SOL SANDERS: NOSTALGIA FOR THE DAYS WHEN CONVENTIONS WERE BLOOD SPORTS INSTEAD OF SPECTATOR ZOOS
Alas! Conventional conventions!
Call me masochistic, but I watched both conventions. Chalk it up to nostalgia for a mistaken teenage as a politics junkie. Then, we bet whether “Roll Call of the States” might trip up FDR’s dumping his popular leftwing populist vice president Henry Wallace for Harry Truman. Or the rush felt when a “balcony demonstration” stampeded 1940 Republican delegates to accept Wendell Wilkie, perhaps first of now carefully contrived enthusiasms. Or the frisson when Claire Booth Luce’s turned her venomous playwright pen to the 1944 GOP keynote charging FDR “lied us into a war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it.”
Not only was there none such but the foregone conclusive nominations produced inevitable speculation whether conventions had outlived their time. I hope not. Participation is the name of the game in party politics as in government. That convention party is the reward for wardheelers. Talking heads have already forgotten we believed all through spring 2012 Mitt Romney might have had to fight on the floor. Or forgotten now is how Barack Obama never got a 2008 primary majority but used his old Communist buddies’ “sitz-fleisch” tactic: hold the vote until everyone else has gone home at any consensual meeting including caucuses. [So much for endless lauding of Clinton political genius; no fall-back position after losing the first primaries wave!]
There was one little piece of oldtime antics: the Democrats wrestled with God on the routine platform. God won, as the Scriptures tell us He always does. The original decision to omit Heavenly Father – apparently “irrational exuberance” by separation of church and state fanatics who know little about our Founders – also zapped Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He may know how to coral Mexican-American votes among his half of 10 million fellow Los Angelenos, but he doesn’t know how to run a convention. [If we must have Big City Machines, bring back the Irish!]
Then there was the Jerusalem shemuzzle. It’s no secret both parties, Congress and most recent candidates have courted whatever Jewish vote and dollars endures for Zionism. Acknowledging Jerusalem’s centrality not only to Israel but to Judaism [and, for that matter, to Christianity, and even Islam despite recent Muslim claims ancient Jewish kingdoms did not exist] has been a no-brainer. Just as well known State Dept. Arabists oppose moving the Embassy, a last piece in the airy-fairy “peace process” jigsaw, dangling the unlikely possibility it might also be an Arab capital. [Pity poor Embassy staff who must navigate that Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, surely the world’s most dangerous traffic hazard!]
We may never know “who: – but Democratic National Committee cameras kept focusing on the plethora of pre-fabbed “Arab-American Democrat” and mysterious hand-drawn “Middle East [cq] First” signs in Michigan’s delegation [with its half million Arab heritage residents]. A post-screwup interview with a prominent “Palestinian activist” caps that hypothesis. After all Republican hope springs eternal [and pessimistic Democrats fear] a Romney landslide might suck in his birthplace where his father was twice governor and headed a motor company.
With web “fact checkers” as prejudiced as “politics” reporters, we will have to forgo sorting out downright speechifying lies, half-truths and “fudges”. Sometimes the illustrious talking heads, too, interrupted the flow adding further confusion. I finally switched to C-span from my favorite, Fox. Obvious to this limping wordsmith, if not to the spinmeisters, it’s crystal why President’s speech bombed: it had no central theme, obviously cobbled together by too many cooks. [I wonder if Abraham Lincoln’s “going on his knees” reference was product of a “google search” for “Lincoln, religion” after “the God fiasco”. Hard to believe you could appreciate Lincoln’s words and continue to encourage Mr. Obama and Vice Presidential Joe Biden’s windbaggery.]
Economic issues, what should have been the talk of the town, were left hanging. Not the least fundamental subject, energy: Mr. Obama’s claim to have produced lower imports and smashing domestic production is ludicrous. The reasons? The economic downturn and pump prices lowered consumption. Leases handed out in the oil-connected Bush years and the incredible shale gas and oil technological breakthrough — already underway but luckily mostly on private land the Administration can only marginally inhibit – complete the list.
Oh well! These may well be my last conventions. Anyway, there were occasional flashes of “the good old days” when politics was a blood sport instead of a spectators’ zoo.
Sws-09-07-12
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