The first time that I watched the Republican and Democratic conventions, I was nine years old, and, though my grasp of civics was rudimentary, they were fascinating. The Democrats had contests for both the Presidential and the Vice Presidential nominations. The GOP’s gathering offered no suspense, but I did get to see my first cogently expressed political speech when the governor of my then home state, Arthur B. Langlie, defended the Eisenhower Administration’s record and principles in a classic keynote address.
Even then political conventions had passed their glory days and were dwindling into staged, scripted spectacles. (“Infomercials” isn’t an inapt label). That evolution was doubtless inevitable. Nonetheless, I don’t have to applaud it, and I don’t have to spend the next two weeks parsing its products. Hundreds of pundits and tens of thousands of other bloggers will tirelessly do that. For myself, I’m signing off from campaign trail watching until the Republican convention ends. After this post, you won’t see the words “Obama”, “McCain”, “Biden” or [blank to be filled on August 29th] on this site until September 5, 2008, at the earliest.
After that vacation, I shall, I hope, be refreshed enough to endure what looks to be one of the most peculiar Presidential campaigns in our country’s history. The Obama-Biden ticket consists of the Senate’s first and third most left-wing members, according to the National Journal’s analysis of voting records. (Self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont ranks fourth.) Both nominees are fine practitioners of the debased contemporary style of oratory, in which argumentation consists wholly of slogans and shibboleths. Off the teleprompter, both are prone to say odd or nonsensical things. Neither has ever accomplished much except to read speeches that were praised at the time but produced not a memorable phrase, much less a noteworthy idea. Each carries a burden of potentially embarrassing associations, the one with ideological extremists and corrupt political fixers, the other with lobbyists (which would be fairly innocent, had his running mate not spent the past two years demonizing professional petitioners for the redress of grievances).
Add to that the handicap of feverish support from personality cultists and Angry Leftists, and one has what would, in normal political times, be a prescription for electoral suicide. Obviously, the times are not normal. Just how far from normality they have drifted is yet to be seen, but “it harrows me with fear and wonder”.
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