Thomas McDonald on the Catholic dilemma and partisan politics:

Witnessing the degradations of the Democrats, those on the right fall back into identifying with Republicans, who suck about 10% less. But the Republicans aren’t conservatives any more: they’re hawkish corporatists. This is absolutely out of line with basic Catholic teaching. As long as the holocaust of abortion continues to be the central plank of liberal social policy, we’re stuck with them, but don’t act like the Republican party is some grand solution to our problems.

I should say that I take no pleasure in noting that the pro-life Democratic caucus is crawling toward extinction. No matter how inadequate or compromised conservatives might think pro-life Democrats are, the truth is that if you really care about eradicating the scourge of abortion they’re absolutely necessary. Because without them, the argument about abortion switches modes from moral persuasion to pure partisanship. And because the latter is so devoid of reason, it’s much harder to win converts.

All of which is to say that I have a great deal of natural sympathy and affinity for Bart Stupak.

Yet at the same time, I think we can fairly lay a great deal of responsibility for the polarization and acrimony of the last four years at his feet.

Our political order is based around what voters believe to be a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for our elected officials. At the top of the pyramid are high-minded hopes about wisdom and judgment. But at the base of the pyramid–the foundation for our relationship with our officials–is that we trust them to be self-interested. That is to say, we trust them not to deliberately do something so abhorrent to us that they know for a certainty it will cost them their jobs.

I would argue that the passage of Obamacare damaged the political order because it broke this basic compact. And I don’t particularly blame President Obama or Nancy Pelosi. Sure, they drove the process. But that’s what their constituencies wanted from them. The engine governor for such radical change has always been guys like Stupak, who wouldn’t go along with it because they knew they couldn’t get away with it.

But Stupak didn’t keep up his end of the bargain. He violated basically every tier of the politician’s Maslow hierarchy: He didn’t believe in Obamacare, he didn’t like Obamacare, and he knew that voting for it would cost him his job because his constituents hated it. But he did it anyway because pure partisanship overrode every other concern. That’s not supposed to happen.

I’m sure Bart Stupak is a kind and gentle soul. But he failed as an elected official, with terrible consequences for the body politic. He abandoned even the old pro-life Democratic line, which may have hardened the fight over abortion into political amber. And his failures are not merely personal. They are a national tragedy.

Per this morning’s Wall Street Journal: Decide.com–a website designed to help untangle internet retail price elasticity.

I’ll have some expanded thoughts on this later today, but for now here’s my write-up from yesterday’s meeting of Democrats for Life in Charlotte.

I seem to have mistakenly deleted the little WordPress widget in the sidebar which listed all my various scribblings (the “JVL Elsewhere” list). Does anyone know a smart way to find a recently cached version of the site so I can copy them back in?

I’ve been offline most of the day haven’t kept touch with the congealing opinion on Clint Eastwood’s performance last night. But with 20 hours of distance, the following two thoughts occur to me:

1) The further I get from it, the more I like it. His timing wasn’t perfect, but it was perfect in all the critical spots. And the parts where he missed his timing actually built a sense of mild danger about the performance. I don’t know how it played on TV, but in the arena I kept thinking, Dear God, this thing could go completely off the rails any second. That frisson of disaster narrowly avoided lent the thing a kind of extra spontaneity and power.

Also, I’ve never seen anything like it at a convention. It completely broke the form. That, all by itself, made it interesting and memorable.

2) I think there’s the potential of real political danger in it for the Obama campaign. You could easily–really easily–imagine a world in which the Dems try to rebut it or mock it in Charlotte and instead they actually make the bite deeper. You could also imagine a world in which the empty chair becomes a pop symbol of Obama’s failed presidency. Romney and Ryan could leave an empty chair on every stage they mount. It could be a kind of iconic short-hand for popular disillusionment with Obama’s job performance.

Or, it could just fade into nothing. If I were in the Obama campaign or on the revamped JournoList, I’d tell Democrats and their partisans to pretend the entire thing never happened. Don’t mention it. Don’t mock it. Just ignore it and hope that it evaporates with the rest of the convention ephemera.

Oh, I’ve also got some reconsideration on Dark Knight Rises, having seen it, um, subsequently. That’ll have to wait until Monday.

Two quick kudos:

1) I didn’t catch the name of a cappella group which sang the national anthem, but it was one of the most beautiful arrangements I’ve ever heard. Phenomenal.

2) The law enforcement people in Tampa this week have been wonderful. Professional, helpful, friendly, even. A sterling, exceptional job they’ve done this week.

* I poked fun at the RNC set design–it looks like the Windows 8 tiles. But they’ve really grown on me during the week. I actually kind of love it now.

* Early prediction: Unless Mitt Romney passes out, the immediate CW on it will be that it was an excellent, strong speech–a forceful case for his presidency and a better speech than anyone expected him to give. The performance of his life!

Because that’s what people almost always say immediately after the nominee gives his acceptance speech. It takes a couple days for a more considered appraisal to settle in.

* That said, this has been a very competently-run convention. Probably the most impressive GOP convention I’ve been to, in terms of messaging and production.

* As Clint Eastwood ad libs, Venus Williams dropped the first set and it looking terrible. Roddick announced he’s retiring. We could be heading into the nuclear winter of American tennis. After Serena it’s a waste land.

* I’d never seen Rubio live before. I’m now a believer in his native political skills. His drop-in line as he walked out onstage–“I think I just drank Clint Eastwood’s water”–was incredibly deft and showed a totally intuitive sense of theater. As he speaks, I’m watching the teleprompter and he’s occasionally dropping in lines. And they all work. It’s a very impressive display of political gifts.

That said, his speech would have been twice as powerful if he had pressed through some of the applause lines, as Condi Rice did last night when she put on a clinic.

* Instant reaction to the Romney speech as it’s in process (I read ahead through the transcript for the rest): Whatever you think of the text, or the delivery–this is a pre-Ryan speech. It’s absolutely the speech he would have given a month ago when his theory of the campaign was “jobs-jobs-jobs, make the election a referendum not a choice.” So if you thought that strategy was smart then, then you probably think this speech is well conceived.

On it’s own merits, though, it struck me on first-blush as a good effort with some great moments.

Possible updates to follow later in the night; either here or on the Twitters.

Last night there were three big speeches: Rice, Martinez, and Ryan. All three were above average, but my own sense was that Ryan’s was the weakest of the three. Quick thoughts:

1) Condi Rice had both the best speech and the best delivery.If you read it as an essay it hangs together with a beginning, middle, and end. It both an arc and a point and had just enough poetry sprinkled in (“America has a way of making the impossible seem inevitable”) to make me think that Peggy Noonan may have taken an editing pass on it. And she even challenged her audience slightly. “But today, today, when I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether you’re going to get a good education, can I honestly say it does not matter where you came from, it matters where you are going?”–that’s not just a rebuke of teachers’ unions. It’s a rebuke to Republicans who deny the problems we’re having with class mobility.

It wasn’t just her text, though. Rice seems to have gone to the Christopher Walken School of Speechifying. Her delivery was marked not by changes in register or dramatic pauses for applause lines. What she did was tinker ever so slightly with cadences (“we know it was never, in . . . evitable”) and even pronunciation (“a-lies” instead of “allies”). It was as though she went through the speech, took out all the punctuation, and then re-punctuated it on her own with an eye toward making the delivery just slightly unexpected.

Also–and this is a lesson every speaker ought to take from Zell Miller’s epic 2004 speech–she didn’t let the audience bog the speech down with applause. People kept clapping, but Rice pushed through these pauses. (See that “Today–today” example above.) That’s how you sustain tension in a speech. If you let the audience interrupt you with cheers throughout, it has the effect of deflating the balloon slightly each time. But if you power through, the pressure builds. And the release at the end of the speech is then cathartic. I doubt we’re going to see a better speech either here or in Charlotte.

2) Martinez did well not to be blown off the stage by following Rice. Her demeanor is pleasant and sunny, but tough. She was a conversational speaker and that’s hard to pull off.

3) Ryan’s speech was good enough; his presentation was good enough. I suspect it was just fine as a national introduction. But it seemed to me that there was no through-line to the speech. There were some great moments and very good lines. But the speech itself was just kind of an amorphous set of remarks. It didn’t really go anywhere and I don’t know that it accomplished any specific rhetorical or narrative goal. As a performance I’d say it ranked far below Sarah Palin’s 2008 convention speech.

One final note about Ann Romney’s Tuesday night speech. It didn’t really do anything for me, though people seemed to love it. But one question: When’s the last time we had a presidential candidate’s spouse gave a convention speech and people didn’t declare how fantastic her performance was? The general verdict on all spouses is that they’re amazing, attractive women who are so eloquent and appealing and they are (almost invariably) their husbands’ secret weapons. So in this sense, Ann Romney is no different from Michelle Obama, Cindy McCain, Laura Bush, Liddy Dole, Hillary Clinton, and Barbara Bush before her.

This isn’t to say that Ann Romney didn’t do a marvelous job–just to point out that we always say how wonderful these women speakers are.

(Funnily enough, the one spouse over the years who struck me as being genuinely attractive as a person was Theresa Kerry–because she was (a) not particularly into the election and (b) candid and emotionally accessible in a way I found utterly charming.)