Justin's Political Corner

(cross-posted from Daily Kos)

CHARLOTTE — Michelle Obama’s convention message was simple: Barack Obama understands the hardships of working Americans. He’s been there himself.

“For Barack, these issues aren’t political, they’re personal because Barack knows what it means when a family struggles,” she said.

The first lady used the word “struggle” or a variation seven times throughout the speech, much of which was an extended retelling of the Obamas’ pre-politics biography, with a special emphasis on the leaner moments before they made it big.

On the president’s upbringing: “Barack was raised by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills, and by grandparents who stepped in when she needed help.”

On their courtship: “He was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he’d found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small.”

On their marriage: “Believe it or not, when we were first married, our combined monthly student loan bills were actually higher than our mortgage. We were so young, so in love — and so in debt.”

The subtext was that wealthy scion Mitt Romney had no such connection to the average American. But the first lady, whose strong popularity comes in part from her avoidance of hard-nosed politics, focused her speech solely on describing her husband’s humble roots and character. There were plenty of more partisan speakers, like the firebrand Ted Strickland or keynote speaker Julián Castro, to make the Romney connection explicit.

“Barack knows the American dream because he’s lived it,” she said. “And he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are, or where we’re from, or what we look like, or who we love.”

h/t: Benjy Sarlin at TPM

WASHINGTON (AP) — On the opening day of the Republican National Convention, the party chairman said the American people “need to prosecute the president on what he promised and what he delivered.” That’s just what the GOP tried to do this past week in Florida.

Reince Priebus, and speaker after speaker, took to the stage to make the case that Barack Obama was guilty of overregulation, abuse of power, dishonesty, wanton spending and class warfare, and that he deserved no more time in the White House beyond January, when his current term ends.

In the legal world, the prosecution gets to make the opening statement and the closing remarks. But this is politics, and now it’s the incumbent’s turn.

Before the Democrats open their convention in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday, the public gets a political pause, with time for a Labor Day cookout and maybe a trip to the movies. Even Democrats, says media strategist Fred Davis, have “room for minor adjustment” to the case they want to make.

“I’d always rather be the last car dealer you visit and the last convention you watch,” says Davis, creative director for the 2008 GOP gathering. “Because the first guy is out of mind already.”

In pro football, they flip a coin to see which team will receive first and which will kick. New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick says his decision often depends on “what the wind is going to be.” About 60 percent of the time, the coin-toss winner opts to receive, and about the same percentage of those teams go on to win the game.

But the order of the national party conventions is effectively preordained.

The tradition since 1932 has been that the incumbent’s party goes second. That worked out great for George H.W. Bush in 1988, not so well four years later. In 2008, the Democrats were set to convene first, in Denver, when the GOP learned ahead of time that the other party was planning elaborate staging, with Grecian columns.

The conventions weren’t always back to back like this. They used to be about a month apart. In recent decades they have been derided as mere coronations, with the nominee ordained long before.

But as sterile and orchestrated as these gatherings have become, author Norman Mailer once wrote, they remain a reminder “that politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people.” Our politics, Mailer wrote, “still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen” rather than being handed down from the aristocracy.

There’s not much difference between the conventions when it comes to how much thought people put into them. A Pew Research Center survey out this past week found that only 44 percent of adults cared what happened at the Republican convention, and just 43 percent gave a hoot about the Democratic one. Among independents, interest was about 7 percentage points lower.

h/t: Yahoo! News

URBANDALE - President Barack Obama, in Iowa to kick off a campaign swing, mockingly charged Saturday that the just-concluded Republican convention had showcased policies “better suited for the last century.”

“You might as well have watched it on a black and white TV,” Obama told a cheering crowd of thousands in Urbandale, outside Des Moines. The president was in Iowa — a pivotal battleground state — on the first stop of a push that will take him to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC.

Obama recalled how his upset victory over Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses four years ago had revived his campaign at a time when pundits were predicting his political demise. “And it will be you, Iowa, who will choose the path we take from here.”

The president took several shots at the Republican convention in Tampa, noting Romney did not mention Afghanistan in his acceptance speech on Thursday, and accusing his political foes of having outdated ideas. ”It was something to behold. Despite all the challenges that we face in this new century what they offered over those three days was, more often than not, an agenda that was better suited for the last century,” he said. “It was a re-run. We’d seen it before.”

Obama’s greatest vulnerability is the sour economy, still sputtering nearly four years after he took office vowing to fix it. Stubbornly high unemployment and sluggish growth weigh down his hopes for a second term. The president’s response has been to argue that he inherited an economic crisis of historic dimensions and that Romney’s approach is to favor the rich at the expense of the middle class.

H/T: Yahoo! News

WOLFEBORO, N.H. — Mitt Romney insists that he stepped down from his private equity firm years earlier than federal records indicate, but President Barack Obama is more than a little skeptical and says his Republican rival has much to explain.

Obama campaign advisers said the president, during a second straight day in tightly contested Virginia, planned to remind voters on Saturday of the discrepancies between Securities and Exchange Commission filings and Romney’s recollection of his role at Boston-based Bain Capital.

Obama was focusing on a state that he won in 2008, a first for a Democratic nominee since 1964, and on an issue that Romney says diverts attention from struggling economy.

A new ad from Obama’s campaign repeated the charges that the firm shipped American jobs to China and Mexico; that Romney has personal wealth in investments in Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands; and that as Massachusetts governor, he sent state jobs to India.

“Mitt Romney’s not the solution. He’s the problem,” the ads says as Romney is heard singing “America the Beautiful.”

At stake is Romney’s chief contention that as a former businessman, he has the experience to create jobs and spur a struggling economy. The Obama campaign has countered that Romney ran a firm that pioneered the practice of sending American jobs out of the country and that his background is an investor.

The ad was set to run in closely fought Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and debuts as Democrats and some Republicans call for Romney to release tax returns going back several years. Romney has said he won’t go beyond releasing his 2010 tax records and, before the November election, his 2011 taxes.

h/t: Huffington Post

President Barack Obama has asserted executive privilege in reference to requests made by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who has embarked on a controversial investigation into the Department of Justice’s Operation Fast and Furious gun-walking program.

“We regret that we have arrived at this point, after the many steps we have taken to address the Committee’s concerns and to accommodate the Committee’s legitimate oversight interests regarding Operation Fast and Furious,” he wrote. “Although we are deeply disappointed that the Committee appears intent on proceeding with a contempt vote, the Department remains willing to work with the Committee to reach a mutually satisfactory resolution of the outstanding issues.”

Obama’s decision will allow him to refuse to give certain documents pertaining to the Fast and Furious program.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who had met with Issa the day before in an attempt to find an agreement on how many and which documents related to Fast and Furious he would turn over, had formally written Obama requesting that he exercise executive privilege. A copy of that letter is below.

AG letter

H/T: Huffington Post