The Cult of Personality

Tonight, Comrade Obama will speak at the DNC and, if crowd reaction from the first two nights is any indication, the democrats will riot and burn Charlotte to the ground.  So, before this impending tragedy takes all the funny out of the Democratic convention, I've got a point to make about why I don't think the Republicans can win this election.

First of all, did you see the audiences for each convention?  The Republican convention looked like the state of Florida's AARP convention.  No wonder they all liked Paul Ryan so much.  He was ten years younger than anyone else there, they all wanted to eat him and steal his life force.

I don't even know what to say about the Democratic convention audience.  It's like they rounded up a bunch of people in Penn Station at 3AM on a Wednesday, but honestly that doesn't even begin to cover it.  I've seen (and heard) babies in the audience at the DNC.  Honestly, babies.  One was crying while some lady was talking about how Republicans want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, thereby allowing insurance companies to deny people with pre-existing conditions, including sick babies.  Seriously, that happened, right there on my TV.

Who brings a baby to a political convention?  And people wonder why I refuse to register as a Democrat.  Diversity aside, I give the advantage on audience to the Republicans in terms of which crowd I'd rather be standing in.  Old boring people are exactly who should be at a political convention.  If you're under 30, you should be outside chanting things and throwing stuff and getting arrested. And if you're under 18 months, you should be nowhere near anything like a convention, and you shouldn't be on my TV.

Having said that, in a voting contest between "boring old white people" and "everyone else", I'd still put my money everyone else.  I think.  Old white people do like to vote.  No, I'm sticking with everyone else.

Then there's the actual talking.  I'll give the Republicans this, their message was certainly more simple.  Barack Obama is destroying America, and we're going to save it with tax cuts, because tax cuts are magic.  That's three days of Republican bloviating summed up in 19 words. 

Instead of spending three days calling the Republicans stupid (which is probably the way I would have gone), Democrats have decided to fight fire with fire by spending three days talking about how Barack Obama is actually the most awesome person in the history of awesomeness.  During Bill Clinton's speech last night, I lost count of the number of jobs he said the President saved or created somewhere around eleventy billion. 

Now, on the surface, the Democrats may seem to be at a disadvantage, what with getting bogged down with all their "facts" and "numbers" and "things that actually happened".  But I think, in the long run, the whole "telling the truth" and "not just making shit up" strategy is going to pay off.

Most important, I think, is the tone.  If the Republicans are the cult of tax cuts (and they absolutely are), then the Democrats are the cult of personality.  They believe in Barack Obama.  The speakers all talked about it, the talking points all echoed it, the pundits all noticed it; they believe.  In contrast, you'd barely know if any of the Republican speakers other than his wife had ever met Mitt Romney.

The RNC was fueled by hate.  Hate for the President, hate for certain types of people they don't like, hate for government.  The DNC has been fueled by belief.  Believe in Barack Obama, belief in what he can do, believe in what good government can do.  I'm not making a value judgment on who's right here, just stating the facts.  And I'm not blaming the Republicans for going negative, they can do what they want.

What I'm saying is, I don't think they can win with negativity against all the positivity and optimism we've seen in Charlotte.  I don't think you can be as successful getting your base out to vote for hate as you can be getting your base out to vote for hope.  I just don't think it can be done.  I guess we'll see.

Words Don't Matter

I've only watched the Republican convention in bits and pieces.  The conventions aren't worth watching if you've been paying attention to the campaign before now.  They're just week-long infomercials for the party talking points.  What's that you say?  The Republicans think Barack Obama is a bad President?  And they think Mitt Romney would be less bad?  Stop the presses! 

I don't need to spend hours watching TV to find out that the people speaking at Mitt Romney's convention are mostly in favor of voting for Mitt Romney.  I wanted to watch Chris Christie, just to see if he was able to get through a 20 minute speech without taking a snack break, but I honestly forgot it was happening.

Having said that, the little bits of Republican convention I've seen have been really strange.  Tuesday night I watched my old buddy from the primary debates Rick Santorum run his mouth for a while.  I just couldn't resist.  My blog and I miss Rick so much.  I tuned into MSNBC literally about 4 seconds before Rick started, just in time to hear Rachel Maddow say "he's not telling the truth.  Let's listen".  Now, I'm sure Rachel was finishing a sentence that went something like "If Mr. Santorum says (insert stupid Republican talking point here) during this speech tonight, he's not telling the truth.  Let's listen", but it was still hilarious and a perfect introduction for the man who the second half of the 20th century forgot.

Anyway, Rick rambled and rambled about his god and all that.  He didn't mention Mitt Romney a whole lot, which seemed strange.  I wonder if they've told Rick that Mitt won.  Or maybe Rick won't believe it until his god tells him personally.  Then Rick said America holds out a loving hand to all of his god's children.  He forgot to add "except if you're gay, or black (or really any minority for that matter), or not super into jesus, or if you're a lady who doesn't understand that men are supposed to be in charge of your lady parts.  If you fall into one of those categories, well fuck you, but loving hands for everyone else".  They must have left that part off the teleprompter. 

Like I said before, I completely missed Chris Christie, but I'm given to believe that he didn't start a fight or eat anyone, so I guess he more or less nailed it.  I don't know why I'm so mean-spirited about Christie, well except for the fact that whenever I see him on TV he's belittling someone or yelling at a reporter.

Wednesday night was even stranger, and I honestly only watched a total of like 12 minutes.  I caught about half of John McCain's speech.  The Republcan party is supposed to be the fiscally responsible party, but Senator McCain's speech would have been shorter if he had given us a list of countries he doesn't want to invade.  Unless he thinks we're going to find buried treasure in Iran or Syria (which is funny, because that was essentially the Bush administration argument about oil in Iraq), we're going to need a way to pay for John McCain's ever-growing list of fun new wars.

Quick McCain sidenote:  Everyone on MSNBC's convention coverage panel after McCain's speech felt obligated to heap the praise on McCain for not playing ethnic politics with Barack Obama during the 2008 election.  First of all, I seem to remember some crazy lady from Alaska running around trying to paint then Senator Obama as "pallin' around with terrorists".  I'm pretty sure she was connected with the McCain campaign in some ancillary way.  More importantly, is the bar really that low now?  Is not stooping to the lowest possible level now all you have to do in politics to get praised as a great guy with tons of integrity?  Sigh.

Anyway, then I watched like three minutes of Condoleezza Rice.  First of all, with her and Herman Cain, the Republican party now has two black friends.  Two!  And I'm not even counting Michael Steele, who's more of a high school acquaintance that the Republican party is facebook friends with, but wouldn't actually go hang out with.

Secretary Rice talked about education and the importance of good schools and good teachers.  It sounded really good, but also highly suspect coming from a party that:
1) has spent the last two years busting teachers unions in every state they control.
2) has spent the last 32 years demonizing science, learning, knowledge, facts and the very idea of being educated.
3) has ruined textbooks for the whole nation by doing stupid things in Texas.
4) wants to cut the entire Department of Education.
And I realize that they think #4 will actually help, but the fact that they think parents and local school boards know more about education than, ya know, professional educators, just circles right back to #2.

I'm not really sure how Condoleezza Rice got stuck being the one who had to talk about education, but I guess when you're the Secretary of State you kind of have to know about everything. 

Then Paul Ryan started.  I thought he was supposed to be all energetic and exciting.  He looks like a muppet and I was still bored.  I spent the first three minutes thinking of new Romney/Ryan campaign slogans, like "Hey ladies, Mitt and Paul would like to have a word with you about your uterus." or "you might as well vote for us, because if you're planning to vote for the other guy, we're not even going to let you register".  Catchy, no?  Anyway, after three minutes I went back to watching Almost Famous on cinemax, and I had already missed the airplane scene.  Stupid Paul Ryan.

I'm not planning to watch Mitt Romney tonight.  It's going to be dull, and I already know what he's going to say.  Plus I hear he's going to try to tell us who Mitt Romney the person is and let us get to know him a little, and I really couldn't be less interested in that.  But mostly, I'm not watching because the words don't matter.  Conventions are about stagecraft.  It's four days (or, if you decide to have your convention in Florida during hurricane season, sometimes three days) of patriotic backdrops, silly songs, weird video packages and mindless cheering. 

I'm told the Republican party has a platform that they've agreed upon.  I'm also told Mitt Romney doesn't agree with some of it, but I'm told that doesn't really matter.  Other than the tax cuts (which I swear is the only thing Republicans really believe in) I haven't heard much about this so-called platform.  The actual Republican platform, the one about outlawing all abortion and telling poor people to go fuck themselves if they get sick and cutting taxes but never actually getting around to the whole cutting spending thing, that's sort of like Republican fight club.  They all know about it, but they're not going to talk about it.  It's like how Barack Obama is going to take away everybody's guns in his second term, but he's not saying it now, because he's all smooth and shit.

And this is why I'm not watching Mitt Romney, because the words don't matter.  It's all nonsense.  Mitt Romney isn't going to stand there tonight and tell me what he's going to do as President, I'm not sure he even knows yet.  He'll sit there and tell me about his family background or whatever, and he'll talk about all the terrible things Barack Obama has done in the alternate Republican universe, and he'll make uncomfortable jokes that uncomfortable delegates will laugh uncomfortably at, but he won't actually tell me anything.

I honestly don't know if the Democratic convention will be any more informative (I doubt it).  Sometimes I wonder why I bother paying attention.  I was watching Chris Matthews as I was finishing this up, and he played a clip of Paul Ryan from last night talking about "the strong protecting the weak" and "caring for the least among us".  Now those are some good talking points.  So what if his economic policies do the exact opposite of those things?  I mean, his mom thinks you should vote for him, and look how cute his kids are!

I Was Wrong

Even though I'm super smart and totally awesome, sometimes I'm still wrong. Around this time last year, I said the Washington Wizards would surprise everyone and get to the second round of the playoffs. As you may have heard, later that season, Gilbert Arenas brought a gun to work and the Wizards traded their entire team. They wound up with the first pick in the draft.

Similarly, last spring I picked the Seattle Mariners to win the AL west. I did a few paragraphs for every team, so I didn't expect to be right about everything, but man did I get that one wrong. I stopped watching after a while because I couldn't take it, but it's possible Seattle lost all 162 of their games last year. I think they may have also managed to go a whole season without scoring any runs. Swing and a miss for me (and the Mariners, many many times).

Why bring these things up now? I wanted to have some take on the midterm election results, but with the three cable networks hosting a combined 174 analysts for eight hours each, I really doubt there's an angle they missed. I can't imagine I have anything to say that wasn't shouted over 10 other people on cable TV at some point. So, I'm left searching for something that's specific to me, and that brings me to what I was most recently wrong about. Charlie Crist.

A little over two months ago, I boldly predicted that Charlie Crist would win the Florida Senate race convincingly, and his win would usher in a wave of successful independent candidates. I still stand behind the logic I used to draw that conclusion, which was basically this:
1) Polls consistently show people are angry with both parties.
2) Independent candidates can do well if they already have strong name recognition, which the current Governor of the state certainly does.
3) Crist honestly seemed like the best candidate.
4) I also thought the Democrat would drop out and endorse Crist at some point. Swing and a miss there too.

That was my logic, and I would have looked pretty good if my prediction had panned out. Instead, Crist lost by 20 points to tea party favorite and department store mannequin Marco Rubio. Whoops. I tried to figure out where I went wrong and came up with the following:

First of all, Crist was an awful candidate. I don't know what his deal really is, but it seems clear that Florida voters see him as a slimy politician who would do anything to win and has no loyalties other than to himself. I don't know how Florida voters think this makes him any different from every other politician, but one way or the other, they didn't vote for him.

Secondly, Marco Rubio turned out to be probably the most reasonable of all the tea people. To be fair, it didn't take much. Being the most reasonable tea person is like being the coolest kid at bible camp. Still, Senator Elect Rubio looked like a rocket scientist Tuesday night compared to the likes of Carl Paladino and Christine O'Donnell, and that was a pretty good reflection of how the whole campaign season looked.

Most importantly, I ignored the fact that this election was happening in Florida. The Florida that gave us George W. Bush because they couldn't figure out how to vote correctly. The Florida that sent Katherine Harris to the House of Representatives...twice. The Florida that has three sports teams based in Tampa Bay even though Tampa Bay isn't an actual city.

Obviously, Florida shouldn't be allowed to vote anymore. I honestly don't know what we're waiting for. More importantly, I'm never making a prediction for a Senate or House race again, because I'm from New York, and all the other states are crazy.

As for the rest of the midterm results, I have one thought for each party. Humble advice for the road forward.

Democrats
Try growing a collective spine. If it doesn't feel good after a few months, you can always go back to your natural state of cowardly compromise. But, just for a little while, why not try deciding on some principles and then not voting for anything that doesn't match up with those principles. The Republicans did that for two years and do you know what happened next? They mopped the floor with you.

This obviously starts with the President, who's been especially timid since Tuesday. I'm never happier with the President then when he's doing his "why are you people so stupid?" tone of voice while calmly explaining why he's right and everyone else is wrong. I want more of that. Republicans are going to call him arrogant anyway, he might as well just come out swinging.

Republicans
You have to do stuff. I know you don't want to, but you're going to have to. The Democrats still control the Senate and the White House. If you want a shot at winning those in 2012, you have to pass some legislation through the House that people like. Then, you can go to the voters and tell them how the big mean Democrats killed all your awesome legislation and if they just hand the rest of the government over to you, they can have their candy.

Also, you have to find a decent candidate for 2012, and I'll get to that next week.