Two extravaganzas lit up my LCD television in August. The first was the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. That one left me breathless, and the most pitiable person in the world right now must surely be the director of the 2012 Olympics in London. One e-mail correspondent had it right: “London should just stage a performance of Hamlet and send everyone off to a pub.”
The second spectacle was Obama night at Mile High Stadium. The crowd was probably the largest ever to witness a convention address – roughly, I think, as many people as were jammed into the Birdcage in Beijing. My impression was that it was de trop, that no words, no matter how well delivered, could measure up to the setting. Barak Obama is a terrific orator, maybe the best of our time, but the Mile High speech was not a mile high. The talking points were too well orchestrated – as they will be this week in Minneapolis. Maybe I’m getting too cynical, but words designed to produce hysteria among the convention faithful sound too contrived on television. It is the same old recipe: something for the teachers, something for the old folks, something for the poor, something for the uninsured, and let us not forget the women and minorities and the armed forces. Noble causes have a way of sounding prepackaged at a political convention. It’s show biz, just as Beijing was show biz, but Beijing was more honest because it didn’t pretend to be anything else.
Now, what are we to say about Governor Sarah Palin? First, she is an attractive, personal, feisty woman and will be an energetic campaigner. There is not much else to say, except that it reveals much about the state of the Republican party that it could find no better qualified running mate, no one better prepared to place within a heartbeat of the presidency. Senator McCain is 72 and has had health problems. President Sarah Palin?
Yet I am still undecided. Senator Obama has obvious leadership talent, but I wonder about his program. For instance, if you increase the number of people covered by health insurance by, say, 20 percent without increasing the supply of doctors and nurses, won’t the system break down? Or take the Senator’s promise to penalize companies that ship jobs overseas and reward those who hire U.S. workers. How, exactly, will that work? If you ship electronic products to China and hire 100 Chinese technicians to service those products, is that a no-no? If you decide to staff a call center in Bangalore instead of Bangor, will President Obama attack you? There is more than a whiff of protectionism in the air, and this is worrisome.
McCain and Obama both come with major shortcomings, and I suspect many people will hold their noses as they enter the voting booths in November. One possibility that should not be overlooked is to vote for the candidate of one party while backing the congressional slate of the other.
