as seen on TV

I watched some of the Republican convention last night.

Wow.

I'll try to keep the tone of this blog respectful, but Jesus.

Any party's convention is going to be, by definition, triumphalist and one-sided.  The immediate point of the convention is to fire up the delegates, the foot soldiers who will go back home and actually work to turn out the vote.  If they're not passionate, that's one less lawn sign, three fewer phone calls, five hundred bucks that doesn't go to the campaign.

The second, and at this stage, less important goal is to influence the persuadables out there, those few hundreds of thousands of voters who could go either way.  They're probably not watching the convention,but the highlights will get filtered down to them through the media and every little bit helps.

So, I'm taking all of this with a fistful of salt, but still.

It started with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Minority Leader of the Senate.  McConnell is the great legislator and statesman who said, on the record, that his highest priority was making Barack Obama a one-term President.

Way to govern, Mitch.

McConnell started out by praising someone named "Mitt Ryan". I don't know who this is, must be some last-minute replacement for Romney, some back-room Tampa deal.  And then he kept talking, raising the question:

How on God's green earth did Mitch McConnell ever get elected to anything, let alone the United States Senate?  He is the most phlegmatic, wooden speaker I've seen televised nationally in years.  Biff from the old Letterman show is Robert Preston in the Music Man compared to the good Senator.

And speaking of old TV shows, was that the old SNL guitarist accompanying Jack Blades?  And why didn't they turn Jack's microphone on?  Kind of a shame, him being the singer and all.

McConnell stumbles off and Rand Paul strides on.  Ah, Rand.  You got to give some grudging respect to a grown man who defies any comb or hairbrush.  Apparently, hair grooming of any kind is unconstitutional, clause 8, paragraph 41, you can look it up.  Right around the part that decrees African-Americans to be equal to three-fifths of European Americans.

That's one infallible document, huh?

Rand started out with a history lesson, which is always a great way of making an audience think you're smarter than they are and therefore your ideas make sense even if they don't make any sense.  The Newton Leroy Gingrich gambit, I think it's called.  Very effective.  You could feel the crowd getting into it, finally.  They love it when the Pauls lay in to that serious, straight-up Ayn Rand shtick, just thundering out that simplistic, selfish, short-sighted message.

McConnell and Rand both took some good, measured whacks at the President, which raised the second question of the night:

How do the Republican strategists, with straight faces and presumably able to sleep through the night, continue to try to characterize Barack Hussein Obama as a member of the elite?   Because he went to Harvard? So did Romney.  George W. Bush went to Yale.  Come on.

The President grew up as a black guy with a single white mother.  In America.  Odds, actual odds, friends, are that he ends up in prison, not in college and certainly not in the White House.  You can disagree with his policies and his philosophy,  you can just not like the guy, that's fine, but don't insult the collective intelligence of the voters or dismiss the extraordinary effort and discipline of the man.  His road was not easy.  Respect that.

Then Rand just flat-out lied, setting the bar nice and low for Ryan's speech later.  The word from the back room is clearly:

 "Hammer away on the "You didn't build that" line.  Just keep saying that, with scorn and a slow head shake on the profound arrogance and ignorance of a person who would dare say that to an American business person.  Just keep saying that, we'll figure out something else in September."

So Rand said, simply and concisely, that businesses build roads.

Umm...

That would be, untrue, Senator.  Flatly, simply, obviously untrue.  I've never driven the Staples superhighway and I've seen a lot of road in this country.  Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican president, built the interstate highway system.

Look it up, Rand.

And then Condoleeza Rice walks out.  I've already said what I think of this woman.
The coldest, smartest mercenary I've ever seen.  Enough said.

And then the highlight of the night, Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Davis Ryan, possibly related to Mitt Ryan, don't know.  And now you could really feel the crowd tuning in and breathing easier.  Like a dead party when someone finally says, "Hey, you guys want a drink?"  Ryan damn near burned the place down.  Mostly because his pants were on fire,I guess.

I mean, he lit his pants on fire and then kept pouring on the kerosene.

Wow.

Again, I'm trying to be respectful and all, but holy Jesus on the cross eating corn chips.

Liar liar.

He certainly proved he belongs with the Big Boys, I'll give him that.  One of the unfortunate and corrosive skills you have to possess to run for national office these days is the ability to lie with great passion and sincerity.  Ryan excelled.

A couple of places where the Congressman strayed from what some of us would call the facts:

- The GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin that Ryan claimed the President promised to keep open closed in December of 2008.  Yeah.  Hard to pin that on a guy who wasn't sworn in yet.  Janesville happens to be Ryan's hometown, by the way.  So, he knows when it closed.

- This one is more of a lie of omission, I guess.  The bi-partisan debt panel that Ryan claims the President ignored?  Ryan was on the panel and voted against it's recommendations.   Come on.

--Of course the stimulus created jobs.  Millions of them.  Not enough, and I've written before, the problem with the stimulus is it wasn't big enough, mostly because of political calculation and cowardice on the part of the President and his team.  But to claim it had no effect is just silly.

-And then the bald-faced, brazen bit about Medicare.  Read Ryan's budget, the reason he was standing there last night, the only reason any of us outside of Wisconsin know his name.  It's not the Democrats that are going after Medicare, folks.

Ah.  Sorry.  A little partisan venting.

Again, I know the game.  I've been watching it for awhile now.

But when they demonstrate so blatantly that they think we are so, so stupid, it just gets me all kind of bitey and snarly.

If you think your points, your policies and your vision are better than the other guy's, then just make the argument, for god's sake.   Don't just stand there and lie.

what the Ryan pick means

And all the pieces are in place.

First off, as far as the horse race goes, the raw politics of it, Romney picking Ryan confirms that President Obama's team won the summer.

Which means exactly as much as winning the first half of a basketball game.  If winning the first half meant eventual victory, the New York Knicks of the mid-nineties would have been a dynasty.

This means that the President's team outcoached the Romney crew.  Romney's strategy of don't get specific and keep talking about job loss and "I'm a business guy" was their one play and the Obama camp ran good offense painting Romney as Mr. Burns from the Simpsons without any of the laughs and the media and Mitt himself kept the cyborg weirdness storyline alive, so the President started pulling away in the states and with the demographics that are actually going to decide this thing.

So Romney and Co. had to throw out the playbook and throw something different at them. When they realized they were getting beat they started complaining about "garbage politics" and how the President was demeaning the office by...campaigning,  I guess.  A sure tell that one side is losing is when they start complaining that the other side is playing dirty.  You never see a winning team whining to the ref.

The larger meaning of the pick is that we have a  chance at an actual, interesting, meaningful election.

Think of the foolishness of the Bush/Kerry race and the surface noise of the Obama/McCain contest.  If it hadn't have been for the complete economic meltdown right at the end there and if McCain hadn't have said "the fundamentals of our economy are sound" (which is a perfectly reasonable and sensible thing for a candidate to say), it could have easily gone the other way.  It was all about optics and emotion that year, with the nuance and depth of a high school Homecoming King race.

Ryan now defines Romney, which speaks to the weakness of Romney more than anything else.  And the definition is "radical conservative economic policy".

I haven't gone through the Ryan budget, just seen all of the highlights they flash on the screen when the pundits are jabbering about it.  And since I've promised not to revert to talking points or lazy assumptions when writing here, (curse those late night, whiskey-fueled promises!) until I get some time to study it, I'll avoid judging it.

But a couple of things are clear.

It's an extreme document. 

It's extreme and, in my view, dangerous and wrong-headed not because of any of the details but solely on it's premise.

Our country is not a business.  We do not have to balance our books every year, or in fact, ever.

Now that's got to get somebody writing in.

Also, it doesn't tap the easiest and fairest source of revenue.

Which would be corporations and rich people, Bob.

So, you've got two deeply moderate guys, the President and Romney, standing on either side of a Big Debate:

Great Society vs. Gilded Age.

Keynes vs. Friedman.

Watered down, half-serious, old-time liberalism vs. Wild West dogs eating dogs, everyone else eating the poor.

Could get interesting.  

radicals in our streets

I read a headline the other day that blared something like:

Senate Likely to Turn More Conservative

But it was about the odds that some Tea Party-backed candidates were likely to replace some older, incumbent  Republicans.  And, here's a news flash, kids:

Tea Party ideology, if there can be said to be a single one, isn't conservative.

Not in the historical, generally understood meaning of the word, anyway.

Whether the ideology, philosophy, goals and game plan of the Tea Party are smart or dangerous to our country is a conversation I'm itching to have, but first we need to clarify what we're talking about.

The Tea Party is radical.

Kind of the opposite of conservative.

The Tea Party wants enormous change and it wants it now.  Think of the word "conservative" for a moment.  It generally means that someone wants to change everything, everything and he wants it to happen now, this afternoon, man, and if things get rowdy and a little crazy while we're overhauling the entire structure, well, hell, that's what happens, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, boys.

That's what you think of when you think "conservative", right?

Hmm.

The Tea Party is radical bordering on revolutionary, which is why I admire them.  Not what they want to do, not how they generally behave, o god in heaven no, but their revolutionary vision is something you don't see much these days in this country.  And they're matching that vision with organization in a lot of places and that's even more rare.  Occupy Your Mom's House could learn a few things from these guys.

The New Conservatives are really Clintonian Democrats, President Obama and Secretary Clinton being the leading figures of the cause.  They're mildly progressive on the social issues, which defined the chasm between the Left and the Right over the past forty years or so, but when it comes to economic policy, foreign affairs, energy policy, education, everything that actually falls under the job of government, they want to keep things pretty much the same and maybe gradually make small changes, if those changes are deemed prudent and acceptable to most people.   Very conservative way of doing business.

I don't know what you'd call the old Republicans getting overrun by the Tea Party crew.

Doomed, I guess.  Soon to be extinct.  The honest ones, anyway.  Watching the rest of them run to that new money is a sad thing, like watching an old fat man trying to dance with the kids at a wedding.  It's like,

"Dude.  Just sit down and talk to your wife.  You can't dance to that song."

mandatory opinions

This was suggested by my friend Brian Dykstra a few years back.  Brian does a lot of political spoken word stuff and in one show he called for something very simple from political candidates:

Mandatory opinions.

Buzzwords, codewords, blather and bullshit are fine, it's a long road and you're saying the same thing to a different crowd every four hours.  I'm not saying you've got to channel Lincoln and Douglas every afternoon.

But behind all  that and right out front where anyone can see, mandatory opinions.
On everything and anything anyone asks.

Imagine a job interview where you ask the candidate what he's going to do.

You're hiring this guy for a pretty important job.  And you say,

"So, financially we're in a rough patch here.  We almost went out of business four years ago and things are better, compared to that nightmare, but we need to be thinking about getting stronger, you know, more stable.  So, what would you do?"

And the guy nods and smiles and says,

"We need to create more jobs."

So you say,

"Exactly.  Right.  We're on the same page.  What would you do to do that?"

And he looks at you real sincere and says,

"This is the greatest company in the world.  And I want to restore its greatness."

So you nod.  And you say,

"Well, that's a nice thing to say.  I like this company a lot, too.  Been with it all my life, actually.  But I'm asking you, directly, what are your plans to improve it if we give you the job?"

And he smiles broadly and says,

"The guy you have now tried.  And he seems like a nice guy.  He tried, you tried.  But he's not doing the job.  He's got to go."

And at this point you're getting a little frustrated, right?   So you stare hard at  the guy and say,

"Well, that's the way we've set it up here, even though he has the job, he has to reapply after four years.  And we've seen a lot of candidates, did a pretty thorough search, actually, all across the country and it's down to him or you.  So, if I can ask you plainly,  what the hell are you going to do, sir?"

Mandatory opinions.  On both sides.

 Otherwise it's just a reality TV/popularity contest/smearfest/dirty money jamboree.  And maybe it's that anyway, but at least more of us will know who we're hiring and fewer of us can pretend to be outraged down the line.