Beginning to Believe Again

For nostalgic Americans of a certain age, the political conventions were television’s original “reality shows” -- quadrennial opportunities to watch amateur actors in contrived situations. This year, more or less live from Boston, the Democrats continued that tradition, cobbling together a fascinating combination of “Star Search” and a modern morality play.

To be sure, everyone arrived reasonably content that the prolix John Kerry would get the party’s nomination, and Kerry exceeded expectations with an exceptionally well-crafted speech. But when it comes to star power, the real entertainment value has been in the talent auditions featuring Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

As for the morality part, what we are seeing is a party trying to revive the social conscience it tamped down throughout the greed festival that began with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and the timid triangulations that followed during the Bill Clinton presidency.

The declaration by Edwards, the vice presidential nominee, that it is “immoral” for a nation as rich as the United States to have 35 million people living in poverty must sound archaic to New Democrats schooled to boast that their hearts are not so liberal after all and certainly never bleed before the cost analysis is completed. Who knows what the undecideds -- nearly one voter in five, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg poll -- make of that kind of talk? The Democrats haven’t consistently spoken that way since Fritz Mondale lost 49 states by challenging Reagan on “compassion” and “the fairness issue” in 1984.

Parties everywhere do have to update their vocabularies and values. Yet on social issues, this Democratic convention seems retro in regard to message and messengers, though not as humorless as in days of old. Obama, son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, gave the most memorable keynote in years, and afterward joked that before his instant fame people often called him “Alabama.” During tumultuous applause for Obama’s speech, the television camera caught Hillary Clinton looking away at one point and looking somber at another. Mrs. Clinton applauded in the right spots and is too smart a politician not to treat a potential rival with respect. But it would be naive not to think that Mrs. Clinton, potentially the first female president, was not assessing the formidable debut of a man touted as a contender to be the first black president.

Even so, fans of both Mrs. Clinton, an iconic figure to Democratic women, and Obama, the party’s first rock star since Bill Clinton’s pre-Monica days as “Elvis,” had to be worried by Edwards’ smooth speech, up-from-the-cotton-mill biography and aggressively telegenic family. If Kerry wins the presidency, his vice president will become a betting favorite to succeed him.

Amid the fun of the futures competition, there are vibes from Boston that this battered party is beginning to believe, somewhat to its own surprise, that the future is now. Kerry is lanky and lantern-jawed, but in the right light he’s also Lincolnesque. And there’s no question that he’s lucky, having been well born and well educated and having had a good war in Vietnam. Indeed, in respect to political luck, he may turn out to be more like George H.W. Bush than George W. Bush. Like Bush pere, Kerry has film footage of himself in a combat zone. The current President Bush, by contrast, still can’t prove he went to all the required meetings of his gold-plated Air National Guard units.

What, then, of the Kerry campaign’s promise to be subtle in its criticism of Bush? Whatever they promised, the Democrats, including Kerry, used their TV time to underscore growing public suspicions that Bush, miscast as commander in chief, has needlessly given the country a very bad war that’s going to get worse. Tuesday evening’s parade of generals and admirals capped later by “old soldier’s” endorsement from John M. Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was impressive. When Kerry and his Navy shipmates marched before the cameras Thursday night, it was another subtle reminder that in the three years since 9/11, Bush has done nothing to improve the nation’s crippled intelligence system and has also managed to throw the Army into turmoil over its strength and mission.

The two ruling questions for any television show, of course, are whether anyone is watching and, if so, whether they are paying attention. This was written before we knew whether Kerry’s speech drew more than the 18 million viewers who tuned in on the first night for Bill Clinton’s speech. On the second question, it’s sobering to look at the one in five voters classified as “persuadable” in the aforementioned Annenberg poll. Of this group that has not made up its mind, only 17% said they were paying close attention to the campaign. We’ll have to wait until after the Republicans’ own little reality show to know how many tuned in and how many tuned out.