Two analysis of Bill Clinton's Speech at the DNC - Great Takeaways

Why Bill Clinton's Speeches Succeed - The Atlantic

Because he treats listeners as if they are smart.

That is the significance of "They want us to think" and "The strongest argument is" and "The arithmetic says one of three things must happen" and even "Now listen to me here, this is important." He is showing that he understands the many layers of logic and evidence and positioning and emotion that go into political discussion -- and, more important, he takes for granted that listeners can too.

The main other place you hear discussion based on the same assumption that people of any background, education level, or funny-sounding accent can understand sophisticated back-and-forth of argument and counter-claim is sports-talk radio. ("I understand the concern about Strasburg's arm. But ... ") You hear insults and disagreements and put-downs on sports-talk discussions. You rarely hear the kind of deliberate condescension, the unconcealable effort as if talking to slow learners, of many political "authorities" addressing the unwashed.

It's the difference between clarifying, and over-simplifying. 

Bill Clinton Shows How It's Done - The Atlantic 

Clinton made arguments. He talked through his reasoning. He went point by point through the case he wanted to make. .....
He began with an appeal to bipartisanship -- a clever and unexpected turn in a partisan speech, one pitched directly to independent voters in their living rooms. "Nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day," he said. "And every one of us and every one of them, we're compelled to spend our fleeting lives between those two extremes, knowing we're never going to be right all the time and hoping we're right more than twice a day." Then he pivoted to attack: "Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn't see it that way. They think government is always the enemy, they're always right, and compromise is weakness."....
"My fellow Americans, all of us in this grand hall and everybody watching at home, when we vote in this election, we'll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in," he said. "If you want a winner-take-all, you're-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket. But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility, a we're-all-in-this-together society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden."
.......
A few minutes after Clinton was finished, a spokesman for the Romney campaign delivered its response: ""President Clinton drew a stark contrast between himself and President Obama tonight." He did nothing of the sort, of course. But the point was, the GOP knew it wouldn't get far taking on Clinton. Instead, the Republicans could only hope he was so good at pumping up Obama that Obama might pale in comparison. In its way, that was the greatest tribute of all.

Guernica - September awesomeness

The latest issue of Guernica Mag landed in my in-box yesterday and below are the links I enjoyed:

1) Women in Power and Politics - Sonia Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi have overcome tragic and arduous pasts to emerge as leaders of India and Burma. What’s next for these two historic icons? http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/women-in-power-and-politics/

2) Making Faces - Two potters keep an unusual art alive in South Carolina. http://www.guernicamag.com/features/making-faces/

3) Reporting Poverty - Following three years of research in an Indian slum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo discusses what language can’t express, her view that nobody is representative, and the ethical dilemmas of writing about the poor.
http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/reporting-poverty/

In her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Boo turns her attention to India and the residents of Annawadi, a Mumbai slum in the shadows of the city’s airport and luxury hotels. Of Annawadi’s three thousand residents, few have full-time employment. Most sleep in homes of nailed-together scrap metal, plywood, and plastic tarpaulin; some sleep outside. Many children are forced to work instead of attend school. The dwelling’s eastern edge borders a vast pool of sewage.

Amid Annawadi’s grinding poverty lives Abdul, a teenager who supports his family of eleven by selling scraps of trash. Boo chronicles the struggle of Abdul and other families to get out of poverty by whatever means available: corruption, education, work (NGOs, tellingly, never enter the picture). Their lives illustrate what poverty can wrought on the underclass of a developing country, but Boo never reduces them to case studies. She depicts the residents’ relationships, squabbles, opportunities, and misfortunes with eloquence and detail. In its specificity, Behind the Beautiful Forevers tells a larger story about India’s rapid growth in the global economy, and the people the country is leaving behind. Boo spoke with me over the phone from her mother’s house in Virginia.

—Emily Brennan for Guernica

Guernica: After reporting on issues of poverty in the United States for so long, what drew you to write about India?

Katherine Boo: I met my husband, who is from India, in 2001. When I first started going to India, I’d be at these dinner tables where people, claiming a posture of great authority, talked about what was going on in these historically poor communities. They always seemed to fall into two schools of thought: everything had changed with the country’s increasing prosperity, or nothing had changed in the lives of low-income people. I wasn’t a subscriber to either. In fact, I was familiar with these arguments from my experience of writing about the poor in the United States. Most of the people who do the talking about what it’s like for the very poor don’t spend much time with them. That circumstance transcends borders.

It was my husband, who had watched my reporting and fact-checking process, the way I use official documents and taped interviews to be quite precise, who first said to me, “Well, this might be something you can do in India.” And at first, I thought, “I can’t do it. I’m not Indian. If I did write anything, I would just be some stupid white woman writing a stupid thing.” But there were people around me who were saying, “If you do it well, then who you are becomes less important.” My husband and these others were interested in issues of social equality and fairness in India and thought it would be valuable to know what it was like for low-income people there, know it with a little more depth. There was plenty of reporting going on in India, but specifically what I do—follow people over long periods of time—there wasn’t much of that in India. (There are some people in the United States who do it, and do it very well, but there are not a lot of them here, either.) In my kind of work, you don’t parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It’s the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals’ lives? That was really the question for me: whether I had anything to add to what had already been written.

A reporter will go to an NGO and say, “Tell me about the good work that you’re doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give.” It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos.

And the best quote:

There’s a moment I describe in the book when Abdul starts talking about what a life is, says something like, “Even a dog has a life. Even if my mother keeps beating me, even if that moment was my entire life, that’s a life.”

4) Robert Reich: It’s Inequality, Stupid - Income inequality is a pressing issue, but you wouldn't know it from watching the RNC in Tampa.
http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/robert-reich-its-inequality-stupid/

The most troubling economic trend facing America this Labor Day weekend is the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top–among a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people–and the steady decline of the great American middle class. 


Inequality in America is at record levels. The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.


Republicans claim the rich are job creators. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to create jobs, businesses need customers. But the rich spend only a small fraction of what they earn. They park most of it wherever around the world they can get the highest return. 


The real job creators are the vast middle class, whose spending drives the economy and creates jobs.

5) Brandon Lingle: Queen’s Creek - Back from Iraq, a veteran meditates on the past, present, and future of American warfare, and the small creek in Virginia where they all flow together.
http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/brandon-lingle-queens-creek/

The hazy sky, commingled with swamp stench and car exhaust, yanks my mind back to Baghdad. On a certain level I savor the smell of the primordial mud riding the November breeze as our discussion slides toward Mesopotamia. He completed his second Iraq tour a few weeks before I returned from my first, during the death throes of the nine-year odyssey.
“This tour was a joke compared to the first,” he says. “Last time we could shoot back.”
I nod in the dark.
In the past, American forces would fire back on the spots where insurgents launched rockets or mortars toward our bases. More often than not, the bad guys didn’t stick around to watch. Cobbled launchers of scrap iron, batteries, and washing machine timers lobbed their weapons automatically. The U.S. barrage that followed could sometimes kill innocents and destroy their neighborhoods. As Operation Iraqi Freedom shifted toward New Dawn, and Americans left Iraqi cities, the policy shifted too, and we stopped shooting back.
“It doesn’t add up,” he says. “What good is an artillery unit that can’t fire back?”
I begin to think that it’s a good thing his unit wasn’t pummeling neighboring Iraqis, and then I’m ambushed by the reality: it’s much easier to think that way when you’re safe at home on a brisk autumn night.
“Makes about as much sense as carrying unloaded weapons in a warzone,” I say. “Some soldiers didn’t even have their own ammo. The bosses were more afraid of our own guys. Accidental discharge.”
......
The prospect of endless days of mental, physical, and emotional trials excites him. He hopes to eventually deploy to Afghanistan, or maybe Iraq again.
“We talked, drank tea, and got lots of people hurt and killed.” Some worked to keep the war going, riding around the country on helicopters and selling weapons to Iraqis.
“Can we keep 50,000 troops in Iraq, please? 25,000? 10,000? 5,000? How about 150?.” A pause. “I killed a sixteen-year-old boy,” he says. “Our battalion’s only kill this deployment.”
I stare at his shadow on the dock, and I feel a stab of fall air through my damp t-shirt.
“Outside Kirkuk. Got pinned down by someone taking pot shots,” he says. “We figured out where the shooter was, and the lieutenant colonel froze. He was nearly crying. Lying on the ground. Ordered me to take the shooter out. So, I did. Just a barefoot kid with a rusty AK. He fell in a drainage ditch. I remember the muddy water flowing over his feet.”
Like the vast majority of service members, I’ve never fired a weapon in combat let alone killed anyone. I think about how I’d have reacted.
“Damn dude,” I say. “I’m not sure what to say.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Maybe I accomplished something while I was over there.”

Some interesting articles at The Economist

1) Foreigners in China To flee or not to flee?

Read this with interest. Some interesting points:

IT MAY not count as an exodus. Indeed, it doesn’t even satisfy that hoary old journalistic definition of a trend: three examples.Separately, a pair of expatriates long based in China have written heartfelt accounts of their decisions to leave the country. And though few in number, they have attracted a great deal of heartfelt attention from many other “old China hands”, as foreigners who have chosen to make their lives, careers and homes here sometimes like to call themselves......In one of the recent expatriate accounts, an American film-maker, editor and blogger named Charlie Custer said most of his reasons were personal—and that none of them had to do with ugly threats he’d received since entering into a nasty public feud with a prominent Chinese television personality, Yang Rui. However Mr Custer did acknowledge feeling distress over China’s lack of a free press and rule of law. And he mentioned that his past couple of years had been not only “depressing” and “soul-crushing”, but also “occasionally terrifying”. However he cited as bigger problems air pollution and food safety. These were the most important factors behind his decision to leave Beijing, after a four-year stay. “I like breathing,” and “eating also is fun,” he wrote in pithy summary.
An essay by Mark Kitto, a Briton who first came to China as a student in 1986, ventured into more thought-provoking realms. After living here for the past 16 years as a businessman, Mr Kitto decided he’d had enough. Some of his motivations match those of the wealthy Chinese who choose to leave. He cited concerns that “the air my family breathes and the food we eat is doing us physical harm” but added that the “one overriding reason I must leave China” is the need to give his children a decent education.Other aspects of Mr Kitto’s experience might only make sense to a foreigner, and a disillusioned one at that. “I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream,” he wrote.Upon returning to China in the mid-1990s, after a post-graduate period spent away, he noted a widespread difference since the time of his student days. An air of optimism remained, but then he also detected “a distinct whiff of commerce in place of community”. Mr Kitto bemoaned China’s shift from a traditional family culture to a “me” culture, and its rush toward materialism and conspicuous consumption.Mr Kitto also wrote that he wanted, in a certain sense, to “become Chinese.” He acknowledges that this was never possible—but not that he was naive to think it might be. Eventually he came to find that his “desire to be part of a community and no longer be treated as an outsider” was not attainable. 

2) So Mitt? What do you believe? (Economist is against Romney)

All politicians flip-flop from time to time; but Mr Romney could win an Olympic medal in it (see article). And that is a pity, because this newspaper finds much to like in the history of this uncharismatic but dogged man, from his obvious business acumen to the way he worked across the political aisle as governor to get health reform passed and the state budget deficit down. We share many of his views about the excessive growth of regulation and of the state in general in America, and the effect that this has on investment, productivity and growth. After four years of soaring oratory and intermittent reforms, why not bring in a more businesslike figure who might start fixing the problems with America’s finances?
But competence is worthless without direction and, frankly, character. Would that Candidate Romney had indeed presented himself as a solid chief executive who got things done. Instead he has appeared as a fawning PR man, apparently willing to do or say just about anything to get elected. In some areas, notably social policy and foreign affairs, the result is that he is now committed to needlessly extreme or dangerous courses that he may not actually believe in but will find hard to drop; in others, especially to do with the economy, the lack of details means that some attractive-sounding headline policies prove meaningless (and possibly dangerous) on closer inspection. Behind all this sits the worrying idea of a man who does not really know his own mind. America won’t vote for that man; nor would this newspaper.