There have been various stories over recent months of people being ejected from Bush rallies for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts and stuff of that sort, with the rationale often being a rather improbable concern for security.

But this Dick Cheney speech in New Mexico seems to be the first instance where would-be attendees were compelled to pledge personal fealty to President Bush in order to get in the front door.

According to this Associated Press story, certain members of the public were required to sign a pledge to endorse President Bush in order to get tickets.

Dan Foley, a Bush campaign spokesman interviewed for the article, tried to argue that the tactic was "a security step designed to avoid a disruption" and said that at least some of the people required to sign the pledge had called from a phone which showed up on caller-ID as ACT (Americans Coming Together), a liberal voter mobilization group.

This article in the Albuquerque Journal, however, says the policy was much more general.

The plan was to limit the tickets "to people with a record of supporting the GOP— or to others willing to sign a statement saying they support President Bush's re-election."

Continues the Journal article ...

Yier Shi, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee in Washington, D.C., said today's rally was meant to reward and enthuse Bush-Cheney supporters, not to be a forum to preach to skeptics.

Democrats, independents and others were welcome to attend the speech, he said— as long as they like Bush and Cheney.

(See also this other article on the topic in the Albuquerque Journal.)

For all the ridiculousness of this loyalty oath mumbo-jumbo, I think Shi's rationale is a pretty apt description of the Bush-Cheney election strategy, and one of the clearest signs of their problems.

A lexicographical note on 'stem-winder'.

Late on Thursday evening I said that John Kerry's speech wasn't a 'stem-winder' and that he was smart not to have tried to pull one off. In that case, as the context implied, I meant 'stem-winder' as a rousing or impassioned speech.

However, since then, while most readers have responded to my discussion of the speech itself, perhaps a dozen have written in to say that I used the term incorrectly, that it refers to a boring and long-winded speech rather than a rousing one.

I, for one, have never heard this meaning. For all the adaptability and ambiguity of certain words, it seems odd that one word should have two diametrically opposite meanings. And the two dictionaries I consulted seem to back me up.

Merriam-Webster defines the word thus ...

Main Entry: stem-wind·er
Pronunciation: -"wIn-d&r
Function: noun
1 : a stem-winding watch
2 [from the superiority of the stem-winding watch over the older key-wound watch] : one that is first-rate of its kind; especially : a stirring speech

American Heritage defines it this way ...

SYLLABICATION: stem-wind·er
PRONUNCIATION: stmwndr
NOUN: 1. A stem-winding watch. 2. A rousing oration, especially a political one.

In other words, the dictionary meaning seems pretty clear. Yet enough people are familiar with this opposite meaning that it too must have some currency. That left me wondering whether this was a corruption of the original meaning of the term that has gained currency in recent years. And this article, also sent along by a reader, suggests that is precisely what has happened.

Great moments in Republican <$NoAd$>outreach ...

This from the running Thursday night commentary on National Review Online from Barbara Comstock, former spokesman for John Ashcroft at the Justice Department, former lead investigator for Dan Burton back in the glory days, and now power lobbyist ...

However, there are some things that did strike me about this odd man.

John Kerry once administered CPR to a hamster. This was one of the poignant vignettes we learned tonight from one of his daughters. Is there some gerbil-loving swing demographic out there we are trying to connect with? His daughter told this story as if we could all relate to this "human" moment of mouth-to-mouth contact with a rodent. I think I can speak for most parents, that while we might lay down our lives for our children; we see no need to swap spit with vermin.

...

John Kerry may have been able to breath life into a hamster; and he may have been able to breath some hope (or is it help?) into the gerbil-loving delegates; but he's still a strange, Herman Munster-like figure to me.

No mention of the inveterate Bush hatred among the gerbil-lovers. But presumably that's for another column.

I just read this article in the Times, billed as Cheney's counterattack against the Democratic ticket, figuring it would be filled with various distortions and untruths I could pick apart.

Really, though, there's not much there to pick apart, because there's simply not much there. Some boiler plate about raising taxes, the troop funding vote run-around and some stuff about John Edwards hair -- that's about it.

If the Times author is reasonably conveying Cheney's message, it's awfully weak stuff.

Now this is rich.

President Bush's new line of attack is that John Kerry is a man of few achievements.

"My opponent has good intentions," the president said today. "But intentions don't always translate into results. After 19 years in the United States Senate, my opponent has had thousands of votes but very few signature achievements."

This might be a plausible line of attack coming from another opponent. Unlike, say, Russ Feingold or Ted Kennedy, there's no prominent piece of legislation with Kerry's name on it, though admirers of Kerry point to his critical role in a series of high-profile Senate investigations.

But coming from George W. Bush? A guy whose handlers had to get some of the more gullible run of journalists to refer to his life before he turned forty as his 'lost years'?

I mean, even if you grant that Bush's presidency has been a tenure of transcendent achievement (and it has undoubtedly been eventful), it's a bit hard to get around the fact that even by his own account he spent his first five decades kicking back, living off family connections and playing solitaire.

It's certainly true that Mr. Kerry said certain things in his war protestor days that can now be used against him with some audiences. But until he was well into middle-age President Bush's most noteworthy public utterances seem to have been limited to various invocations and inflections of 'par-TAY' and reciting the alphabet under legal compulsion.

(I'd be surprised if the Kerry camp didn't use this as another opening to highlight the difference between how these two men spent their twenties.)

It's also another case of the Bush campaign's internally contradictory lines of attack.

John Kerry: highly ambitious and grasping ne'er-do-well.

George W. Bush: man of action, sword of steel.

In the Boston Globe this morning, Tom Oliphant, no foe of Mr. Kerry, says the nominee "essentially blew an opportunity he may not get again until the debates with Bush this fall" and "muffed an opportunity to hone great material into a powerful address."

I know what he's referring to: Kerry's sometimes rushed delivery. But this seems like a needlessly harsh appraisal and a distorted impression of the speech itself.

From the start of Kerry's speech I could tell that he kept talking into rising applause -- something like the rhetorical equivalent of spitting into the wind. He would nail a good applause line and then rush into the next verse of the speech.

In many cases I wondered or worried that some of those lines couldn't be heard over the din, though I suspected that television microphones would do a better job keeping Kerry's voice audible over the crowd.

At the time this struck me as a function of Kerry's lack of expertise as a public speaker. A master like a Clinton or an Obama can make magic of those moments, half-heartedly trying to talk over the crowd, only to let them again and again beat him back with their cheers. Kerry mowed right through them, though perhaps it was simply that Kerry had a speech he could only get through if he took few or no breaks for sustained applause.

In any case, I really didn't think it was nearly so big a deal as Oliphant did. But I'd be curious to hear others' opinions.

The reference to CNN last night was to their running live on-air the panicked reactions of the convention director as the balloons failed to drop precisely on schedule. Originally it may have been a glitch. But they seemed to keep it running long after they could have rectified the problem.

Another good take on the speech is Will Saletan's in Slate. I remember looking out into the audience at various of those moments of thunderous, almost defeaning response that Will mentions and thinking, they sowed the wind.

A brief note or follow-up on the Kerry speech.

A number of readers have written in to say they were wowed by the speech and ask why I led off saying that it wasn't a 'stem-winder'.

To me there's no contradiction. The term 'stem-winder' isn't simply an evaluation of the quality of a speech, but also -- and more so -- a description of a certain kind of performance. I thought this speech was very impressive, about at the top of the guy's form. To say it wasn't a stem-winder is simply to say that it wasn't like Barack Obama's speech a few nights back, or Clinton's, or even Clark's or Sharpton's for that matter.

But I don't think that's the kind of public speaker Kerry is. And he was wise not to try to be something he's not. He didn't try to be a master of rhetoric or tear into the crowd like those others. This was a well-written, powerfully delivered speech. And what occurred to me as I listened to it was how well the convention planners had used the earlier evenings events and speeches to tee the moment up for him.

I mean that not just in the sense that there's an effort to build excitement for the main event or talk up the candidate --that's a given. I thought they did a good job at playing Kerry up as a forceful and decisive leader. And that allowed him to suit his strengths as a speaker to the moment, to slide his speech-making right into that path they'd carved for him when his moment came.

Of course, I still haven't seen the video of the actual TV-version of the speech. I'm still going on what I saw in the hall, watching the back of his head as he delivered. So perhaps my opinions are still premature.

And a final point, for what it's worth. I talked to numerous reporters in the minutes and hours after the speech. And I think it would be fair to say that every person I spoke to told me that Kerry had exceeded their expectations.

Great work CNN! (You'll understand soon enough ...)

Not a stem-winder -- and Kerry would have been foolish to try. But a solid speech. And I thought he hit all the right points -- with the right emotional tenor. In a way, sitting in the hall and watching the back of Kerry's head most of the time is no way to judge how it appeared on TV. But that's my snap judgment.

"I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation - not the Saudi royal family."

Paging Adel Al-Jubeir ...

For the last four days, this convention hall has always been in motion -- people milling on and off the floor, in and out of the stands, the ever-present floor ushers -- the only real extremists in the whole place -- hustling people out of the aisles. But, now, like it is at the tail end of every national party convention, everyone is stationed in their place.

No one is moving from their seats. No one is leaving the floor, because if you do, you can't go back down. I'm sitting just up and back to the side of the podium and looking out over the crowd, it -- or they -- look like nothing so much as a vast carpet of people, all watching intently, no floor to be seen anywhere.

The crowd was certainly more roused in Barack Obama's speech; but not at any other time has their attention been more rapt.

Cleland just introduced Kerry. More later ...

Actually, apropos of the previous post, the real sucker on this one seems to be MSNBC rather than CNN. At least thus far. As of 5:43, the Ghailani capture is the headline on the MSNBC website, while it gets lesser billing on CNN. MSNBC is even blaring it more than Fox News (oh the infamy!).

As with the earlier post, I'd be much obliged if anyone can tell me whether any of the MSNBC talking heads note the earlier published report in one of America's most respected political magazines (see previous post) about the White House's pressure on Pakistan to produce an al Qaida bad guy during the Dem convention.

Finally, right now I'm watching Wolf Blitzer on his little CNN news perch right off the convention floor doing a live shot. If he's talking up the al Qaida story, why not have on Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, to talk about their above-mentioned story? I'm sure Peter would be happy to come on. And I just saw him here in the Fleet Center not more than twenty minutes ago.

Just-in-time-production?

See CNN's Breaking News Alert: "Security forces have captured a high-level al Qaeda operative in a raid in central Pakistan, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said."

Then, after you see that, remember that we noted in May and then The New Republic reported out extensively early this month, that this White House has been telling the Pakistanis for months that they wanted to see a big-time al Qaida leader -- hopefully bin Laden -- produced during the Democratic convention.

Reuters is reporting that the guy they've served up may be a Tanzanian involved in the 1998 African embassy bombings. So apparently they couldn't come up with bin Laden himself.

But here's the thing. I'm not going to be able to watch the television coverage of this throughout the day. But many of you will. So I'd be very, very curious to hear whether when, oh say, CNN goes on about how this al Qaida guy has been hauled in they will mention at all, or with any consistency, that one of the most respected political magazines in the United States reported just weeks ago on the pressure the administration has been placing on the Pakistanis to serve up an al Qaida bad guy on this day.

Will they make the obvious connection? Or will they just ignore it?

This is just the latest, but perhaps the most blatant, example of how this administration has placed politics and, really, political dirty tricks above national security itself, and along the way persisted in defining political deviance down until tactics we used to associate with banana republics start to seem commonplace here.

And while we're at it, this is yet another example of how truly important it is that we democratize the Middle East. Because once we have, some of them will be able to come back here and redemocratize us.

A few thoughts on Edwards.

Friends who I watched the speech with, down on the floor just to his left, thought Edwards was about 75%. I don't know how much it appeared that way on TV. He may only have come off that way if you'd seen him a lot on the campaign trail.

His voice was slightly hoarse and cracked on certain phrases. He seemed to me like he might be getting sick.

Still, with all that, he has an irresistible charm. And he does wind the themes of this convention together in a unique, compelling way. One point: listening to Edwards tonight, and thinking back to the themes he struck during the primaries, it occurred to me how many of them have been incorporated into the message coming out of this convention.

Another thought ... There was a line down towards the end of the speech that stuck in my head: "We have to restore our respect in the world to bring our allies to us and with us. It's how we won the World Wars and the Cold War and it is how we will build a stable Iraq."

Makes perfect sense, no objection -- either on substance or on politics. But it rattled in my head. Because with those words he committed their administration to the herculean task of holding together all the centrifugal forces that are cutting that country apart.

There's nothing I disagree with in the sentiment. And it is notable (and it's been much noted) that the word was a 'stable' Iraq, not a 'democratic' Iraq. Still, a very tall order. I think Kerry is going to win this election. And I'm optimistic in general. But it has occurred to me more than once that that hypothetical next administration could be brought to grief by the occupation (and it is still an occupation) that this president has embarked the country upon. Those were fateful words, even if correct or inevitable ones.

And finally this. As I said above, I watched the Edwards speech in a standing crowd of journalists and Democratic operatives down to Edwards' left on the convention floor. At my back were two of those alchemists and engineers of sound and color, message and image, the ubiquitous handlers and speechwriters who play such an outsized role in the theater that is so much of politics.

As Edwards finished his speech and began his round of thumbs-ups and pumping fists, and as everyone else in crowd was whooping and screaming and clapping, one of those guys at my back turned to his friend and said, with quiet satisfaction and unfazed observation, "right on time." In other words, all wrapped up just minutes before eleven o'clock. Perfect television.

And it was.

Another legacy of Bill Clinton's impress on the Democratic party.

Early this evening I noted that the tone of the Democratic party assembled here in Boston really is quite different than it was in New Hampshire, and much different from what it was in mid-2003. Democratic 'rage' and 'Bush-bashing' was to a real extent a product of Republican spin. But not altogether.

So why the difference? Certainly it's not because opposition to the president has waned in any way. And I think the fact that the convention is meant to appeal to the swing voting audience actually doesn't play that great a role in the change.

I think there are two main reasons -- and they're fundamental rather than cosmetic.

Reason number one has to do with understanding the dynamics that animated the 2003-04 primary contest. On the surface, the fiery rhetoric and animus of 2003 and early 2004 were directed at President Bush. And to some degree of course they were. But the punch of that rhetoric derived not so much from Democrats' antipathy for President Bush as from a pitched battle, almost a rebellion, within the Democratic party -- the grassroots of the Democratic party insisting that Washington Democrats were compromising with the president over particulars when he was leading the country in a direction that had to be opposed across the board. Fiery rhetoric against President Bush was fiery rhetoric against compromise and accomodation with him. In other words, it was to a very real degree aimed at other Democrats.

The specifics and the rights-and-wrongs of that intra-party debate are complicated and needn't detain us here. But understanding that intra-party debate explains why the tone here is so different. The Democratic party is now deeply united around the proposition that President Bush is moving the country in the wrong direction on almost every front and must be opposed head-on. With that question settled within the party, what is there to be angry about? Is there anger at President Bush? Sure. But no one here is talking to President Bush. So opposition, yes. But anger, much less so. Unity isn't simply a reason or a tool to stifle anger. In a sense, it has eliminated it.

Point two is related to point one. Anger is often, and rage is almost always, an emotion rooted in powerlessness. That was certainly the position of Democrats in early 2003 (on so many levels), though less so as the year went on. These Democrats don't feel powerless. The mood is one of cautious optimism that they can drive the president from office, that the wind is at their backs. That too changes the emotional tone dramatically.

This column by Rich Lowry in National Review Online makes some very shrewd points about Barack Obama's speech Tuesday evening. Praise across the political divide is often rich with backhanded compliments and disingenuousness. He includes some digs. But this is something different.

I'm really enjoying this Wyclef Jean song. But isn't this seriously off-message. I'm surprised it got by the message wizards.