I'd like to direct your attention to an event the Buddhist Peace Fellowship is holding in conjunction with both national conventions. It begins with a dawn-to-dusk meditation vigil in Boston during the DNC, then joins the 28-day walk from Boston to New York, and then a meditation vigil during the RNC.
http://www.bpf.org/html/whats_now/conventions.html
This link has details about the event(s) and several statements about relating Buddhist principles to current politics and why they're doing this.
An excerpt from their handout:
Traditional Buddhist teachings consider the well-being of the generations to come, seeing the future of parents, children, and loved ones. How will our loved ones be impacted if we fail to take care of the present? This kind of care calls for transformation: personal, political, economic, social, and cultural. Transformation is difficult work. We are often afraid to exchange the familiar--even though it causes us suffering--for a future that is unknown. Our challenge is to step into the unknown and not fear change or discomfort. Our challenge is to understand that principled conflict is often the midwife of transformation.
With these principles in mind, we offer three areas of transformation to apply when choosing and working with political candidates, and when designing policies that will shape lives around the world:
- Transform greed into generosity.
- Transform hatred into love and compassion.
- Transform ignorance into clarity and attention.
I'm not affiliated with this group, but I definitely support what they're doing, and I encourage anyone who'll be at either convention to drop by and talk with these folks. The BPF is connected with the Engaged Buddhism movement, and is explicitly non-partisan, but it's safe to say that everyone there will be anti-war and definitely sympathetic to the Left if not the Democrats.