Despite the best efforts of the morons of mainstream media to depict this week's Democratic convention as a house divided, I have never attended a Democratic convention -- and this is my ninth -- that is more united. The Clintons have clambered aboard the Obama Express, and Bill’s speech last night reminded me again why I concluded while I was covering him in 1991 that he was the most gifted politician I’d ever seen and likely would ever see. Indeed, his speech, with its depiction of Americans failing to reap the rewards of their work, returned me to the populist themes he sounded in his ’92 campaign. Joe Biden, though his lack of familiarity with teleprompters threw off his cadence and led him to mangle a couple of sentences, continued Clinton’s theme with his quiet depiction of American families struggling with the nation’s and their own economic decline.
Indeed, not only are the intraparty battles between hawks and doves a thing of the past, but the party has even reached a state of provisional unity on economic policy. Alternative energy and green jobs are policies that unite labor, environmentalists, and national-security types, and there is growing recognition in the party's various wings that Obamanomics is centered on a very serious jobs program for a nation that badly needs one.
This provisional unity was on almost stunning display in the skybox from which I watched last night's proceedings. The box belonged to a major Democratic donor who is also a longtime critic of free trade and who is close to industrial unions. Leaders of the Steelworkers union watched the convention from the box. So did Jason Furman, Obama’s economic-policy director, whose work on Robert Rubin’s Hamilton Project made him a target of much mistrust from economic progressives -- among them, Bob Kuttner and me. Last night, though, as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden spoke up for jobs and progressive taxation and union rights, Obamanomics (and, for that matter, Clintonomics) never looked better or more progressive.
Intraparty divisions? Phooey – at least for now.
--Harold Meyerson
