DemCon, Night 1

I muted most of it while reading Peirce's Lectures on Pragmatism--a strategy I can heartily recommend.

Pelosi: Craptacular. Simply godawful. Possibly a Republican mole...(think about it--it would explain a lot...) Truly terrible, as usual. Will somebody please do something about this woman? She is just terrible beyond belief.

Kennedy: Jebus H. Christmas, you Democrats really are clueless, aren't you? We're talking about the fate of the free world here, and you spend like an hour on the Kennedy biopic. Now hear this: fawning over Ted Kennedy is not, I repeat NOT, the way to capture the hearts and minds of middle America. Sure, Kennedy has had a rough time of it, and I can understand the urge to get weepy about him and give him some highly public props... But all sorts of people do all sorts of good work in their lives and go through all sorts of hard times, and don't get big, glitzy congratulatory etc. etc. The thing to do here would have been to throttle back a bit. You don't put Ted Kennedy front-and-center when you are trying to sway the middle. Heck, I'm mostly a liberal, and I have what you'd call extremely mixed feelings about Senator Kennedy.

Though I hear he gave Bush some hell, which is good. But I'd muted it by then and gone back to reading.

Michelle O: Well, I may have an overly-sensitive saccharine-detector, but it was a little much for me. I've got no problem with genuine displays of emotion...and there's no denying that the story of M.O.'s dad was very, very moving. And the story about Barack asking her out, and the ice cream and everything was really great. But it was all so canned that I found myself looking away and wanting to mute it a good bit of the time. It seemed so clearly fine-tuned to combat the wingnut smears that it was a little embarrassing, I thought. I mean: family, faith, family, faith, hard work, see-we're-just-like-you, GOD BLESS AMERICA!. It'd have been really great, I think, if she'd throttled back a bit and been less automatic.

But, see, when you're up against the Republican noise machine, you can't leave much room for spontaneity. And that's one of the ways they get you--they make you self-conscious about anything you say or do that might be twisted back against you.

This speech was just a battle in a rhetorical war, so what I thought is pretty much irrelevant. If it worked to defuse the Republican smears, then it's a success. So keep your fingers crossed.