The Politics of Nothing

We've heard the sneering, desperate insults against community organizers who go into areas decimated by economic disaster and get people working.  But there has not been a single whisper of specifically how McCain/Palin will get the people back to work or how they'll get the economy moving again.  We've heard the derisive attacks against Barack Obama's experience, but not a word about healthcare, jobs, or energy independence beyond schilling "drill drill drill".  We heard ridicule, crude jokes, lies of grandure, assertions of imagined sexism anti-ruralism.  We saw them play the victim and cry crocodile tears, but everything we saw was further proof that Palin = Bush without the pedigree and McCain = Bush with a better one.

Sara Palin did not mention the economy one time in her speech.  Blame the media, reignite the culture wars, hit below the belt. Assert some kind of nascent sexism. Play the victim.  This convention, and Sara Palin's speech haven't been about anything.  John McCain and Sara Palin just don't get it.  This is more of the same, more George W. Bush and not a single specific solution in sight.  If you aren't insulted, you aren't paying attention.

The McCain campaign this week asserted that this will be a campaign of personalities, not issues.  How desperate.  How pathetic.  How insulting.  If you've lost every single issue, what more do you have to run on?
Sara Palin's string of nasty attacks and ludicrous assertions of experience, selling a plane on ebay and arguing that her experience running a small town, that she left miserably in debt, is somehow qualification to run the country.  This is her argument for preparedness!?  

What we have here is a desperate attempt by John McCain to rally his base, because going into labor day, he did not have their support.  In Governor Palin, he found his base: the global warming deniers, those who want to teach creation in school, those who want to control the decisions women make about their bodies.

The goal for Palin going forward is to have her go in to rural areas and "connect" with rural women.  The problem for Governor Palin is that the Republicans have no agenda, no plan, nothing to offer the American people, just the same old culture war attacks that leave the rich getting richer, the majority of Americans fighting to get by, and America's reputation in tatters.  America is sick of it.  Enough.

John McCain has offered nothing except a cynical ploy in Sara Palin to fire up the base, and in so doing he has both jettisoned all claims to independence, and proven he lacks the temperament and judgment for the highest office in the land. If John McCain doesn't offer something real and substantive, this convention will go down in history as an astonishing failure.  The first two days certainly have been.  

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