Am I the only person who was utterly appalled by the DNC last week? Have we ever had a convention more militaristic? (by either party?) How has it come to be that the Democratic party must ensure, through virtually every speaker, that our nominee will "not hesitate" to use military force? Especially on the heals of the most ill-advised military incursion of my entire life time. Is it to be our goal that the country identify the Democrats as being more hawkish, by promising to actually increase the military budget significantly?
From all of my personal contacts I am told that we must do this to "win" the election. It's not that we really believe that the conquest of Iraq was a good idea merely mismanaged, but we must give that impression, to win over these fickle undecided voters. Why are we to believe that these undecided voters are fervent militarists who are looking for someone "stronger" to vote for? Isn't this the impression of our country that would be peddled by Faux News? It certainly doesn't reflect my understanding of the world around me and the nearly half of the electorate that doesn't choose to vote at all. Does this message resonate with them? Are they going to be drawn to our party by a hyper-patriotic glorified boy scout meeting?
We are now getting the news in the form of polling data, which many seem to refuse to accept, that our convention was actually geared towards people who already are dead set on voting for W again. Even though we played by all of the rules set out for us by the mainstream media and kept our convention as debate free, lifeless, sanitized, punctual, and militaristic, as any of the best Republican conventions, we are not seeing a ground swell of new support for Kerry.
My strong hunch is that the RNC this month will be a bloodletting. They will riddle Kerry with bullets as well as honoring our countries "best and brightest" every fifteen minutes. They will receive a bump and will retake the lead. The worry for me is that it will take the Kerry campaign as long as it took Dukakis, (up until the last two weeks of the campaign), to realize that maybe deciding you are a liberal isn't such a scarlet letter. Maybe actually having a different way of looking at our countries problems is not such a bad thing.
Sadly I think that the Kerry-Edwards campaign will engage in too much conventional wisdom to realize that having a "Plan for America" that promises to balance the budget (or reduce the deficit by half), while cutting taxes for 98% of us and increasing spending significantly on the military, education, and health care, will come out sounding to most voters like utter horseshit. (Do we really believe that the type of voter to be fooled by this is not already voting for W?)
My other fear is what if we do win, and the most incompetent, inept, ignorant, and ideological president we have ever had is removed? What are we to do if we do not have a triple purple heart winner with "a band of brothers" to nominate? How much will we have to promise to increase military spending then? How will we convey the immediacy and certainty of our military response?