Void of content on goals, slyly appealing to the baser elements of humanity with innuendos and lies (or as one might say, playing fast and loose with the facts and truth), and discrediting substance and value of a measured approach.

The only memorable lines I recall from this speech last week was that she felt for those with parents with children having special needs and that she’d be their voice in the White House. As a full-time parent of children that didn’t even require the special care of a child with trisomy 21, I would have to say that all children have special needs, and we have had enough of one education president.

Just as Obama was interrogated regarding the meeting his campaign had with the Canadian gov’t. contact re: NAFTA (to contradict what he was saying publically)?

Just as Obama was interrogated regarding his associations with convicted felon Tony Rezco and former terrorist Willam Ayers?

He is treated with kid gloves.

McCain should be interrogated about the VP choice and about all of his views, as does Obama. The “cautionary” approach is complete B.S.

I saw a TV interview( not press conference) with John McCain the other day where the interview was conducted almost as an interrogation re: his VP choice. Since Palin hasn’t been exposed to the national media, it seems reasonable to proceed with caution and to set some guidelines.

BTW, how soon into his candidacy did Obama do a full press conference?

FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK — Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has agreed to sit down with ABC’s Charles Gibson later this week for her first television interview since John McCain chose her as his running mate more than a week ago.

Too bad she won’t participate in interviews or debates.

YES!

To which Jim Treacher responded:

Hey, you know who else was a community organizer? Don Corleone.

P.S. Here’s a funny thing: If you Google “Jesus was a community organizer” “Pilate was a governor”, suddenly that moronic non sequitur is all over the place. Hundreds of results, and I’ll give you a cookie made of dreams if you can find one dated before Sept. 4. Purely spontaneous, right?

Way to get rid of the “He thinks he’s the Messiah” meme, geniuses.

To be fair, what speech, out of the two conventions, had real policy and governing content? Obama’s contained a laundry list of policy proposals targeted at Democratic interest groups and vague appeals to bipartisanship, which might be too little or too much depending on your point of view, and I haven’t read or seen McCain’s, but Biden’s speech wasn’t exactly Grand New Party in terms of policy ambition either.

The entire election is about personality and life story. Part of it is because of the society we live in, where voters trust character before policy (a development which I consider to be a good thing), and part of it is because of Barack Obama himself, whose entire candidacy was solely premised on his life story, up to and including his opposition to the War in Iraq. (To be fair, so has John McCain’s, to a large extent.) When Joe Biden was nominated more hay was made out of his supposed rough and tumble upbringing than his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

And it isn’t new. “I still believe in a place called Hope” isn’t exactly the Beveridge Report either, and I’m not blaming or even criticizing Bill Clinton. It’s just what you do to win these things called elections nowadays. I don’t see how the problem is limited to Sarah Palin or how that somehow the fact that she advances her compelling life story undercuts her claim to be qualified to govern when every other candidate does the same.

And she answers the claim that Palin’s religion is somehow a frightening thing:

I think you are badly misinformed about what religious faith actually entails. I am willing to bet my left leg that not a single recognizable politician of a major party believes in the “end times,” at least in the “Left Behind” sense. And even so, I don’t think believing in the “end times” entails what you think it does. Implying that because one is a Pentecostal — a denomination that covers over a hundred million people on every continent — one believes in “religious prophesies” that would stop one preventing a nuclear war in the Middle East shows a level of misinformation and, frankly, prejudice and paranoia that is hard to comprehend. Because this person is a Pentecostal, they might be an accomplice in nuclear war? Seriously? If McCain had chosen Joe Lieberman, would you be fretting on how he might condone nuclear war because it would somehow advance the interests of Israel — and, after all, he is a devout Jew, and who knows what their religious prophesies entail? Ahem.

I would say that people who believe they are doing God’s work, from the Civil Rights movement to Reaganite conservatives, haven’t been so bad for the US.

Despite all the heavy breathing about apocalyptical end-times “prophesies” animating US foreign policy, few point out that neoconservatism is the least religious strand of conservative thought. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are noted for many things, but the fervor of their Christian faith isn’t exactly one of them. The only part of US foreign policy that can legitimately be said to be inspired by Christian beliefs is the dramatic expansion of the development assistance and AIDS relief budget, and I don’t think that’s such a bad thing, do you?

“The tactic is the same: run on character, not policy. Portray your blue-collar persona as somehow more virtuous than your educated and nuanced opponent. Mock mercilessly. Fire up the base. Nothing new here, not in tactics, not in policies. It’s Bush all over again, but with a feminine charm. Tell me again why this was supposed to have been a good speech?”

She mocked mercilessly and fired up the base.

I think you miss the point of these conventions. Policy is for interviews and debates. Conventions are intended to draw votes.