Unconventional Wisdom

I said about a month ago that the national party conventions were not worth my time to comment on.  I take it back.

As it turns out, the conventions did a lot to shape the presidential race as it now stands.  President Obama leads narrowly in national polls and by wider margins in the all-important swing states that will decide the election.  You can credit or blame it in part on the Republican convention,  which showed a bunch of surly white people as stiff as Ed Sullivan's neck (and far more dated than "Ed Sullivan Show" reruns on PBS) and Clint Eastwood's inexplicable performance with an imaginary President sitting in a chair, as if Obama could actually hear Clint's grievances.  (The chair himself couldn't hear him.)  Eastwood himself makes no apologies for his skit, laughing at Mitt Romney for thinking that the actor was going to make a serious political speech at his behest.

Meanwhile, at the Democratic convention, former President Bill Clinton laid out a series of facts to make the case for Obama better than Obama can make the case for himself, picking apart the Republican agenda piece by piece.  The spotlight on the Democratic convention also was a benefit to Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, whose convention speech jump-started her U.S. Senate campaign against blow-dried Republican Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts.  As of today, she's taken a lead in the polls, and she is given a good chance of taking that Senate seat in November.  The Republicans, meanwhile, are not given as good a chance of taking the Senate majority anymore.  In fact, the Democrats are well-favored to retain it.

So the conventions had an effect on the 2012 campaign after all.  But the presidential debated are still right around the corner. It's not over yet.

I still plan to watch the debates, and I hope that Obama doesn't blow it by letting his intelligence show too much (this isn't France!).  The first debate will be about domestic policy, though I doubt there'll be any discussion of my pet issue, public transit - not even high-speed rail, once championed publicly by President Obama but possibly to be used against him in the debate by Romney as an example of an attempt at "reckless government spending," and there will certainly not be a debate on light rail transit.  Because when I demand a focus on the issues I care about, no one hears me at all.

Not even the chair.