Watching the doings in Denver on CSpan, I probably felt the same mixed emotions others were feeling about that odd mixture of genuine political fervor and irritation with the vapid repetitions of worn, "patriotic" phrases. Michael Chabon, writing in the New York Review of Books, conveys the atmosphere of convention better than anything I've seen written about it. Two excerpts follow -- chosen because they capture that tiresome, slick lah-te-dah; important power shifts within the Democratic party (the speeches given by Hillary and then by Bill); and, hanging over the proceedings from start to finish, the desperate hope that we may really -- this time -- achieve some important changes. Chabon writes:
"No matter how slick or high-tech things got, there lingered always, over all the proceedings, an old-timey air of mock solemnity embodied in that act of hammering. Every time Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, banged the chair’s gavel, she did so with an unmistakable glint of delight in her eye as if at the chance to speak the old, lost tongue of politics in America: 'The fourth session of the 45th quadrennial National Convention of the Democratic Party will now come to order.'
"Quadrennial; I ate that stuff up. There was a daily mass recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone stood up—on the last night, Obama Night, tens of thousands stood up, and put their hands over their hearts, and said the magic word, indivisible. I was a little self-conscious about doing that, at first, but found that I still remembered the words perfectly, and it was like singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the seventh-inning stretch, an act of collective recollection of the past, of a time when people routinely stood up and sang together, stood up to recite pledges, credos, oaths, poems.
Then there were the hopes and expectations 84,000 people took with them into the vast, open Invesco field.
"Everyone seemed to agree, employing another term from the approved glossary of bromides, that his speech needed to be 'a home run.' Obama needed to 'hit it out of the park.' But that was not quite the honest truth. We needed Obama to hit it out of the park. That was what we had drafted him to do. He was our hottest prospect in a very long time. Everything we hoped for in the grandstands he would carry to that podium on his shoulders. And that was why I had come to Denver: to add my little featherweight of hope to his burden."
Former New York Times editor, Joseph Lelyfeld, writes a review in the same NYRB of the McCain-Palin gig in St. Paul that's the color of newsprint. That's not Lelyfeld's fault. The Republican convention with its police incidents and repressions outside, the shrill and showy Sarah Palin within, seemed to have a lot of sound but little warmth or color. McCain wasn't his old self but the new, humorless edition. Lelyveld concludes:
"Back in 2000, Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, described McCain as 'a conviction politician with no clear convictions.' It could be said again. Taken altogether, McCain offered not answers, not a program, but himself, the exemplary patriot. Jitters about a recurring crisis in the financial system had driven the Dow Jones average down nearly 345 points the day of his speech. The morning after, the unemployment rate was reported to have jumped to its highest level in five years, with 605,000 jobs having disappeared from the economy since the start of the year, posing the question of whether a combination of autobiography, promises to 'fight' on all fronts, mockery, and attack ads could possibly be a winning formula in an autumn that promises to be chilly. A betting man like John McCain, intending to do whatever it takes to win, might be attracted by the odds."
