The Libertarians are blogging the convention for Reason Magazine with Tim Blair from the lib-right and Matt Welsh from the lib-left. Blair's posts are more interesting than Welsh's in general -- here's his (warning: unfriendly)
exploration of Kerry trade policy for instance from a right-libertarian's point of view, and here's his (warning: snide)
exchange with Kos .
Maybe Libertarians are just naturally snide; maybe it's a cog in the big wheel of undermining and exposing the absurdity of big government. And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of fun stuff being blogged here I haven't seen from the gang at TNR or TAPPED. But Matt Welsh has always been a favourite political / cultural writer of mine for his work on the Iraqi Sanctions and on the left's reaction to 911. He's a very talented guy, who sometimes really seems to have something genuine to say, which is why it's so frustrating to watch him descend straight into the sort of knee-jerk anti-Party More-Independent-than-Thou, celebrity hobnobbing, name-dropping cynicism he displays here. It's a beef of mine with a lot of outsider/ alternative/ independent journalists: no matter how smart they are, no matter how good and unique their policy work, put them in a political medium and they quickly become Russerts-in-training.
A lot of the stuff is just snotty. Welsh
makes fun of a group of senior citizen delegates for their knee-jerk negativism about Ralph Nader, and then one of them for misunderstanding the conversation he's trying to have wit them. I can't tell if he's being straight in his
"picture of Kerry enthusiasm" though the sentiment expressed by the delegate seems pretty genuine to me. In other posts, Welsh makes fun of the
protesters in the freedom cage and of
Deaniacs stupid enough to donate money to their failed candidate -- in the end you have to wonder if there's anyone out there who'd attend a Democratic Convention -- other than fellow world-weary columnists and cartoonists -- who's worth Welsh's consideration.
But it's almost worse when Welsh gets substantive. In this entry, a complaint about how politicians are too quick to call themselves courageous for being politicians, Welsh points out how disgusted he is by politics in general, asserting his Independence in prime Lord Saleton style before getting his hackles up because THK praises her husband too loftily. Welsh delivers this ultimatum:
And let Democrats know this -- Bill Clinton might have declared that the Era of Big Government is over, but the warped mentality from generations of confusing governance with courage, campaign contributions with patriotic sacrifice, and electoral victories with revolutionary wars, is alive and unwell.
Fine. Welsh doesn't like the rhetoric; it rankles his Libertarian soul I guess. But, clever as it might sound, it's not at all evident that because Ted Kennedy goes overboard on Boston Tea Party analogies that he or his party really have a deep engrained perspective problem. It's a Convention. It's a Convention for Democrats. And as Welsh acknowledges, there are a lot of people -- Welsh refers to them as "humans" -- who care deeply about politics and enjoy the rituals of hearing historical parallels and extolling of Kerry's "courage". If Welsh has a deeper point to make about the failures of conventions as more than just coronations -- if actually wants to make a real statement about identity party politics and its contrast to libertarianism -- then fine. But he's not doing that: he's just nitpicking, and sneering at those to whom the pageantry means something.
On foreign policy, Welsh complains in a series of posts that Dems haven't expressed a coherent plan other than not-Bushism. This could be a reasonable argument and Welsh is certainly talented enough to make it, but instead the whole exercise reeks of more complaints for the sake of complaining. For one thing, the Dems he quotes -- Gore and Carter from Night One (he seems to have dropped the topic since then) -- aren't running so I'm not sure why it matters that Gore hasn't given us "any sense of just whatever happened to the Al Gore who tried to convince Americans in 1998 that putting the military squeeze on Saddam Hussein was one of the world's most urgent priorities" - does Welsh really think Gore should be trying to explain his own policy developments in a speech at Kerry's Convention? What matters, you'd think, is what Kerry and Edwards and their advisors say, and, to that end, Welsh does go in search of one but is still, apparently, unhappy with the answers he gets, and so far neither he nor Blair have had anything to say about Edwards' speech (instead moving quickly on to making fun of Clark for wanting a prime time speaking slot). Essentially, Welsh complains that the Dems are being unserious about their vision of the world - and that it's all just Very Fake - yet at the same time he's complaining that Gore and Carter and presumably Clinton also don't snappily fit some clear-cut inviolable Alternative Vision or Twelve Step Plan into a combined hour minutes of delegate-riling-up. Sometimes, no matter how smart you are, you really can actually complain yourself into a corner.
Here's my beef: Matt Welsh is really bright, a valuable journalist and blogger who routinely explores a lot of topics others don't touch. I read him religiously. But put him at a political Convention and suddenly he's a tiresome, name-dropping dilettante making sure we all know he voted for Jerry Brown in the 1992 presidential election and that he's really just too cool to have even a modicum of respect for anything going on around him. Silly Libertarians: they might write for Reason, they might have Alternative Worldviews and big IQs prominently on display, but in the end they're mediawhores just like the big boys.