On the Conventions, Part One: Bullshit and Balloons

So I spent the last two weeks watching the U.S political conventions and God, I'm sorry I did. Mostly, it's a force of habit for me. I've been a political junkie (and a U.S political junkie, in particular) since my early teens. I watch these things because I've conditioned myself, against any rational sense of reason, to believe that something interesting might happen. The same is true of the candidate's debates. 

Of course, that's utter nonsense. The conventions and debates are utterly meaningless. The last convention where anything interesting happened was the Republican convention in 1976, when there was a very real possibility that a sitting president could be denied the nomination for the first time in a century. The debates - which nobody that knows any better considers real debates - have accomplished exactly nothing since at least 1980. 

Prior to 1932, candidates didn't even attend the conventions. The nominee's acceptance speech didn't occur until days, and sometimes weeks, later. And the conventions actually did serious work, because there really was no indication of who the nominee would be. The 1920 Democratic convention took 104 ballots to decide their presidential nominee. Today it's shocking if you see a single roll call on television because the important matters have been decided months in advance. 

These aren't just infomercials, they're bad infomercials. Watching Ron Popeil painting hair on dudes had more educational value than anything the major parties have put on in my lifetime. 

And exactly whose idea was it to let the wives of the candidates address the convention?  If you think that what a wife has to say is in anyway important, you should probably lose your right to vote in the first fucking place. If it were up to me, you wouldn't know the names of a candidate's family, let alone what they think about anything. Moreover, once you use your family as surrogates for your campaign, you consciously open them up to personal attack. Bitching about that only demonstrates that you're a hypocritical monster and a pussy to boot. 

I learned exactly one thing from Ann Romney's speech to the GOP: that she looks fantastic for a woman of her vintage. If a 63 year-old woman with MS and breast cancer can look that good, I thought, how bad can MS and breast cancer really be?  And I slept through Michelle Obama's speech. 

There are really two things that stand out about modern conventions: just how easy it's become to lie without consequence and the incredible hypocrisy of virtually everyone, participant and spectator alike. 

Until fairly recently, political parties were actual coalitions, very often coalitions of competing interests.  That meant that speakers had to be careful about uttering blatant, demonstrable falsehoods because there was a very strong chance that someone in your own party would call you on it. The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago is one example, the delegates were about equally divided between pro and anti-war factions. The same was true of the San Francisco '64 Republican convention. A majority of the party supported LBJ's Civil Rights Act, but the nominee, Barry Goldwater, had voted against it in the Senate. 

Moreover, there was a functioning news media before 1996, when somebody had the horrible idea of inventing Fox News and MSNBC.  If you lied too openly, you could bet that reporters would challenge you on it. These days at least 50% of the cable news networks will directly subsidize those lies with extensive coverage. And since the broadcast networks have grown weary of losing money on this horseshit, cable news is the only game left in town. The "truth" is largely determined by which partisan cable outlet has the higher ratings. 

The other standout from the conventions is just how easily the parties can get away with avoiding policy at all costs. There was a time not al that long ago that conventions were a statement of policy and principle. Today those things are glossed over with superficial nonsense when they're addressed at all. 

The Republicans are especially guilty of this, although they learned to be out of hard experience. Even when sensible statesmen controlled the party, any policy proposal of theirs would be demagogued to death with chants that the GOP wanted to kill vulnerable women and children. Because of that it's hard to blame Mitt Romney for avoiding policy altogether, although it's harder to forgive Paul Ryan for lying so blatantly about practically everything he addressed. 



While they didn't openly lie that often, the Democrats - from President Obama down - were wildly misleading about their policy positions, especially their economic ones. The GOP is trafficking in outright fiscal fantasies and falsehoods that will never pass even a filibuster-proof Senate if they're ever seriously proposed at all. Having said that, the Democrats only get to the numbers they do by counting the same dollars two, three and four times. The Washington Post did a stellar job of pointing that out when they examined former president Bill Clinton's speech. 

I will say that Clinton was far and away the most entertaining thing about either convention. He is without a doubt the single greatest political performer of my lifetime, including Reagan. And he's even better now that he's unencumbered by anything approaching responsibility. Watching him work a stage isn't all that different than watching Mick Jagger. 



I've tried to avoid doing this so far, but the collective Clinton-GOP talking point of the late 90's "balanced budgets" should be debunked once and for all.  They never existed, and even if they did, it wasn't for the reasons that either cites. 

Republicans like to tell you that Newt Gingrich forced Clinton to "cut spending," which isn't true in any real way. In fact, the GOP Class of '94 only cut the rate of growth in program spending, and they didn't do it by all that much. Democrats like to lie about the effectiveness of Clinton's minimal tax increase in 1993. 

The fact is that the great economic story of the 90s was the Internet bubble, which then turned into a stock exchange bubble. While it lasted, it brought unparalleled revenue to Washington. But when it burst in 2000, those revenues disappeared. Even without the 2001-03 Bush tax cuts, the "surplus" would have disappeared, although the tax cuts - combined with Bush's insane levels of spending - made the budgetary situation infinitely worse. 

More importantly, there wasn't a "surplus" at all. Neither party wants to tell you that they engaged in Enron-style accounting. The late 90s budgets never counted the government's unfunded liabilities, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or interest on the existing debt. If a private business tried presenting accounting like that to stockholders, its officers would go to jail for fraud. The unfunded liabilities are so large that no one knows their exact cost, but everybody agrees that they are tens of trillions of dollars. 

Both parties are invested in perpetuating this fantasy. The Democrats want to do it because they want you to believe that they're fiscally responsible and they GOP is invested in it because the Ryan-Ryan plan is riddled with similar accounting trickery when it bothers dealing with numbers at all. But because both parties have agreed to lie about the surpluses, most Americans think that they actually existed. But they - like so many other fairy tales - only existed on paper. 

The problem with this fairy tale is that almost everything that you heard over the last two weeks from both parties was predicated on it, ignoring entirely that it was just a fairy tale. 

The conventions weren't an exercise in educating the public about anything as much as they were a competition about who the better storyteller was and who pulled off the better balloon-drop. THat's all. 

As I watched them over the last two weeks, I was constantly reminded of an almost prophetic  interview the late Frank Zappa gave to Spin in 1991. I recommend it to you all, if only because some people actually saw this coming more than two decades ago. Every American should read it ecause there's something there for everybody. 

And that brings me to the second part of this screed, celebrities in politics ....