'Ware Nemesis, Obama

Courtesy of the Dish, a tweet from Jeffrey Goldberg in immediate reaction to Joe Biden's Convention paeaen to Barack Obama, Osama-killer:

@JeffreyGoldberg I've been told I'm a bloodthirsty warmongering neoconservative, but for whatever reason, I just don't like all this bragging about killing. 6:51 PM - 6 Sep 12

For the record, I was on the same page. Below, excerpts from that section of Biden's speech, and my immediate reactions on Twitter.

Obama maintains hope, but not in comity

Much of Obama's speech was the same as always: I ran because the American Dream, the "basic bargain," is slipping away; we need to renew our commitment to shared prosperity, opportunity for all; to build sustainable broad-based prosperity by investing in green energy, education, infrastructure; to secure our budgetary future by controlling healthcare costs without denying care. And of course, the other side is about trickle-down, the failed policies of the Bush years, the toxic post-Reagan conviction that government is the problem.

What struck me as different was a subtle bid to tie his opponents to the wholesale corruption of our politics threatened by the unleashing of the Super PACs and the 501(c)(4)s post-Citizens United and Speechnow.org. Democrats have always suggested that Republican policies serve the wealthy.  Obama cast Romney and co. as pretty much owned and bound.

It began at the beginning, with a suggestion of corrupted process that's encompassed him too:

Defending Medicaid is personal for Clinton

Ezra Klein reminds us that the core of Bill Clinton's extended policy rebuke to the GOP last night was an attack on their proposed cuts to Medicaid, not their Medicare plans. Medicaid is the locus, Klein says, of

arguably the most important and concrete policy difference between the two campaigns. The Medicare changes get more attention on both sides, but Romney and Ryan don’t intend to touch Medicare for 10 years, they swear they’ll honor the Medicare guarantee, and at least in Ryan’s most recent budget, he envisions the exact same long-term spending path as Obama does. By contrast, Romney and Ryan intend to begin cutting Medicaid immediately, and independent analyses suggest that their cuts could throw as many as 30 million people off the program. If you want to see the difference between Obama and Romney’s vision for American policy, it’s probably the single starkest example.

Democrats generally give talk of Medicaid short shrift because it's perceived as a program for the poor, and it's a sad fact of American political life that being perceived as channeling government resources to the poor is about as toxic as being perceived as showering largess on the rich.  Clinton took care of that by emphasizing Medicaid's middle-class constituencies (as well as children, also politically tonic):