the president we elect is going to be their president, too. And for those of you out there who are just getting to know Tim Kaine – you’re soon going to understand why the people of Virginia keep promoting him: from city council and mayor, to Governor, and now Senator. And he’ll make our whole country proud as our Vice President.

And, I want to thank Bernie Sanders.

Bernie, your campaign inspired millions of Americans, particularly the young people who threw their hearts and souls into our primary. You’ve put economic and social justice issues front and center, where they belong. And to all of your supporters here and around the country: I want you to know, I’ve heard you.

Your cause is our cause. Our country needs your ideas, energy, and passion. That’s the only way we can turn our progressive platform into real change for America. We wrote it together – now let’s go out there and make it happen together.

Read more…

After noticing, along with everyone else, that the first two days of the Democratic National Convention were extremely light on discussion of certain issues like terrorism and crime (they did spend a lot of time on the former on Day Three), it occurred to me that perhaps an old vice had returned to the American political scene. So I addressed it at New York:

[T]here is some evidence in both parties that a bad old habit is coming back: the tendency to talk predominantly about issues of most concern to the party base, and where the party’s policy prescriptions are relatively popular, and refuse to talk about anything else.

For many years, Democrats avoided talking about national security partly because they thought they looked and sounded weak on the subject, and partly because they figured if voters were absorbed with “good Democratic issues” like education and health care and wages they’d forget to worry about threats to the country. Republicans had a mirror-image delusion, trying hard to ignore “their” issues to the benefit of “our” issues.

One of the reasons Bill Clinton did well politically is that he refused to play that silly game and talked about crime and national security and, yes, even welfare dependency. You can make a good argument (on welfare policy, anyway) that he made the mistake of adopting conservative policies to address these problems. But he recognized something very simple: When politicians refuse to talk about something voters care about, voters fill in the blank with whatever distorted attributed positions the other side suggests. So when Democrats ignored crime as a “Republican issue” and Republicans accuse them of hating cops and sympathizing with violent criminals, a lot of voters had no real reason to conclude otherwise.

Republican George W. Bush (or his “brain,” Karl Rove) got this basic point, insisting on offering conservative prescriptions to improve education, to cover prescription drug costs for seniors, and to deal with the problem of undocumented workers. He even addressed Social Security, though his desire to “reform” the program and improve its solvency by simply reducing benefits was a little too apparent.

The issues discussed at this year’s Republican convention were remarkably straitened. One of them, climate change, was naturally ignored because most Republicans don’t even believe in it. But big areas of economic policy, education policy, health-care policy, environmental policy, food and nutrition policy, and on and on, were at most paid lip service in Cleveland. And even on issues they did address, they often exhibited a cramped perspective: By refusing to acknowledge the issue of police misconduct toward the minority citizens they are supposed to correct, their silence encouraged the impression that they thought police should be able to do any damn thing they want, and that the odd beaten or murdered African-American John Q. Citizens was just the price to be paid for keeping crime under control. Is there any wonder Republicans continue to struggle with minority voters?

But Democrats are making the same mistake if they minimize discussion of terrorism specifically or national security generally, or of immigration enforcement, or of crime policy. On the racially fraught subject of policing, Republican charges that Democrats don’t give a damn about police or even public safety gain traction they do not deserve from a convention where murdered police officers and their families are rarely mentioned.

Again, refusing to cede ownership of entire issue areas to the other party does not mean accepting their policy prescriptions; indeed, it means denying false choices between, say, strong and proactive policing and the liberties of citizens who ought to be presumed innocent when walking the streets or driving their cars.

Political parties ought to have something to say about any issue voters legitimately care about, if only to show they are listening. And any ideology worth having doesn’t let its acolytes fall silent when an inconvenient topic comes up.