it's the emptiness that kills me. people really think that creating a mood is the thing, and that you create a mood by saying the same words over and over: hope hope hope! 'progress is possible!' touts the washpost. it's 'a moment of reckoning' cracks the nytimes, zeroing in on the synonym-for-synonym rewrite of 'rendezvous with destiny' or whatever. hillary just robotically repeated her phrases. well, you could say the same about al gore or john kerry. it's chickenshit, i tell you; it shows a person with no convictions, willing to take no chances.
the clinton approach to politics is this: freed by a complete lack of commitment to anything, you swamp your opponents by agreeing with them or going one better. so they spent the first two days trying to outprogressive bernie, and the last two days trying to outrepublican republicans: extreme continual patriotism, flag-waving, militarism. you wouldn't think that you could do both more or less simultaneously, but there it was. bernie's revolution got swallowed as though it had tumbled into a huge tub of goo; its corpse is now suspended therein, decomposing. and then they did the same to paul ryan or whatever. to put every move and utterance at the service of political strategy like that: it shows a total failure of human personality. there is nothing there at all.
perhaps the worst moment in dnc history was when john kerry tried to out-militarize bush in 2004. it was outrageous hypocrisy - i'm the peacenik who will kill you if it's polling well - and it was just an application of the clinton victory formula. they ran it with rare incompetence, however, selling their very souls for nothing at all.
also i hatehate the 'cult of personality' they always construct around the nominee, with the videos and the hyper-repetitive tributes; watching that shonda rhimes vid for hillary last night was like watching a jesus bio-pic, and after days of that - using the same damn words every time out - 'tough' 'fighter' 'childrenchildrenchildren,' the actual appearance of the candidate, her actual words, her actual history, was just a lukewarm, filthy bath of bathos. that is your savior? then why isn't she saying anything? america really needs to know the real hillary clinton, on a very personal, human level. that means we need to conceal her utterly under a make-up cake of focus-grouped cliches. imagine being the sort of person - like a tv pundit, e.g. - for whom those two things are the same, or for whom the difference is irrelevant. she needs to somehow simulate authenticity!
here was something so much better: for a number of reasons, not least because he didn't just recite the same phrases. this is easily the best thing i saw from the dnc, or the only thing that was anything.
i've got a feeling that he actually wrote that himself, perhaps the only person at the dnc brave enough to speak his own words.
