Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast: Clinton Totally Kills It

[highplainsdem]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/06/clinton-totally-kills-it.html

Holy smokes. That was the best political speech more or less ever. There wasn’t a thing he didn’t touch on, and there wasn’t a thing he didn’t just blast out of the park. His carriage and delivery nailed it for partisans and for persuadables. He hit Republican obstructionism. He slammed the Romney and Ryan plans on virtually every point they’ve raised in the last six months, from the welfare ads to the tax cuts to the Medicare “cuts” to so much more, and he did it in detail.

Amazing detail! Who else could burrow into those details, give a wonky speech—which this was, in a huge way—but a wonky speech that brought people to their feet two dozen times?

If you weren’t following Twitter and/or didn’t have a copy of the speech, you may not know the extent to which he went off script. All. The. Time. One of the best non-scripted lines was: “Democracy does not have to be a blood sport. It can be an honorable enterprise that supports the public interest.” That was literally about Obama’s decision to name Hillary Clinton his secretary of state, but it really was about much more. It was about the whole Republican posture of the last four years, and there’s no doubt that people got it.

He managed to do just small and obvious things that other Democrats, even Obama, don’t manage to do with any close to Clinton’s force. Notably on Medicaid: It is a simple fact that two-thirds of Medicaid helps middle-class people with nursing home costs. I’ve written that myself. But most Democrats don’t say it, for whatever reason. Clinton just knew how to say it.

-snip-

[jsr]

1. Republicans swimming in the kiddie pool

Sounds about right.

[Lucinda]

2. Thank you!

Reading the rest now...

[Webster Green]

3. Great review!

"An interesting thing about the speech: At the beginning, over Twitter, we were fed the usual diet of snarky conservative comments. That’s fine. We liberals tossed off some snarky tweets last week during the Tampa convention. That’s how it goes, and some of them are funny even when you disagree with them.

But the funny thing was, over the course of the speech, those tweets became fewer in number. Then they disappeared. That’s when you can tell the other side is worried. Clinton reached people. He revved up the base, but he did a lot more than that."

[highplainsdem]

4. kick