Blog of Adam Daifallah -- author, journalist, law student. Lover of politics, writing, golf, curling, fitness, fashion, bacon and maple products -- not necessarily (but probably) in that order. Partisan of the Anglosphere. Contact me via email at adam@daifallah.com.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
All's well in Denver
No one can accuse the Democrats of not having their act together. They are putting on a first-class convention, one which confronts head-on some of the criticisms the party faces. (But please, enough mentions of Scranton, Pennsylvania, OK?)
Note the pro-military video last night directed by Spielberg with Tom Hanks narrating. There also appear to be a significant number of ex-military people at the convention. Several have sprouted up on TV commenting from Denver.
Hillary Clinton performed admirably on Tuesday evening, despite the mixed reviews. She did what she needed to do and the message was clear. Bill Clinton was in fine form last night, but ex-Virginia Gov. Mark Warner was a bore. He was boring, clichéd, and wooden. As for Michelle Obama, she has impressed me more than anyone. What presence! She certainly knows how to give an interview.
Tonight's speech by Barack Obama better not disappoint, because the expectations are high and the event has been flawless so far.
Sorry that this blog has been so inactive of late. I am currently in bar school and it is taking up all my time. I regret to say I can't promise the amount of posting will increase either, at least not until after Christmas.
On Joe Biden -- somewhat surprising, but it makes sense when you consider what he brings. I find him a bit hard to like; he reeks arrogance in the same way Obama does. When I worked in Washington, he was considered one of the biggest egomaniacs on Capitol Hill, and probably still is. Notice the number of times Obama mentioned Biden's Catholic faith? He is everything Obama isn't. He also brings a decent amount of foreign policy gravitas to the Democratic ticket, which will be useful given Obama's weak credentials in that area. Now we await McCain's pick ... will it be Mitt Romney? I can just see the Democratic attack ads now, replaying all of the negative things Romney said about McCain during the primaries (far worse than anything Biden said about Obama.)
And then there's the story of the poor, embattled mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick. He's facing a bunch of charges, including perjury. No matter what you think of Kwame and his fight to stay on as Motor City mayor, you have to admit that his mother, Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, makes some solid points here in her son's defence:
Speculation has been mounting in recent days that the National Post will be sold. The buzz began after the Globe and Mail published this article Saturday, detailing the financial woes of CanWest Global and throwing out the name of Jerry Grafstein, a Liberal senator and co-founder of CityTV, as a potential buyer of the Post.
Today, our old friend Lawrence "Larry" Martin is out with a speculative piece, predicting -- to our complete amazement -- that a sale to a Liberal could possibly be seen as bad news for people who are Conservative. Great work, Larry.
Where to start? Well, my thoughts on this don't differ much from Paul Wells'.
First, there would be a serious number of logistical problems if the paper were taken out of the CanWest tent, not the least of which is the provision of actual content: with the paper's bare bones budget, they don't even have their own Ottawa bureau. All their Ottawa stories come from CanWest.
Second, and we can thank Larry for this insight, the political direction of the paper would become uncertain. The Aspers have made the paper less conservative than it was before, but it is still reliably conservative and the editorial page is still very good, despite budget constraints.
Third, the paper doesn't need more uncertainty. It and the staff have had enough of that over the past few years.
Of course, this rumour may not be true; the Globe has spilled a lot of ink over the years creating doubt about the Post's future. Every few months they would run a story about rumours of the Post's imminent closure. This has served its own interests (read: advertising dollars) well. But nearly 10 years after its launch by Lord Black, the paper is still chugging along.
When the Post was sold to the Aspers in 2001, I didn't think I would like them. But they have proven that they care about the paper and were willing to see it through tough times, all the while keeping its founding political orientation reasonably intact. For these reasons and more, I hope they keep it.
The U.S. presidential election is in full swing, and the fawning over Barack Obama continues apace. I was on a panel yesterday for a pilot of a new CBC radio show debuting this fall. The topic was the Obama "brand" and whether he could ever live up to expectations. The two other guests were thoroughly convinced Obama-ites (although one claimed to not be) and endlessly sung his praises. They also thought the new McCain ads were ineffective, because they apparently break a number of cardinal marketing sins -- namely, that it advertises his opponent more than himself and portrays him as a star.
I respectfully disagree, and think the new ads are pretty clever. They are fun, funny and catchy. They are essentially an avowal by the McCain campaign that they cannot do anything about the effusive media coverage Obama is getting and that the only recourse is to poke fun. It seems odd, but I think they are effective. And it may be working. If all of the national polls are averaged, we have what is essentially a statistical tie. I have said for a while that the chances of either man winning are about 50/50. You would never know from the media coverage, but this is a very close race right now.
Joe Clark was the original headwaiter to the provinces. Pierre Trudeau mocked him mercilessly. But of course it was Mr. Trudeau's great centralist grab, the national energy program, that backfired. Brian Mulroney undid some of Mr. Trudeau's work and tried to go further with his province-friendly constitutional accords. Under Jean Chrétien, the Grits got in the act, forsaking economic nationalism.
Mr. Harper is following and hastening the trend line. We needed - thank you, England - grandparents. We needed - thank you, John A. - a national policy. We needed measures to keep us independent of the United States and our social security systems and national institutions. Thank you, other leaders.
All part of growing up. But now? Noteworthy is that while in more recent times we have seen a trend away from centralized powers, unity is now well intact. Many would argue the country is more unified today than at any time since 1967.
The big centre is still needed. It's still needed for infrastructure, uniform social programs, defence and multifarious other initiatives. But, with the old family having a better sense of its bearings, it isn't needed the way it was before.
