One More thing on Palin

All this outrage over the Palin personal life by the right brings up another question from me. Why is that when John Edward’s life was dragged into the spotlight, no one said boo? Why is it when Spitzer’s personal life was dragged into the spotlight there was no outrage? When did politicians personal and family lives become irrelevant and off-limits? And on top of that, as far as I know the only people to really pick up on those stories were bloggers and US Weekly. I don’t think any of the major news networks or cable news were running stories regarding some of the now defunct rumors on her family. When politicians enter public office and enter the cesspool that is media attention, I’m pretty sure they should expect these things to come up every once in a while.

Convention Wrap Up

Now that they’re over, I’ll wrap up my thoughts on the many different aspects of the conventions.

Democrats

Way to play down the bigger-than-life, celebrity, elitist angle with the pillars and the stadium. On top of that, as someone e-mailed into CNN, way to not have any flags on the stage for the first day. Right or wrong, for the last 8 years you’ve been painted as sissy America-hating socialists, and visually I’m not sure you did much to re-assure the populous that you’re not. Generally, Americans tend to focus more on the visuals of what your saying and less on what your actually saying (If anyone needs proof, watch any action hero movie and try and follow the plot, and the try and figure out how it made $1,000,000,000 in a weekend.) So it doesn’t matter how many times you say you’re tough on terror and how much you love the country and how much you say you’re part of the “American dream,” the only thing middle America sees is the big stage and the pomposity of it all.

That said, to any reasonably intelligent person the speeches were great. The platform is great. I think Obama did a good job of setting his plan forward and equalizing McCain’s mantra of patriotism by saying “we all put country first.” He also did a good job of painting McCain as an honorable man (something that democrats have always been good at) but also forcibly and decidedly pointing his policies as wrong (something that democrats have not been good at, despite their best efforts.) Biden’s speech was unimpressive, as his call and response, “That’s not change, That’s more of the same” didn’t fit into the rhythm, nor did it really inspire me to do anything.