All show, no substance in Democrats' Convention

National political conventions are great. Good speeches, with memorable zingers. Lots of good music. Patriotism galore.

We saw all of that on television last week as the national Democratic Party gathered in Boston to officially nominate hometown hero John Kerry as their nominee to take on George W. Bush.

What we did not see, however, was much suspense. Nor did we see the Dems demonstrate that they were ready to take the reins of power by exhibiting foreign policy competence, an inspiring domestic policy agenda, or a plan to keep the economy growing at an increasingly rewarding pace.

No, they failed on all counts.

We can’t really criticize them for a lack of suspense. It hasn’t been since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 convention that there was any doubt about who’d be on a national ticket. That was when Reagan made an at-the-wire decision and selected George H.W. Bush to be his running mate while speculation was rampant in the Detroit convention hall that former President Gerald Ford might be his pick. Not even that, however, could top the suspense generated at the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago, when a young Sen. John F. Kennedy was locked in a vice presidential nomination battle with New York Gov. Averell Harriman and Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver. It was Kefauver who’d win and join Adlai Stevenson in a losing battle against Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

Kerry’s pick several weeks before the convention of Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina was a generally popular choice among conventioneers and Democrats nationwide. Of course, Edwards had embarrassingly sucked up to Kerry for weeks on end in an effort to push past others on the short list of possible running mates. And ever since he was named to the ticket, Edwards has gushed like a kid who’s just been given a new bike.

The Kerry campaign wanted to show the nation – the world – that their guy was ready to step into the role of commander-in-chief and immediately run military operations in Iraq and steer our foreign policy. In their words, they wanted to demonstrate that a President Kerry will make us “respected in the world.”

So who did they pick to speak on the convention’s opening night? Jimmy Carter.

You remember Carter, that great foreign policy president from Plains who in the late ’70s made America so very “respected in the world.” Couldn’t you hear the guffaws across the land as Carter on Monday night droned on and lectured Bush on foreign affairs and military matters?

And when it came time to highlight domestic policy icons, Kerry trotted out Ted Kennedy, Dennis Kucinich, and Al Sharpton, among others certainly more credible.

Kerry is quite upfront about Kennedy being his “mentor” for the past 20 years, ever since Kerry was first elected as Massachusetts’ junior senator in 1984. The mentoring is obvious, what with Kerry having racked up a two-decade voting record every bit as liberal as his senior partner’s.

When Kucinich took the stage, he put on his best Elmer Fudd performance and demonstrated the same policy beliefs he surely held in the late ’70s when as Cleveland mayor he drove the city into bankruptcy. If Kucinich played to one union group, he played to them all.

And what can we say about the Rev. Sharpton? If he showed us nothing, he showed us that he can’t tell time. He hijacked the convention stage, ignoring the handful of minutes he’d for some reason been given and blubbered on for just shy of a half-hour. That was Wednesday night. He appeared three days later in a more fitting role as comedic host of Saturday Night Live.

This is not to say that the Democratic National Convention only put on stage folks who certainly should’ve been left off. There were a few serious speakers, Virginia’s own Gov. Mark Warner among them. Populist Howard Dean revved up the crowd. Al Gore did, too. And nobody can take anything away from keynote speaker Barack Obama, who’s the Democrats’ U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois.

On the whole, though, Democrats failed to fly a new flag. Kerry’s speech offered only a few domestic policy specifics beyond his pledge to begin rolling back – that is, reinstating – some of Bush’s hard-won tax cuts while simultaneously investing hugely in education and health care and also cutting the federal deficit in half. Oh, yeah, he’s going to shore up Social Security, too. No word yet on just how the numbers jive on all that.

Kerry’s roughly 5-point post-convention bounce in the polls is the smallest recorded in anyone’s memory. That can’t bode well for a Democrat who has to do well in a few select states – Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Bush won two of the three (Florida and Ohio) in 2000.

If Republicans feared that the $65 million Democratic convention was going to do great things for the Kerry-Edwards ticket, they worried for no apparent reason. The polls showed a neck-and-neck race before the convention, and they show a neck-and-neck race still.

For that, we can thank Carter, Kennedy, Kucinich, and Sharpton. Oh, and Kerry, too.