"We need leaders once again who can tap into that special blend of American confidence and optimism that has enabled generations before us to meet our toughest challenges. Leaders who can help us show ourselves and the world that with our ingenuity, creativity, and innovative spirit, there are no limits to what is possible in America.
"This won't be easy. Progress never is. But it will be impossible if we don't fight to put a Democrat in the White House."
A reader writes:
I am a 36 year old African American woman. I have two girls ages 10 and 8. The country does not get the full import of this moment. My daughters and I sat together along with my husband to watch Michelle Obama tonight. Mr. Sullivan, we were all in tears. This is a day that cannot be fully described. This country has systematically oppressed Black women for centuries. My ancestors were slaves and my great, great, great, grandmothers raped and treated as property. My daughters have very few Black women to look up to in popular culture as role models. They do not feel seen, they are not held up as the standards of American beauty. We shed tears tonight as a family because Michelle (with her elegance and grace) is holding all of us up with her. You don't understand the burden that she bears.
No, I don't. How could I? But as she spoke of somehow being able to reach for the American dream, through struggle and disdain and marginalization, it wasn't just about race or gender - but about all those things that Americans have overcome. I couldn't help but think, perhaps solipsistically, of my wedding a year ago this week. And what it means. And what it would have meant to countless gay people who, for centuries, were brutalized, mocked, jailed, murdered and beaten for who they were. And I get a part of this in a different way. And am glad.
...Michelle did it. She more than did it. She struck fear in the GOP tonight. Their lies about the Obamas will fail. As they should.
Photo: Lebbeus Woods
“All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces,” said Mr. Woods. “But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.”
via Andrew Sullivan:
Matthew Mitcham of Australia celebrates his gold medal in the Men's 10m Platform Final diving event held at the National Aquatics Center on Day 15 of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on August 23, 2008 in Beijing, China. Mitcham is the only openly gay male athlete at the games, and prevented a Chinese sweep of the diving medals with a perfect final dive. By Jamie Squire/Getty.
I'm not a big fan of targeting politicians for their wealth. I don't begrudge anyone succeeding and admire many fabulously wealthy Americans. But the inheritance - rather than earning - of great riches can rub some the wrong way. George W. Bush is not wealthy because he earned it; his family connections made all the difference. And John McCain, who hails from a very privileged family, married money that most people can barely imagine. If your house just got foreclosed on, or you can't afford the mortgage any more, this is not someone you can easily identify with:
Those real estate holdings include a Sedona ranch with three dwellings, worth $1.1 million; a Phoenix condominium suite that had originally been two units, worth $4.7 million; an $847,800 three-bedroom high-rise condo in Arlington; an oceanfront condo in La Jolla, Calif.; a half-million-dollar loft in Phoenix purchased for their daughter Meghan; another Phoenix condo, worth $830,000; and two beachfront condos in Coronado, Calif, one of which is valued at $2.7 million. The other was purchased just this year, as McCain was lamenting the difficulties that struggling Americans were facing just to make their mortgage payments. Cindy McCain told Vogue magazine the family needed the second condo because the first was getting too crowded as their family grew.
I don't know about you, but this is more distant to me than someone who just earned a bunch of royalties for a book he actually wrote himself.
A reader at Josh Marshall's TPM writes:
I think we'll look back on August as when Obama won the election. August was when John McCain had the chance to define Obama and so cement a negative view of him that he could never recover. Now his time is almost up, the conventions are about to begin and we get into the full swing of the campaign. And what did McCain get out of his month? The Gallup tracking poll barely budged; most polls show Obama still with a modest lead, only slightly less than where he started a month or so ago. Obama's negatives are up somewhat -- no surprise after the pummeling he took -- but hardly up to critical levels. Unlike with Kerry, no single message has stuck -- he's a flipflopper! No, he's a scary leftist! No he's an empty celebrity! With no single negative image, the effect is likely to diffuse over time, especially with a successful Democratic convention. I think Obama's played this just right so far.
Yes, lots of folks are complaining he hasn't gone after McCain enough but it simply wouldn't have worked. McCain has not been the story -- Obama has been. Unfair, sure, but that's the way it is. Obama's the new guy in town and everyone is trying to figure him out. So instead of fecklessly launching attack after attack on McCain only to have them disappear into the ether, he sat back and played rope-a-dope waiting for his moment.
Now his moment is coming. The VP choice, the convention, the post-Labor Day sharpening of people's attention, the debates and the full onslaught of ads, money, and organization. Can he blow it? Sure. He's new to this. He can make the wrong VP choice. He can give an empty, if soaring, acceptance speech (or it could rain!) Hillary and Bill (especially Bill) could add a sour taste to the convention and make that the story. He could fall short of expectations in the debate. But all (or most of those) are under his control. I would *so* rather be Obama heading toward November than McCain. It's his for the taking if he just executes it right.
Inverted World
By Christopher Priest
Afterword by John Clute
The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the "optimum" into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.
The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum.
Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
