It is some indication, I suppose, of the desperate political situation in America that a staunch opponent of Republocrats and Demublicans like myself actually watched significant portions of the convention last night. Why? Because I am desperately worried about what will happen if we do not defeat the current criminal war-mongers and theocrats in Washington, DC. And so I watched hoping for some reassurance that the Democrats won't screw it all up for me and my children, not to mention world history. From the first night, I have only two observations:
(1) Hilary Clinton is a dreadful speaker; she needs to be retired from public life ASAP, for the sake of humane values. She comes across as exactly the irrelevant, stiff rich girl, trying to affect human emotion, that she is--the female counterpart to John Kerry, who at least has the redeeming virtue, for political purposes, of having gone to war in Vietnam and been shot at.
(2) Bill Clinton--who, let us remember, had a domestic economic policy far to the right of Richard Nixon's--is such a good rhetorician that it embarrasses the entire field, except of course John Edwards. I never voted for Clinton, but I would vote for him this year, since for all his reactionary domestic policies, he was not a fascist theocrat, and his values at least stand in some relation to the values of the Enlightenment. One could have some confidence in Clinton as a candidate against the beady-eyed, tongue-tied Bush. Like Edwards, Clinton would wipe the floor with Bush in a public debate. Alas...
UPDATE: There is a decent, short account of why the Clinton speech was effective here: "He performed a brilliant rhetorical trick: he deployed the usual canards used against him to buttress Kerry. Rather than attack the wealthy as recipients of tax cuts, he attacked himself as a now-wealthy man. And then the coup de grace: he put himself and Bush in the same camp as draft-dodgers, in stark comparison to the patriotic Kerry!...[I]t was mighty effective. And the way in which he described the cost of the tax cut in terms of squandered attempts to improve homeland defense was another smart move. Use the Republican tax cut issue against the Republican security issue. Wedge against them for once. If the constitution didn't prevent it, the man would still be president. After last night's speech, you can see why."
UPDATE: I actually missed former President Jimmy Carter's speech last night, but the text is here, and it's not bad, pleasingly direct in many ways, given the usual dishonest pleasantries that ordinarily prevail on such occasions.
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