By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire

People have been predicting the end of political conventions for decades now.  We haven’t had a contested one in quite a while. They’ve been boring and bloated affairs. Ratings have gone down, one election after another. 

People looked silly as those weighted balloons fell. I never understood it. Watching the Democrats and Republicans this year, though, made me realize that the problem hasn’t been the conventions at all. The problem has been us.

Putting aside the junk (did we need Bill Clinton?), the cringe-worthy television effects, and the greeting card sentimentality that their flacks insisted on using, the Democrats put on a worthwhile show.  Cuomo spoke well. Kerry spoke well. Kasich spoke well. Biden spoke well.  Sanders spoke well.  Powell spoke well.  (Why didn’t any of these guys run for president?)  Kamala spoke like the empty suit she is, but you get what you ask for. More importantly, except for Kamala, they all had something to say. Their words had weight and meaning.  

It was even good to hear from the Carters again.  Simply by being decent people, and sounding like it, Jimmy and Rosalyn made me feel ineffably sad.

It has been decades since the Democrats actually said anything of note.  I will lay off Carter because his ghost no longer haunts us.  The party moved beyond him many years back, for good or ill.  But Bill Clinton said and accomplished nothing for the eight years of his presidency, and Barack Obama said and accomplished little more.  The one’s much-vaunted third way was middle-of-the-road mush. 

The other’s hope and change was little more than identity politics, minus the ward heeling that made identity politics useful to begin with.  Neither of these Democratic presidents did much to reverse the strong rightward leaning slope of American politics in the post-Nixon era, and they actually did a fair amount to support it.  

Both let Wall Street rule the roost.  Both missed the boat on China (see above: letting Wall Street rule the roost — the prospect of selling those proverbial billion toothbrushes blinded them from seeing any else). Both missed the boat in the Middle East (see above: putting identity politics on a pedestal — of all the sorry people who were displaced in the wars that followed World War Two, only the Palestinians had to be continually promised that they could go back home — I’ve always wondered why the Sudeten Germans don’t have a lobby in Washington, DC, not to mention a couple of hundred million Pakistanis). 

Democrat after Democrat for thirty years, long years, stopped fighting for what the Democratic party had always cared about.  They stopped fighting for the poor to be treated fairly. They stopped fighting for the rich to pay their share.  They stopped fighting for an international system that promoted morality. They just went along with the times.  So yes.  Their conventions started getting dull.  Their speeches were exercises in vanity.  They had nothing to offer but some vague sense that they were better people than their Republican counterparts, because more of them had dark-colored skin and some of them were even gay.  They let this become their theme.

Then finally came the Hillary campaign: the most intellectually bankrupt Democratic campaign in decades. And it all came crashing down.   Her husband, ironically, used to moan about how he didn’t live in a time of crisis, so he couldn’t be great like his heroes were.  Turns out that he did live in a time of crisis; he just didn’t see it.

We’re paying for all that neglect now.  All the anger and all the rage of pure class warfare is back in style, but its home is now the Republican party, which has taken leave of its senses. It isn’t filtering that rage with the common sense of union strength; it isn’t purifying that anger with the morality of faith.  It’s just serving those things neat — maybe on the rocks.  The Republican convention was a doozy.  It was all a blur of hair extensions, sherbet selling, and screams.  It was the birth of a personality cult that needs to be strangled in the crib.

So, the Democrats talked like something was at stake this year, and even a few Republicans joined them.  It was heartening to see. It gave me hope for real change.  I wouldn’t even mind if Biden wins and institutes a government of national unity. We could use that, to get back on track.  Maybe we can afford politics again in another four years.

Michael Davidow is a lawyer in Nashua.  He is the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project.  His most recent one is The Book of Order. They are available on Amazon.

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