Reply #47: There was "no best for the country" The fact was this is not a major issue resolved [View All]

[karynnj]

nor would anything have played out differently had Kerry, who they also found acceptable, had gone. Clinton's role here was largely kabuki (as it would have been with Kerry). The fact is that though this is welcome to their friends and families, this is not a major foreign policy achievement. It is no different than similar things done by people from Richardson to Jesse Jackson.

The value of BOTH Clintons's convention speeches was that they said that the party was uniting behind the candidate. This was important, but also what every Democratic nominee deserves. The fact is that every Democrat in 1992 stood behind Bill Clinton, whether they supported him in the primaries or not. He needed that support and he got it. Many used their own political capital to defend Clinton on issues where he had liabilities.

I would think the speeches most likely to have impacted swing voters were Michelle and Barak Obama's. Peopel wanted to be comfortable with them - and their speeches helped on that. In terms of making the case of Obama vs McCain, the speech that created frames that people took up was Kerry's. Before the convention, McCain had used in ads and in things said by surrogates the fact that for years many many Democrats had praised McCain. Kerry dealt with this by speaking of "candidate" McCain vs "Senator" McCain - giving examples. I heard people such as Claire McCasgil using this nearly verbatim by the next weekend.

In addition, it was a variation of Kerry's Kerry/Feingold plan that both Obama and Hillary Clinton herself had as their Iraq plan. By November, Bush himself had moved to give a date by which he thought we should be out of Iraq. Kerry spoke in talk shows of how Bush had moved to OBAMA's plan on this. (Even Hillary was saying in 2008, what Kerry said in 2006, that without the threat of us leaving the Iraqis would not make the hard political decisions they had to make.)