| | |  Editorials | August 2008 
That's a Negative
 The Boston Globe
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| | Mainstream media coverage of the Democratic National Convention did not give much, if any airtime to former Republican Representative Jim Leach's address on Monday. (Associated Press) | | |
Denver - The best way to watch a political convention is on C-Span. That way Americans can make their own judgments unfiltered, without being told what to think by the nattering nabobs of TV commentary. The latest "narrative" making its way around the Democratic convention here is that the Obama campaign hasn't learned the lesson of John Kerry's 2004 convention, in which the nominee failed to directly attack President Bush. CNN commentator Soledad O'Brien even asked late Monday night whether Michelle Obama's introductory speech shouldn't have been tougher on the Republicans.
Of course, if the early days of the convention had presented a more negative tone, the talking heads would be complaining that the Democrats can only say what they are against, not what they are for.
Had the commentators not been so busy filling airspace and paid closer attention to what was happening on the podium, they might have had a different take. On Monday a speech by former Representative Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican, ably set the framework for his own party's failings, besides delivering a bipartisan endorsement of Barack Obama. His address wasn't electrifying TV, but it was a more articulate critique of the Republicans - and from a former loyalist, too - than many Democrats have mustered.
More in sorrow than in anger, Leach described how the Republican Party has abandoned its core principles. "The party that once emphasized individual rights has gravitated in recent years toward regulating values," he said. "The party of military responsibility has taken us into a war with a country that did not attack us."
The litany went on: The party that championed arms control had undermined international treaties from the nuclear test ban to global warming. The party that put the "conservative" into conservation had become antienvironmentalist. And "the party historically anchored in fiscal restraint has nearly doubled the national debt, squandering our precious resources in an undisciplined and unprecedented effort to finance a war with tax cuts."
He didn't have to add that the party of Lincoln had jettisoned its historic commitment to civil rights with a cynical strategy to win the white Southern vote.
In a way, the power of Leach's criticism was precisely in its understatement. There may be more scathing critiques of the Republicans and John McCain to come - for example, when Obama's running mate, Senator Joe Biden, speaks to the convention tonight. But there is unlikely to be anything more devastatingly true. |
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