Four Thoughts, Mid-Convention

• Graciousness is perhaps the greatest defense we have against approbation.  It erases past bad acts more cleanly than confession.
• We Democrats can not stand on pragmatism alone.  It’s not the necessity of our platform that will compel the undecided, but the moral appeal of it.  We can ignore the plight of the returning veteran, the uninsured child, the planet.  We know this because we are ignoring them now.  The argument can not be that we must do something about these wrongs, but that we should do something about them.  It’s time for those better angels of our nature to come out of their long, deep slumber and join in civic discourse once again.
• Very few people over forty can look cool when they dance.  If they are holding signs, wearing funny hats, or dressed in sloganeering t-shirts, the likelihood of coolness seems to drop even further. 
• John McCain is frighteningly willing to steal other people’s voices and turn them into puppets:  Paris Hilton, Jackson Brown, Hillary Clinton.  All people who have appeared in his campaign ads, all people who have repudiated his cooptation.  Watch this.  A man who will steal another’s right to speak for themselves is a dangerous man indeed, and perhaps the least fit man we can imagine to hold the office of the President.

Bedfellows

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scotti spent his afternoon calling people to ask them to vote for Hillary Clinton on the 13th.  The pundits say it was unnecessary; last time I looked at the polls, she was favored to take the state by twenty points.

I, on the other hand, have been a die-hard Obama fan since he first emerged on the national scene.  He talks to me like I’m an adult, and I rise to the occassion.  He says difficult things to me, and I am grateful. 

You’d think there would be arguments in the yellow farmhouse, but we are oddly able to each believe the other is completely misguided without feeling the need to bring it up. 

Of course, if one or the other of us were out rallying voters for McCain, it would be a different story.  Here is my favorite story about politics:

My parents had just eloped.  My mother was at Queen’s College in North Carolina, and engaged to someone else, when my father appeared out of the blue.  “You said to come back when I was ready to get married,” my father said from the payphone in the lobby of her dorm, “and so here I am.  Get packed and let’s go get married.”  Or something to that effect.  One hopes there was a little more romance to it, and that just gets left out of the telling for the sake of us kids.

In any event, my mother called my grandfather from the road to tell him the news, a little afraid of how he would react.

“Daddy, guess what?  I just married John Einstein!” she said.

“Well, that’s great, honey,” my grandfather replied.  “I always did like John.  He’s a good boy.”

“Now, Daddy, you know this is a mixed marriage, right?” my mother said, a little sheepishly.

My grandfather’s exact words are never reported when the story gets told, no doubt because he said some very ungrandfatherly things.  But there was some yelling, and some over-my-dead-bodying.  Finally, my mother was able to interupt with, “But, Daddy, you knew John wasn’t Jewish the whole time we were dating!”

“Jewish?” my grandfather said–and I believe this, because my mother won’t brook any lies about her father–”Who said antying about Jewish?  I thought you meant he was a goddamned Republican!”

So the little yellow house on Ridgeway Avenue can sleep peacefully behind warring Democrats, safe in the knowledge that once we finally have a nominee, we’ll both be standing behind the same person.  Everything will be fine, as long as neither one of us becomes a goddamned Republican.