Official Democratic National Convention Thread

I found it very surprising that there was zero mention of Dodd-Frank, particularly given that it is generally played up by the campaign as one of the Obama administration's most significant legislative achievements.

My theory is that they felt they had to have a focused message tonight - targeting women voters and associated issues, the youth (there was a ton of stuff on financial aid for students and they had Kal Penn), Don't Ask Don't Tell, and "Obama saved the auto industry".

Tomorrow, Elizabeth Warren is speaking (establisher and head of the government's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), and I would be shocked if it wasn't all hands on deck for the economic message and financial sector reform leading up to Bill Clinton's speech.

Castro 2020 will lose to Rubio 2020. Hey look, an all Latino election!

Seriously though, I thought it was a perfectly good speech that accomplished what it set out to accomplish in terms of tearing down Romney (which it did more of than championing the President), but the delivery wasn't quite top notch, particularly after what Deval Patrick did earlier. Michelle's speech was better than Julian's.

And I thought Chris Christie was excellent by the way.

1. Neither of those guys is the first or the last to talk about their mom working hard so they could be there, so that's ridiculous

2. What comment on education are you referring to

3. Obama stated that he changed his mind on the gay marriage issue. If Romney is saying he changed his mind - i.e. that he thought a similar system to Obamacare was a good idea when he was governor of Mass, but that he no longer thinks it's a good idea, that's fine. But he hasn't done that, because that would be admitting that he made an error with respect to one of the biggest policy initiatives he undertook as governor. So they're better off just not addressing it.

4. There are Texas references because he's the mayor of San Antonio. Similarly, there were a lot of Massachusetts references in Patrick's speech because he's the governor of Mass, and lots of Ohio references in Strickland's speech because he was governor of Ohio. Not exactly shocking.

5. What was the lie about Mitt's stance? I am not aware of exactly what Mitt's stance is on pay equality nor was I really paying attention to that speech, since she was pretty damned awful.

6. What video said "government is the only thing we belong to"? I feel like that's a misstatement or at best out of context, because no one's dumb enough to make a political statement like that.

To be more specific, the claim was 4.5 million private sector jobs in the past 29 months. It is not a statement by Castro - it is posted on Obama's website and has been repeated numerous times. The source is... Surprise! the Bureau of Labour Statistics, which confirms the number.

Okay, so it didn't say "government is the only thing we belong to", but "Government is the only thing we ALL belong to", the point being that everyone has vastly different backgrounds, priorities, views and interests but that everyone has an interest in government and should participate in it - i.e., by voting, vote mobilization being a major theme of the evening. That's not controversial. And how the hell is it "socialism"?

Seriously there are plenty of criticisms to level at democratic politicians without this kind of BS.

Rockshead - Two things.

First, it's the "Democratic Party", not the "Democrat Party". The latter is a meme that was created by the RNC to make their opponents rhyme with "rat". It's cheap partisan hackery, and it makes the speaker look like a cheap partisan hack.

Second, feel free to criticize obviously, but spamming the thread with random posts about liberal organizations and figures about the U.S. that have no bearing on anything actually going on is not the point of the thread. The point of the thread is to talk about what's going on at the convention - positively or negatively. Keep it on topic. It's not a "general politics discussion" thread and further spam will be deleted.

The national debt has been in the making since 2002, when it was $6.2 trillion - this was when the first Bush budget became effective (it was basically the same as in 2001). By the end of the Bush admin's last budget it had gone up to $11.9 trillion. It's now at about $16 trillion.

The two most important reasons for the transition from a surplus under Clinton to the current deficit are the structural deficit created by the tax cuts from 2002, and the country's largest source of direct and indirect expenditures: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the three, the tax cuts are actually the largest single factor - to the extent that if the cuts are allowed to expire at the end of 2012, projections are that future deficits will be cut in half.

Now, is this a valid thing to criticize Obama for? Absolutely: he could have repealed the tax cuts, he had a majority in both houses and this would have significantly curtailed rising debt. However, if he had, ask yourself how likely it is that Republicans would be spending this entire campaign demonizing him for raising taxes on everyone. I put the odds at 100%.

So what would you do? In considering your answer, please note that non-defense discretionary spending accounts for ~15% of the budget. In other words, f you cut all of the funding for everything except medicare and defense spending out of the budget - 100% of education spending, food safety spending, foreign aid, etc etc - you would save approximately $560 million.

There really are no good answers to the national debt that don't involve raising taxes, significantly cutting defense spending and medicare, or some combination.