From Kennedy to Clinton

From Bill Clinton's speech to the convention, a truly Kennedy-esque inversion:

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.

What a wonderful, succinct way of drawing the contrast between the demented Republican view of the world--in which we are forever serving up bluster and brinkmanship out of some abstract fear of "emboldening the enemy"--and the coolly pragmatic and principled view offered by Barack Obama. What an immense difference in maturity, pragmatism, temperament, optimism, and basic human decency there is between Clinton's speech and Giuliani's sneering diatribe against "liberals", against civil liberties, against imagined Democratic "elites" who, he fantasizes, spend their days looking down on their fellow countrymen and devising politically correct ways of saying the word "terrorist". One man is reasonable, says reasonable things, and is grounded in the empirical world; the other is completely unserious, says unserious things, and seems to be living in some kind of grotesque cartoon where upholding the Constitution comes in a distant third to eavesdropping on the American population carte blanche and unilaterally bombing the shit out of some distant country to show someone, somewhere, who is boss.

I mean--really. This has got to be the lowest, most ideologically bankrupt, most shameful moment in the history of the Republican Party. There are no ideas, only a Down Syndrome baby passed awkwardly from Palin to Palin. There is no acknowledgment of reality, only the bizarre and Orwellian spectacle of a ruling party calling for a "change" in Washington as if it hadn't had a stranglehold on power for the previous eight years. Stern promises that suspected terrorists will be tortured are met with whoops and energetic chants of "USA! USA!" Declarations that evil will be defeated are swallowed whole by an eager audience that is either unaware of or unconcerned by the fact that such statements contain virtually no information, that they are vapid, trivial appeals not to reason but to the raw emotions of nationalistic fervor.

That Republican convention hall is a crystal ball filled with dark, dark visions of a possible future that I hope with all of my being never comes to pass. And over the last few days, listening to the Clintons, Kerry, Gore, Obama--the decent ones, the right ones, the calm ones, the adults--I have never been prouder to be a Democrat.