It is fun – pep rally, campaign central, grip-and-grab fest, party, etc.

If that ever happens, I’ll be a Democrat. Until then…

“Still in one sense I’ll give you this: the Democrats have always, always defined themselves mostly by collecting a vast collection of various small interests and gluing them together in a sometimes-awkward coalition. The Republicans have usually taken strong stances on a handful of principles, and stuck to those come hell or high water. That does seem the hard kernel of a difference between ‘em.”

That pinpoints exactly what is wrong about the Democrats and the Left generally, and what is right about the Republicans and the Right. I’m Independent, but at least the Republicans have some semblance of a philosophy, contradictory as it is.

Eventually you stumble back into the daylight wondering if your liver will ever recover, where you parked your car, and if you actually signed up for all those grassroots activities you fear you did (they should not have sign-up lists in the hospitality suites).

Then its back to work like you were a normal person. Or something.

You’ll get it, though many people won’t.

Unless the race has been close and the convention determines who the candidate will actually be for that party, I see these conventions as little more than an annoyance and a circus side show. It’s all fluff and no substance. (And I hate fluff and no substance.)

But you actually listen to the speeches and determine which candidate you will vote for, based on their speeches and their “ideas”?

That’s really interesting.

It would never occur to me to do that. It never occurred to me that other people do that. I knew that there were changes in the poll numbers after these things, but I could never figure out why (for people who follow politics and government). I don’t base my choice on what they say or how well written or delivered their speeches. The speeches are valuable to me only as a method of determining how much of a liar they are (or aren’t) by comparing what they say they want to do to what they’ve done in the past. I vote based on their record and nothing else. If the disconnect is huge then you know the candidate is devoid of character. Nothing but their record is an accurate indicator of what they WILL do.

Tarring either party with the segregationist past is just not appropriate. You know, Bull Connor’s dead. Let him be dead.

Since I’m sticking up for the Republicans though now let me stick up for Democrats: historically their reputation as the Dove party’s also not really right. Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt were not pussies. John F. Kennedy hated communists his whole life and gave us an even bigger military buildup than Ronald Reagan did. And for all his reputation for being a wimp, Jimmy Carter actually threatened to use nuclear weapons if the Soviets tried to expand further than Afghanistan, making him so far as I know the only President to ever openly make such a threat to the Soviets. (Reagan’s “the bombs begin dropping in 5 minutes” joke doesn’t count.) The Scoop Jackson Democrats were no pushovers either.

Still in one sense I’ll give you this: the Democrats have always, always defined themselves mostly by collecting a vast collection of various small interests and gluing them together in a sometimes-awkward coalition. The Republicans have usually taken strong stances on a handful of principles, and stuck to those come hell or high water. That does seem the hard kernel of a difference between ‘em.