RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/the_republican_convention_ends_on_a_high_note__literally.html

The Democrats and Republicans approached their virus-era conventions in different ways. The Democrats opted for a dark, barren, and claustrophobic convention, bounded by the size of a computer monitor. The Republicans, however, chose a magnificent convention, one with a sense of spaciousness and color. After three dynamic days, it was hard to know if they could keep that momentum for the fourth day — but they did.

On Thursday, Republicans again used the vast and splendid Andrew Mellon auditorium as a backdrop for many of the speeches. And then, for Ivanka’s and the President’s addresses, the setting moved to the White House’s South Lawn. Behind the speakers was the beauty of the White House; behind the audience was the symbolism of the Washington monument. It was a wonderful culmination to a powerful convention conducted under challenging circumstances.

Before I even get to the substance of the speeches, compare how Biden and Trump appeared:

Trump’s setting was open, brilliant, and powerful. Biden’s looked like a high school student council election. It’s true that Trump benefitted from the symbolism of the White House, but the Democrats could easily have found an equally beautiful and powerfully symbolic site . . . if they’d wanted to. They didn’t even try, though, both because their goal was to make the point that America is a grim and dark place, and because Joe would have been overwhelmed if taken off that high school auditorium stage.

https://spectator.us/protesters-clearing-path-trump-kenosha-black-lives-matter/

‘This city is not going to stop burning itself down until they [the protesters] know that this officer has been fired.’ Thus spoke Whitney Cabal, a leader of the Kenosha chapter of Black Lives Matter, in response to the latest police shooting in Wisconsin. The use of the passive in that sentence is revealing.

As Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out (see ‘The knife went in’) it is common for people to assign motive to inanimate objects when they are loth to admit to being in the wrong. I suspect that the suitably named Ms Cabal knows that the state of Wisconsin did not auto-combust this week, as Krook does at the end of Bleak House. True, there was first a police shooting and arrest. But someone must then have put a match to the place. The American public, press and politicians know that. But any willingness to say it appears now to fall along strictly party-political lines.

It is one of the most striking things about the violence and unrest that have followed the killing of George Floyd. Not the violence, but the increasingly ostentatious desire of a portion of the population to pretend they do not see it. Some friends in New York tell me of gang robberies at restaurants in broad daylight, of lootings, shootings and boarded-up shops. ‘Peaceful demonstrations’, I am assured by other friends, who identify as ‘liberals’ though have mysteriously stayed away from the city of late.

The same story is rolling out across America. The left says that there are nightly protests for ‘social justice’. When these protests involve mass lootings, such as those in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, they are claimed (if acknowledged at all) to be the actions of a tiny fringe. Such dogged blindness has a clear political and cultural purpose. The political purpose is a desire to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump. The wider justification would appear to be a belief that ‘anti-racism’ is such an important omelette of a cause that a few broken eggs — or cities — is a price worth paying.

https://freebeacon.com/2020-election/a-trump-in-full/

President Trump accepted the Republican nomination Thursday night with his family flanking him on a dais constructed atop the South Lawn of the White House. His speech hit all the marks of Trump-ism. He said Joe Biden was inept and a vehicle for the socialist left, described how he’s fulfilled the MAGA agenda, and reasserted his opposition to political correctness. “We are not a nation of timid spirits,” he said. “We are a nation of fierce, proud, and independent patriots.”

The setting of the convention was another reminder of how unusual the Trump era has been. Donald Trump appeared out of nowhere when he came down the escalator in June 2015. Since that moment, he has been the indefatigable element of American (and world) politics. There is no getting around him. We have been living in a world in which Donald Trump defines media coverage of his candidacy and administration, reshapes the Republican party, and tugs the government of the United States fitfully and persistently in a national populist direction. Then the coronavirus struck, and the oddities that have defined American life for the last half decade metastasized. And so we were left with a sitting president delivering a convention address from the White House for the first time since 1940.

Donald Trump narrowly won the presidency four years ago because large swathes of America decided that the political class had failed them. He represented an anti-politics, a rejection of the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, immigration, and trade that had influenced public policy since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Trump defied the consensus, and he also flouted every single norm that has governed presidential decorum since at least World War II. As every pundit (including me) assailed his character and his methods, a plurality of Republican and then American voters gave him their assent.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-disruption-11598570719?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

When Donald Trump won the Presidency four years ago, half of America gnashed its teeth or cried and even supporters who cheered weren’t sure what to expect. Four years later our verdict is that he has been better on policy than we feared but worse on personal behavior than we hoped. Whether Americans re-elect him depends on how they assess that political balance sheet.

We realize that even considering the Trump Presidency in these conventional terms is offensive to some readers. Don’t we get that he’s a would-be authoritarian, a Russian plant, or at least so deeply flawed as a human being that he can’t be trusted with power? Yet our democracy survives, and the Constitution’s checks and balances are intact. Americans who heard him ask for a second term Thursday night were trying to make sense of what has been a raucous and disruptive Presidency.**

This week’s virtual GOP convention has spent hours educating voters about Trump Administration successes, and many are real, starting with the pre-Covid-19 economy that we examined this week. The political irony is that this success was due to Mr. Trump’s adoption of conventional GOP economics, not his trade or immigration agenda.

https://spectator.us/two-conventions-saying-dnc-rnc/

What’s the bottom line, so far?
 
Democrats think they will win by making the race a referendum on Donald Trump (more the person than the policies, though they hate both). They are effectively trying to run Joe Biden as a generic Democrat.
 
Republicans think the path to victory is to make the race a choice, Trump versus Biden, and to say Biden is unable or unwilling to stop the far-left in his party. Drawing a sharp contrast between the two parties was the whole point of Vice President Mike Pence’s speech to conclude the convention’s third night. For the most part, though, Republicans focused on the positive case for Trump, not the negative one for Biden. They featured lots of everyday Americans who said they had been helped by Trump’s policies, sometimes adding that he had reached out to them personally.
 
The Democrats made a very strong negative case, devoting almost their entire convention to attacks on Trump, leavened by their depiction of Joe Biden as a genuinely decent guy. Their policies got very little attention.
 
The parties did agree on one thing: the differences between them are stark. Both make a convincing case that this is the most consequential election in decades.