Artur Davis: The Democrats’ Fury

How odd is it that Barack Obama’s acceptance speech seemed the least consequential part of the week that just ended in Charlotte?  While the average, not over saturated with politics voter probably received Obama’s talk more favorably than most pundits, who from left to right (with the charmingly amusing exception of Al Sharpton) panned the talk as fair to middling, it was certainly an address that was low on ambition or imagination. Michael Gerson is probably right to suggest that an incomparable number of political low-lights could offer it at a Democratic banquet next weekend without making much of a stir.

But the evidence, as of this writing, is that Obama gained measurable ground last week, at least before being hit by another set of poor jobs numbers. Whether the gains last, or fade as other Obama bounces have done this year, depends on how effectively Team Romney pivots to reenter the conversation this week, and how much the dark economic clouds dominate post-convention coverage.  It is fair, though, to conclude that Democrats used their week more effectively than their Tampa counterparts.

Part of the difference, obviously, is the bravura speechmaking of Bill Clinton, who seems destined to hold two spots of prominence in this era: the last universally popular president and the sole politician of his generation who mastered the technique of persuasion. In a time span in which Barack Obama and George W. Bush won the presidency primarily by selling themselves, and in Bush’s case, and perhaps Obama’s, held the office by relying on their opponent’s deficiencies, Clinton alone has the gift of arguing for a theory of government and policies that match it.

I am more reserved about the other popular conclusion, at least in liberal circles—that the litany of Democratic speakers was simply better than the one in Tampa. That quickly adopted wisdom in the mainstream media is too tied to a particular conceit of the journalists offering it, which is that a fiery denunciation of Republican economic royalism, and a full-throated embrace of every left-leaning enthusiasm, from reproductive rights to LGBT equality to universal health care, describes the world as they would like to see it, and therefore meets their first test of eloquence.

It is revealing that a succession of Republicans who did manage to ignite their own convention, notably Mia Love, the African American congressional candidate in Utah, and New Mexico’s Governor Susanna Martinez, were glossed over or ignored altogether both in coverage and analysis, and that Marco Rubio’s speech, which generated the single most emotional response in the hall, received relatively minimal attention in the establishment press. In the same, ideologically filtered vein, Paul Ryan was chided for an opaque reference to a plant shutting down, one which might or might not have implied that a closing date in the final Bush months had something to do with Obama, when Clinton’s reconstruction of 2009-10 as one long and successful Republican siege against Obama has escaped scrutiny when the facts are the opposite. (During that stretch, it was congressional Republicans who lost at every turn, and Obama who racked up a near unblemished slate of legislative victories.)

But, having said that, it would take tone-deafness to miss the reality that the crowd enthusiasm was consistently more intense in Charlotte, and that a half-dozen (non Clinton, non Obama) Democratic speakers touched off a frenzy that surfaced very infrequently in Tampa.   Better oratory? For Deval Patrick and a few snatches of Julian Castro (whose much more acclaimed speech was actually less skilled than Chris Christie’s keynote) the answer is yes. But by and large, what was on display is the not well understood fact that the Democratic partisan base is currently more angry and intense than their counterparts on the right. It is a base that is on fire over what it views as a slew of Republican sins, from obstruction, to hatefulness, to greed, to backwardness, and a genuine conviction that a Romney victory would constitute a reversal of progress on every front the liberal base holds dear.

That simmering fury, which had it been present in Tampa would have been slandered in the press as intemperate right-wing heat, is one of the major elements in the next sixty odd days, and would pollute the first year of a Romney presidency.  The same mood has already airbrushed out of the Democratic platform the Clinton inspired admonition that making abortions rare (albeit legal) should be a goal of public policy, and has all but marginalized any sensibility other than a full scale embrace of same sex marriage.

There is a rich irony around the fact that the Democratic motivation to win is less about Barack Obama than it is about denying Republicans the fruits of what liberals regard as a dead-end, country be damned strategy of roadblocks. But whatever its source, passion counts in elections and it is no longer correct to conclude that Republicans will have an edge over Democrats in this regard. And that may be why Charlotte has given Democrats such a gift:  they are on fire again, and there will be nothing that is light or civil in store for the last two months of this contest.

(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from OfficialArturDavis.com)