RUTHFULLY YOURS

This year we’re even farther out and across state lines. The Holiday Inn in Rock Hill, S.C., is a 24-mile drive from the Charlotte Convention Center, where the press had its temporary workspaces. A taxi ride back the other night ran into the triple figures with tip. There’s a mall in our backyard here, too, the Rock Hill Galleria. It ain’t the Mall of America. We went there Monday in search of lunch and found the world’s smallest food court: a China Cafe, a Cookie Store and a defunct pizza stand. That was it.

To a longtime Manhattan denizen, Rock Hill (2010 population 66,154) seems tiny, but it’s the fourth largest city in the state. And it has an interesting civil rights history. It was home to the Friendship Nine, who staged a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter, then refused to post bail when they were arrested. “Protesters across the country adopted the ‘jail no bail’ policy implemented by the Friendship Nine, and served out their jail sentences rather than helping to subsidize a system that supported segregation and inequality,” according to the Friendship College website.

“Rock Hill’s importance to the civil rights movement held the spotlight for a moment at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte Thursday,” reports the local paper, the Herald:

In his convention speech before a packed Time Warner Cable Arena audience, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., recounted his experience riding through the Deep South in 1961 with the Freedom Riders to protest Jim Crow segregation.

When the riders stopped in Rock Hill, Lewis and another civil rights activists [sic] tried to enter the whites-only waiting room at the bus station.

“We were met by an angry mob that beat us and left us lying in a pool of blood,” Lewis said.

When police asked whether the activists wanted to press charges, they said no.

Lewis would suffer another, even worse beating at the hands of a racist mob: in Selma, Ala., in 1965, when his skull was fractured. Decades later, this man who shed blood in a struggle for freedom, speaks for the party of Flukism. That’s a measure of both progress and dissolution.

We were all conventioned out last night, so although we’d put in a brief appearance at The Wall Street Journal’s temporary workspace–and on a WSJ.com video–it didn’t feel right claiming the dateline. We hitched a ride to the airport, where we rented a car. We drove back to Rock Hill and took a meal at the Olive Garden, an Italian chain restaurant we’d never tried before. It was OK, but not as good as Marilyn Hagerty made it sound.

Then back to our room to watch the speeches on C-Span. One got the sense that the DNC balloon had started to deflate after Wednesday’s performance by the brilliant huckster Bill Clinton. And think about the lineups in the prime hour (10-11 p.m. ET): On Tuesday, fresh young keynoter Julian Castro and the lovely Michelle Obama. Wednesday, Clinton, preceded by Sandra Fluke and Elizabeth Warren. As we wrote yesterday, we found those last two highly off-putting, but they do represent the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party: an entitled young woman demanding attention and free stuff, and a privileged older one brimming with resentment of the more successful.

Last night gave us a few highly entertaining performances, but they were early in the evening. The performance of Jennifer Granholm, a former Michigan governor, was like the famous “Dean scream” of 2004 only more frenzied. We can’t do it justice in a description; you have to see the video. It may not be pleasant, but it’s weirdly compelling, like the aftermath of a car wreck.

Brian Schweitzer, whom we last saw in 2008, was subdued next to Granholm but animated by ordinary standards. His folksy refrain last night was “That dog don’t hunt”:

Mitt raised taxes–uh, fees–on driver’s licenses, on school bus rides, on mental health services and even on milk. And here’s the one that got a burr under my saddle: he quadrupled the fee for a gun license! Maybe that’s okay for a guy who hunts “varmints.” But for the rest of us, that dog don’t hunt.

Schweitzer also boasted of having “cut more taxes, for more people, than any governor” in his own state’s history.

That’s right, a speaker at the Democratic convention touted low taxes and denounced the Republican nominee for burdening gun owners. Schweitzer is governor of Anatnom.

But in the prime hour, when the whole country or at least the most sizable minority thereof is watching, the Democrats gave us . . . Joe Biden and Barack Obama. What a letdown.

Actually, there was one other man who appeared briefly on stage during that hour, and his presence represented one of the convention’s biggest disconnects. We’ll tell you why before we tell you who. In a bit of a role reversal, the Democrats put a very heavy emphasis on foreign policy. That makes sense, as it is the one area in which the Obama administration has some real successes to tout. Conservatives tend to argue that the Obama foreign policy has been feckless and will lead to disaster. They may turn out to be right, but it’s no easier an argument to make than the Democratic economic case that Obama’s policies will produce prosperity real soon now.

The Romney campaign committed an unforced error by not including in the nomination speech a statement of support for the troops and a mention of those who are still fighting in Afghanistan. Perhaps seeking to capitalize, the Democrats couldn’t stop talking about how much they supported the troops. But then, after Biden’s speech, Sen. Dick Durbin came on to introduce the president.

Associated PressSen. Durbin, whom we find perturbin’.

Durbin has been the senior senator from Illinois since 1999, a period that includes Barack Obama’s entire brief tenure as junior senator, so it makes a certain amount of sense that he’d be chosen to do the honors. Whereas Obama’s Senate career amounted to little more than a publicity effort for his future presidential effort, Durbin has kept a relatively low profile while ascending to majority whip, the No. 2 position in the Senate Democratic leadership. Had Harry Reid lost re-election in 2010, Durbin might be minority leader today.

In 2005, as we noted at the time, Durbin took to the floor of the Senate and said this:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here [in the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba]–I almost hesitate to put them in the [Congressional] Record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

“On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . .. On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.”

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

The comparison is wildly over the top; using uncomfortable temperatures and loud music to extract intelligence from terrorists is in no way comparable to mass murder and torture of dissidents and other innocent people. As we wrote at the time: “We are fighting an enemy that murdered 3,000 innocent people on American soil 3½ years ago and would murder millions more if given the chance–and according to Dick Durbin, our soldiers are the Nazis.”

Having Durbin introduce the president at a support-the-troops-themed convention seems as odd as running John Kerry, who began his career slandering fellow veterans, as a “war hero.” Though to his credit, Durbin “offered a tearful apology” several days after his reductio ad Hitlerum, as the Washington Post noted. Kerry has yet to apologize, more than 40 years on.

Speaking of the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam, he delivered a forceful foreign-policy speech last night. It has been widely praised–well, maybe faintly praised; the accolades are along the lines of “the best speech Kerry has ever given.” He accused Romney of inconstancy:

He was against setting a date for withdrawal [from Afghanistan]. Then he said it was right. And then he left the impression that maybe it was wrong to leave this soon. He said it was tragic to leave Iraq. And then he said it was fine. He said we should have intervened in Libya sooner. Then he ran down a hallway to run away from the reporters who were asking questions. Then he said, the intervention was too aggressive. And then he said the world was a better place because the intervention succeeded. Talk about being for it, before you were against it.

Kerry delivered that last line in such a righteous tone that it seemed as if he didn’t understand it was a joke at his own expense. Another somewhat clever line rang false to us: “Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago.” With all due credit to President Obama for ordering the raid that killed bin Laden, that success does not diminish the pertinence of the “Are you better off . . .” question.

Reader Keith Cummiskey emailed us during Joe Biden’s speech, the experience of which he described as “listening to paint dry.” Our colleague Kim Strassel tweeted: “Biden’s job tonight is to tell us . . . about the Obama ‘he knows.’ And so far, it is really boring.” We had fun anyway, not least tallying the number of times the vice president used the word “literally”:

1. “. . . the American people literally stood on the brink of a new depression . . .”

2. “. . . families all over America sitting at their kitchen tables were literally making decisions for their family that were equally as consequential.”

3 and 4. “In the first days, literally the first days that we took office, General Motors and Chrysler were literally on the verge of liquidation.”

5. “When things–when things–when things hung in the balance–when things hung in the balance–I mean, literally hung in the balance–the president understood . . .”

6. Killing Osama bin Laden “was about–literally, it was about–it was about healing an unbearable wound, a nearly unbearable wound in America’s heart.”

7. “President Obama had an unyielding faith in the capacity and the capability of our special forces, literally the finest warriors in the history of the world.”

8. “Folks, Governor Romney believes it’s OK to raise taxes on middle classes by $2,000 in order to pay for another–literally another trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy.”

9. “Look–and it literally amazes me they don’t understand that.”

10. “My fellow Americans, we now–we now–and we now find ourselves at the hinge of history. And the direction we turn is not figuratively, is literally in your hands.”

Nos. 1, 4, 5, 6 and 10 are not literal but figurative (notwithstanding Biden’s protestation to the contrary in No. 10). Nos. 2 and 9 are literal, but there is no figurative way of understanding the words, so that it is superfluous. Nos. 3, 7 and 8 are defensible, though he’s using “literal” to say he’s not exaggerating rather than that he’s not speaking figuratively. No. 7 is unfortunate in that the stipulation “literally” suggests Biden expects his audience to harbor some doubt.

What makes this exercise even funnier is the fact that the word “literally” does not appear once–literally!–in the prepared text. All 10 “literallys” were extemporaneous. When Biden says “literally,” it seems, he means “uh.”

As to the Obama speech, we mostly agree, oddly enough, with the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky:

Let’s be blunt. Barack Obama gave a dull and pedestrian speech tonight, with nary an interesting thematic device, policy detail, or even one turn of phrase. The crowd sure didn’t see it my way. The delegates were near delirium; to what extent they were merely still feeding off the amassed energy of the previous two nights I can’t say.

And swing voters watching at home? They probably weren’t as bored as I was, but it seems inconceivable that they’d have been enraptured. This was the rhetorical equivalent, forgive the football metaphor, of running out the clock: Obama clearly thinks he’s ahead and just doesn’t need to make mistakes. But when football teams do that, it often turns out to be the biggest mistake of all, and they lose.

We’d amend that first paragraph slightly: There was, it seemed to us, a strong undercurrent of nostalgia. The crowd responded passionately when Obama reprised the hope-and-change rhetoric of 2008. He succeeded in firing up his base (though not literally), at least for one night. If he can keep up their enthusiasm for another two months, he has a shot at re-election.

But the base won’t be sufficient to give him a majority. The big question is whether the president can find a way to appeal to people who voted for him in 2008 hoping not for change but for competence.