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Convention(al) Wisdom

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Why do we still have political conventions?  There is a legal requirement that they actually sit down and have the formal vote on who their nominee will be, but that does not take days of speechifying and pageantry.  If another political party like the Greens or Libertarians tried to get their conventions on prime-time teevee night after night they’d be laughed at.  So why do the two parties get so much unfiltered airtime?

Because people watch it.

About 40M Americans watched Obama’s acceptance speech in 2008, and nearly 2/3 of all Americans watch at least some of the conventions.  That’s about the same as the Olympics, generally speaking.  People actually want to hear the candidates speak without filters, and they want the party to tell the world what it stands for.

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Gaps & Gaffs

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The long season that leads up to an election is more like a basketball game than any other sports analogy – you make your shots, stay with the plan, and stay focused in the last few seconds.  That is why campaigns are often defined by gaffs and mis-statements.

The recent comments by Rep. Todd Akin won’t be repeated here, but there are plenty of places where they have been refuted completely.  One of them comes from the Romney campaign, which even went as far as to call on Akin to quit his Senate race.  They don’t want this anywhere near their candidate.

Polls show that, like a good hoop game, the Presidential election is close.  But the gap among women is on the order of 15% and could become much worse.  How?  This takes us back to a number of mess-ups with women that defined the discussion last Spring and threatened to rub off on all Republicans – something they can’t afford.

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The Ryan Gamble

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The choice of a running mate can easily be over-stated.  Did anyone vote for Obama because they like Biden?  How about Dick Cheney?  Or, for that matter, Joe Lieberman?  The Veep doesn’t really change the ticket enough to make any real difference in the long run – but it can change the perception in the press and inject some energy into a campaign.  If that’s what was at stake here Mitt Romney, the candidate who could do nothing right, hit a home run or some other sports analogy right when he needed it.

Policy-wise, Paul Ryan brings some serious risk.  But his personality and articulate ability to speak out are the real deal.  Many liberals, including myself, have little choice but to respect him even as we disagree with him.  Nothing substantial has changed in this campaign but it looks like we have a race – and, more importantly, a chance to talk about the critical decisions that have to be made sooner rather than later.

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Swift Boating

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If there’s one irrevocable law in politics, it’s that whatever works will be done and re-done until it fails completely.  The stakes for a Presidential include the most powerful office in the world and total expenditures of $10B.  No one is going to run a campaign based on wild new ideas unless they absolutely have to.

So it should come as no surprise that 2012 is turning into a mirror of 2004.  The only thing that seems wrong with it is that the challenger’s side didn’t anticipate and devise an effective counter to this year’s equivalent of a “Swift Boating” – changing what should be your opponent’s greatest strength into their biggest liability.

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A New Beginning

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Barataria stands as a blog with a purpose.  Most of the time, that purpose is to tell the stories lost in the jargon of economics and finance that have come to define our recent lives far more than most people are comfortable with.

If we can’t grab what is happening around us and make it our own, how can we call ourselves a free and democratic society?  Barataria does what it can to offer a different way of looking at what is happening and relate it in story form, free of unexplained jargon.  Hopefully, this will help to make a more real and useful politics.

After a few months of big events and heavy articles, it’s time to summarize the Baratarian view on the big economic picture in one polemic and invite your comments.

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