THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

Private effort, common good

Democrats and Republicans are now arguing over who can best be trusted with the American Dream

Sep 8th 2012. CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA, from the print edition

http://www.economist.com/node/21562258

BARACK OBAMA’S Republican challengers have a plan for defeating the president. They want to confront him with a question so weighty that he cannot use his charm, personal popularity or powers of lofty rhetoric to escape from it, namely: is America better off today than it was four years ago, when he took office?

For some months Mr Obama and the Democratic Party have struggled to craft a response, seemingly hesitating to run on the president’s record at a time of high unemployment, soaring energy prices and other indicators of tough times for ordinary Americans. Instead, the Democratic campaign has been largely negative, blaming the Republicans for leaving behind a mess when they lost the White House in 2008, and attacking their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, as an out-of-touch capitalist raider.

That unimpressive stalemate budged a bit this week, as Democrats gathered in Charlotte in the battleground state of North Carolina from September 4th-6th for their national convention. True, the meeting offered its fair share of cheap shots at Mr Romney (were the Republican candidate Santa Claus, one speaker suggested, he would “fire the reindeer and outsource the elves”). It left questions unanswered about how Mr Obama, in a second term, might tackle America’s looming crisis of debt and public spending. Indeed, too many of the governors, senators, congressmen and union bosses invited to speak seemed to see no crisis at all, as they hailed the importance of continued government spending (or “investment”) on everything from new infrastructure to preserving middle-class jobs.

But, more interestingly, leading Democrats attempted a political and philosophical counter-attack, directly tackling arguments unveiled by Republicans at their own convention the week before in Florida. That gathering had heard repeated calls for smaller government, less regulation, lower taxes and an end to what conservative speakers called un-American levels of welfare and redistribution.

In Charlotte several speakers, among them a former president, Bill Clinton, the First Lady, Michelle Obama, and a young Hispanic mayor from Texas, Julián Castro, accused today’s Republicans of misrepresenting the American dream, and even their party’s own traditions. Speaker after speaker reached into their country’s mythic past to paint a communitarian vision of American success. The mayor of Minneapolis hailed “pioneer ancestors” who had not settled the prairies alone but in wagon trains. Success in America was a “relay”, not a lone marathon, said Mr Castro. The governor of Colorado declared that western history was not just about “rugged individuals” but communities coming together to “raise barns”.

Mr Clinton gave a bravura speech that deftly recalled Mr Obama’s nasty primary fight with Mrs Clinton, but turned it into a positive by noting that Mr Obama now pragmatically worked with his former party rival. The 42nd president, who enjoys high approval ratings from a public that remembers his two terms as a time of prosperity, solemnly painted the present-day Republican Party as captured by a hate-filled far-right and living in an “alternative universe” in which all those who have achieved success are “completely self-made”. This he suggested, ignored a centrist case for business and government working together to promote growth and “broadly share prosperity”.

For her part, Mrs Obama gave an unusually partisan speech for a First Lady, taking swipes at the privileged background and competence of Mr Romney, which she contrasted with the humble upbringings of her and her husband. More interestingly, she also queried Republican arguments about the individualistic nature of American success.

Republicans have spent weeks attacking Mr Obama for a garbled remark in July in which he appeared to say that successful entrepreneurs “didn’t build” their firms—though in truth he was making a more complicated (but still pretty statist) point about the importance of good schools, roads and other public infrastructure. Their convention in Tampa rang to angry cries of “We did build it.”

In Charlotte, Mrs Obama attempted to recast that Republican slogan as betraying bad manners and ingratitude. She and the president had been brought up to be grateful and humble and to remember that many people had a hand in their success, “from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean”, she said. She described how her father had hardly missed a day of work despite suffering from multiple sclerosis, and had saved and scrimped to pay that share of his children’s college tuition that was not covered by government grants and student loans. The rebuke to Republicans was there to be heard: this was Mrs Obama asserting that the poor (or less than wealthy) can be just as deserving as the bosses whose hard work was the focus of so much attention at the Republican convention.

Yet if the chasm between the two parties is astonishingly wide, the Democratic convention revealed that Mr Obama’s party also suffers from its own internal tensions. Democrats are able to unite around a belief that the government has a role in promoting opportunity and ensuring a “level playing field”. But what that means in practice is less clear, as was demonstrated by the speech that preceded Mr Clinton’s. In that address, Elizabeth Warren, an academic running for the Senate in Massachusetts, described the American economic system as “rigged” against small businessmen and workers and evoking the era when Theodore Roosevelt, a century ago, had fought against the forces of “corrosive greed”. Mr Clinton preferred to focus on practical measures to educate Americans for new sorts of jobs, telling an adoring audience bluntly: “The old economy is not coming back.”

Mr Obama’s fellow Democrats, gathered for a convention, are a far more diverse bunch than their Republican counterparts, whether racially, politically or by age (today’s Republican activist base is remarkably white-skinned and grey-haired). But that diversity poses its own headaches.

To win in November, Mr Obama must revive the enthusiasm that saw black, Hispanic and young supporters turn out to vote for him in 2008 in record numbers. His convention duly placed huge weight on a rainbow array of policies dear to different segments of his core coalition. Sitting in the hall, it would have been possible to imagine that the bail-out of Michigan’s unionised car industry was the biggest economic story of the past five years, and that allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the armed forces ranked alongside killing Osama bin Laden in terms of military importance.

Yet for victory, Mr Obama must also win over a separate group: independents who backed him in 2008, but who are now gravely disappointed by the gap between his promises to transform Washington politics, and a reality that has seen him look like a prisoner of congressional dysfunction and obstructionism.

On September 6th the president was due to address just such wavering supporters, in a speech that would have to explain not just how things could be worse with Republicans in the White House, but how a second Obama term would move the country forwards, and preserve its spirit of opportunity.

Politicians have lauded America as a land of opportunity in every election in living memory. As it enters its final weeks, the 2012 election campaign is seeing the argument move from rhetoric to something crunchier: a debate about how to balance freedom, fairness, the rights of the individual and the responsibilities of the state. This is, in short, an election about which party can be trusted with the American Dream itself.