The polls could always prove me wrong, but I don't think this convention is going to work for the Republicans, or for John McCain -- with one possible caveat, which I'll get to in a moment.
Random flashes, glimpsed while flipping through channels in a futile hunt for Jon Stewart and Comedy Central (the only journalists on the planet capable of doing an RNC justice) reveal:
- Sean Hannity, who is white, and Dick Morris (ditto) discussing why Sarah Palin will be a "big win" for McCain.
- Wolf Blitzer (white) and Anderson Cooper (white) explaining why so much is now riding on Sarah Palin's big acceptance speech (whenever the RNC gets around to scheduling it).
- Shots of old white people.
- Christine Todd Whitman (white, old) on PBS, talking about Shrub the way Democrats used to talk about President Carter, circa 1980 -- history will absolve him, etc.
- More shots of old white people.
- Still more shots of old white people, with a few extremely blonde, extremely slender white females (Paris Hilton?) mixed in.
- An airline pilot (white) with a crewcut saying something serious (9/11 related? I didn't stick around to hear.)
- Judy Woodward (white) declaring that tonight is service night at the RNC, and preparing to interview an even older old white veteran.
Now if the American electorate consisted entirely of the folks who show up at Howard Johnsons on the all-you-can-eat fried clam nights, or if Rupert Murdoch had already succeeded in his plan to for world domination (in other words, if the world were just a great big RNC convention) McCain could consider himself in the pipe, five by five. Mission Accomplished, so to speak.
As it is, though, McCain badly needs to deliver a persuasive sales message to the world outside the ranks of the party faithful (as Obama apparenlty succeeded in doing last week.) But here we are, two valuable prime-time nights have now passd, and so far the focus of the convention, as far as I can tell, has been, roughly: Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin, Palin -- and a small side order of Bush.
(I missed Lieberman's lyrical tribute to McCain's manly maverickiness, so somebody else will have to tell you whether Joe was able to break through the wall of Palin and give the media something else to talk about.)
It looks like the problem for the Republicans is precisely the one the Democrats usually face (and fail): They think that if they keep on talking about Palin, defending her and attacking her critics (which I guess means the Dark Lords of the Liberal Internets) that this will somehow make things better.
But it doesn't. It never does: It only feeds the beast and keeps the frenzy alive. And time spent defending Palin is time not spent attacking Barack Obama -- at a time when the McCain campaign desperately needs to figure out a way to kneecap him.
So the main message (repetitive and unfocused, but also relentless) going out to the couch potatoes back home is that there is Something Wrong About Sarah, and it involves teenage sex and pregnancy and rogue cops who, just on a lark, taser their 10-year-old stepson, and death threats and drunk driving and something called the Alaskan Independence Party, which is even nuttier than it sounds. It's all the stuff that respectable middle-class families don't like to think about and don't particularly want to hear about, because they know it could easily happen to them.
This is not at what Republican National Conventions are supposed to be about, which is the perpetual deification of Ronald Reagan and hearing Lee Greenwood sing "God Bless the USA" for the 348th time.
Now the wing nuts may be right, and the all-Sarah-all-the-time coverage may eventually trigger a popular backlash against her tormentors -- although I've never known it to happen in any of the campaigns I've ever watched or covered. But that doesn't change the fact that the Republicans have only a few precious hours left to present their case for John McCain and (even more urgently) against Barack Obama, and so far all they (and the media) have been doing with those hours is talking about Sarah Palin -- who, let's face it, isn't really all that important to how the race ultimately turns out.
But the biggest problem -- the elephant the McCain campaign simply can't squeeze around -- is that this is a Republican national convention, in a year in which the GOP brand is the political equivalent of a particularly nasty dose of the clap.
In that sense, every shot of the podium, every CNN cutaway to commercial break, every mention of the words "Republican" and "Party" (or "George" and "Bush,") is like a miniature Obama ad inserted into the proceedings. McCain can't hide, and he can't even run -- not for the next three days anyway. It makes it hard to see how the GOP can come out of the Twin Cities with any kind of polling bump at all.
Hard -- but not impossible. Which takes me back to my original caveat.
Say what you will about the Republican convention, the one thing you can never call it is off color (in either sense of the term.) It never ceases to amaze me just how white a crowd it is -- particularly after the GOP apparachiks have herded the few delegates of color up onto the stage for the cameras to record. It's like a reverse of those old "find Waldo" books -- except the trick here is to find someone who doesn't look like Waldo.
I grew up in a racially mixed (if still fairly segregated) society, and now live and work in a majority black city, so to me, all-white crowds looks strange -- as if God screwed up and put too much bleach into the laundry, or like that scene from Ghostbusters, the one where the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man explodes. It is not, to put it mildly, my idea of what America should look like. (And, of course, America looks less and less like it with every passing day.)
But, if a person like me looks at the multi-hued, multi-cultural crowd at a Democratic National Convention and sees the kind of America I would prefer to live in, I also realize there are people out there who look at the near lily white audience at a typical GOP convention and see the kind of America they want to live in.
Given that the Republican Party is, first and foremost, the party of white people (even in 2006, the year of the great Democratic congressional landslide, the GOP still managed to hold on to a majority of white votes) the question becomes: How many voters will tune into this year's RNC and be reminded that, as disgruntled as they might be with the party and its corrupt ways, those are still "their" people?
In other words: Just how tribal is American politics these days? Enough to give McCain and the Republicans a significant bump up in the polls?
Obviously I don't know, although I guess we'll find out soon enough. But McCain better hope there are plenty of them out there. Because from what I've seen so far, pure identity politics is about the only thing they've got going for them.