....LMB: "El Convention"....

August 02, 2004

As they were first formulated in the US, political party conventions were a place for party delegates to come together, debate issues, hammer out a platform, and nominate their favorite candidate to be the party's presidential contender for the year. Near as I can figure, none of these happened at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

And it won't happen at the Republican Convention either.

Somewhere along the line, parties realized that candidates who are chosen early and supported early are more successful than ones who battle it out till the convention, and then only have from the convention's end till the election-time to win over the public. In other words, democracy gets in the way of winning, so the democracy's got to go.

Before I focus too much on the inside of the convention, let's cover the outside.

I have already said plenty about the protest pens, and I was very glad to see protesters use their common sense ("why the hell should we protest in that deathtrap?") instead of blindly doing what they were told. You can see lots of pictures of the protests here and here. I'm not sure how the Really Really Democratic Bazaar turned out, but it looks like it might have been a fun way to spread a little political knowledge, as opposed to your standard dull march/boring speakers/mass arrest thing. To tide you over till the RNC protests, we've got Democracy Uprising, a 258-mile march from Boston to Manhattan.

And in far-off Pakistan, an al-Qaeda "facilitator and operative" was captured, right at the height of the convention. If you read this article several weeks ago, about the Bush administration pressuring the Pakistani government to find a high-level al-Qaeda guy during the DNC, to rip the spotlight away from Kerry, you'd probably find this a bit suspicious... even more so when you read that the al-Qaeda guy was captured on July 25, yet his capture was not announced until July 29-- the day of Kerry's acceptance speech. Luckily for the Democrats, the media did not shortchange the convention in order to cover the terrorist.

Now to the inside.

Conventions these days simply introduce the characters who will be the three months' traffic of our electoral stage: John Kerry- "I'm a stern ex-military man who wants to make the country safe"; John Edwards- "I'm an earnest, boyish Southerner with passion and optimism"; Howard Dean- "I'm a the thick-necked firebrand"; Barack Obama- "I'm the really cool black guy"; Dennis Kucinich- "I'm a magical dancing elf"*. I'm sure come the Republican convention, we'll see: George W. Bush- "I'm a strong, natural leader, who is truly, utterly baffled on how anyone could possibly disagree with me";** and Dick Cheney- "Now witness the power of this fully operational battle station!"***

The media this year went a little too nuts covering bloggers. It seems the sad truth that reporters think that if it involves computers and they haven't heard of it, it must be cutting edge. Of the 15,000ish media people in attendence, 30 bloggers were granted access. This is such a small percentage that statistically speaking, there were no bloggers at the convention.

For my money, there were two blog stories worth mentioning. First, the union of the Pandagon Duo. For months now, the Pandagon blog has been written by a young guy from Dayton Ohio and a young guy from Santa Cruz California, who, until the convention, had never actually met in real life. That made me happy. You read these blogs long enough, you start to like the folks writing them, and you like it when good things happen to the authors.

The other big story was the final outing of pseudonymous blogger "Atrios". I really hope that this revelation was Duncan "Atrios" Black's choice; that would fucking suck if someone else spilled the beans, exposing him unwillingly to the world.

One other weird-ass, blog-related story. Tom Tomorrow posted a personal photo on his site of Michael Moore and Bill O'Reilly conversing/fighting/something. Then, Tomorrow discovered that internet hack Matt Drudge had posted the same photo on his own site, after flipping the image left-to-right and then photoshopping it a bit to make it look like a different picture. Just a quick glance at the two photos and you see that they're obviously the same. What the hell is up with Drudge? He couldn't just post Tom's picture and write in tiny letters below "photo courtesy Tom Tomorrow"?

Apart from Kerry's official introduction to the voters of America, there seemed to be only one significant event inside: the speech of Barack Obama. He already seems a lock for the Illinois Senate seat, and based on the popularity of his DNC speech, folks are already predicting great things for him, possibly even the presidency. As I have no psychic powers, I won't even try predicting the future like that.

I did take issue with Obama's "one America" speech. I have already written my feelings that the United States is so divided by race and class and religion and geography that I don't even know what all Americans could possibly have in common. If we experience this country in such different ways, what could it be that possibly holds us together?

Now there's just the Republican National Convention. I should hurry up and buy my plane tickets, so I can fly out there, protest, get beaten by cops and pre-emptively arrested. Sigh.

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*Why am I always making fun of Dennis Kucinich's appearance? After a bit of soul-searching, I think it's because I'm mean.

**I think the "baffled" bit will truly play a role. "I'm just a reg'lar guy who wants what's best for 'Murica. I just don't *heh* *heh*-- I mean, what's this other guy want?" It helps paint Bush as a man of the people, and paint Kerry's stances as incomprehensible (and therefore liberal and wrong) without saying a damn thing about them.

***You just can't go wrong with "Dick Cheney = evil" jokes