Just Another Democratic Party

The TV networks hardly carried any coverage of the Democratic National Convention this past week. I didn't watch any of it. I did hear snippets of the speeches on NPR the following mornings, and glanced through the articles in the newspaper the following afternoons.

I don't blame the networks for not bothering, because this wasn't really a party convention. It was a party. I'm not that old (no, really, I'm not) but I can remember a time when things actually happened at these events. Like in 1980, when there were the negotiations between Ford and Reagan over the former president being the vice presidential candidate, and Ted Kennedy's challenge of President Carter for the Democrats' nomination.

I vaguely recall that the state-by-state roll call of votes used to have some drama to it, because the outcome wasn't already pre-determined. This was especially true of vice-presidential nominations, which might have to go to a second or third vote as deals were made and votes switched or candidates dropped out. Not a very little-"d" democratic way to select a vice president, but at least it's better than the current system where the choice is made by the nominees for president, from a list culled by their staff. (Hell, G.W. Bush even managed to pull Dick Cheney out of right field - someone most voters had never even heard of, and even the delegates had never even considered - and the party dutifully nominated him.)

There used to be fights over the party platform, whether it would reflect the right or left wing of the party, try to go for centrist and opportunist voters, etc. Some of the agenda for the party, including not just the president (if elected) but their leadership in Congress, would be determined.

But, no, we already knew who the presidential nominee would be. That had been decided by media coverage of the primaries. ("No, it's not going to be Dean; we've decided to start calling Kerry the 'front-runner'.") Everyone already knew who Kerry's choice for vice-president was, leaving the delegates to rubber-stamp Edwards. We even knew who all the speakers would be, so there were no surprises like Reagan's remarks after losing to Ford in 1976. If there was a platform voted on, I didn't see a word about it. Even the speeches were all screened by the nominee's staff.

Which is probably why I found myself (to my surprise) most enjoying the sound bite I heard on the radio of Al Sharpton and the quotes of him I saw in the paper. To be blunt, I generally consider Sharpton to be a buffoon at his best, and he can come across as a sensational and divisive racist at his worst. I was glad to have someone speaking for the black community sticking in the race, but watching his campaign for president this past year has reminded me how much I miss Jesse Jackson. But he was the only convention speaker I heard who actually inspired me with what he had to say. Among all the "mainstream" rhetoric laced with military overtones, nationalist themes, and empty slogans, Sharpton talked with conviction and enthusiasm about how the Democratic party stands (or stood) in contrast to the white puritan patriarchy of the Republican party.

One article I read in the paper talked about the contrast between Sharpton and Barack Obama, casting the preacher as "the past" and the Senator-apparent as "the future". Maybe Obama does represent the future of race in American politics and that could be a good thing, but I'd have to argue that Sharpton still represents "the present". This is still the nation of racism, injustice, and a personally invasive government that Sharpton describes. The news media made more of the fact that his speech went over his allotted time and deviated from his script, than of what he actually said, but at least by breaking the rules of the convention he got some of his message across. And gave me something to bother writing about regarding the convention.