Speaking for myself, I think by now we've had plenty of happy talk at the Democratic National Convention. The American public is not in a good mood; it thinks the country is headed in the wrong direction; and it's fed up to HERE with dysfunctional and corrupt government. Americans probably can tolerate only so much uplift coming from any group of politicians.
No, convention speakers needn't bother to tell us that George Bush has been a godawful president. Everybody gets that who's been awake during any of the last 8 years.
What our friends at the DNC might want to explain, in these few days when they've got our attention, is why the current Republican philosophy of governance led to this mess. There are plenty of Americans who have never given it much thought – why a political party that is hostile to government inevitably undermines good government; why a party that seeks at every turn to privatize government can have no clear idea how to govern; why a party that turns instinctively to divisiveness cannot fail to injure a commonwealth; why a party that hands government over to the powerful to despoil can never be trusted to help the rest of us. They might even want to show the public how John McCain has taken part in the Republican train wreck during the last 8 years.
There are plenty of Americans, too, who don't really know much about John McCain's temperament – his fits of anger, his impulsiveness, his bellicosity, his mendacity. Some don't realize how profoundly ignorant and misinformed John McCain is about foreign affairs and about domestic issues. Many of the public may be only vaguely aware of how privileged a life John McCain has led, or how out of touch he is from ordinary Americans' experiences. A fair number of people "know" the myth the news media have peddled for years about John McCain, and little else.
You might want to remedy that by giving us less uplift and more actual straight talk about what the next 4 years would hold under Republican governance. Now would be a good time to do that.