avocado8

Unconventional

I watched part of the Democratic National Convention last night at my husband's urging, despite my discomfort with watching political speeches delivered live. I'd much rather hear the highlights and analysis post-speech than the live speech, I think because I'm nervous for the speakers. I'm afraid that they'll say something horribly stupid or embarrassing, and that I will be embarrassed for them.

When I agreed to watch we switched over to TiVo, which actually made Edwards' speech easier to take, since we could pause it at any time and discuss some of the points. (Our own mid-speech analysis, as it were.) I was annoyed that Edwards felt it necessary to bring up Kerry's decisiveness and bravery during the Vietnam war AGAIN—and worse, that it was his ONLY example of Kerry's bravery and decisiveness. And hello? Why was there no mention of what Kerry's been doing in the Senate for the past zillion years he's been there? He's been serving his country in Washington, DC longer than he ever served in Vietnam. Let's hear about that, please.

On another critical note, I was a bit disappointed that Edwards didn't make a stronger connection between hard work and equal opportunity in his speech. He laid the groundwork by saying how hard he'd worked, and that he'd had extraordinary opportunities... but then he just told everyone that he and Kerry would work to get opportunities like he had for all Americans. Personally, I'd have liked a little more emphasis on personal responsibility, a "you do your part, we'll do ours" deal. As I said, he laid the groundwork for it with his own story, but he didn't follow through to the logical conclusion, IMHO.

Two things that made me particularly uncomfortable: Edwards' assertion that we would destroy (crush? anihilate? I can't remember the exact word he used) Al Qaeda, and that a Kerry administration would be, in some unspecified way, against outsourcing. For the former, I'm not sure why it made me uncomfortable; perhaps for the same reason Michael Moore's painting of all Saudis with the same "rich, priviledged, having-too-much-influence-and not-acting-in-American-interests" brush in his film Farenheight 9/11 made me uncomfortable. Edwards' mention of winning hearts and minds (or some such) rather than just going in with guns, offered in reference to Iraq, sat better with me.

Regarding outsourcing, I'm still not sure how I feel about it... except to say that we Americans seem awfully (and perhaps unreasonably) indignant that any other country—perhaps especially a "developing" country like India—could beat us at our own game. The answer, in my mind, is not to cry "foul!" like a baby, but to raise the bar, meet the challenge, [insert sports metaphor here]. When factory workers saw their jobs go to Taiwan and China and other countries, all of us smug white-collar smarties told them to suck it up and re-train. Now we're getting a taste of our own medicine, and we're the ones yelling "no fair!" If the Kerry-Edwards plan is to encourage a raising of skill levels, a pushing into new frontiers of science and technology, a turn towards analysis and integration services rather than easily farmed-out basic IT skills, then great. If railing against outsourcing is just another cry for protectionism, count me out. [I guess I do know how I feel about it, after all. :)]

On the positive side, Edwards really got the crowd—and me—when he talked about race and civil rights issues. His line [paraphrasing, here] 'not an African-American issue, not a Hispanic issue, not an Asian-American issue, but an AMERICAN ISSUE' was excellent. Talk about United We Stand. (I was impressed by the camerawork during that part of the speech, as well; the camera guys must have practiced panning the crowd, looking for the appropriate ethnic groups to highlight, ahead of time.)

I'm still trying to decide whether to watch Kerry's speech live tonight; if nothing's being recorded on TiVo, and I can pause at will, I think I might.

Somewhat appropos of the terrorism/Al Qaeda theme mentioned above, Barbara Ehrenreich has an op-ed piece in the New York Times today called The New Macho: Feminism (free registration required). Quote:

So here in one word is my new counterterrorism strategy for Kerry: feminism. Or, if that's too incendiary, try the phrase "human rights for women." I don't mean just a few opportunistic references to women, like those that accompanied the war on the Taliban and were quietly dropped by the Bush administration when that war was abandoned and Afghan women were locked back into their burkas. I'm talking about a sustained and serious effort.

So John and John: Announce plans to pour dollars into girls' education in places like Pakistan, where the high-end estimate for female literacy is 26 percent, and scholarships for women seeking higher education in nations that typically discourage it. (Secular education for the boys wouldn't hurt either.) Expand the grounds for asylum to all women fleeing gender totalitarianism, wherever it springs up. Reverse the Bush policies on global family planning, which condemn 78,000 women yearly to death in makeshift abortions. Lead the global battle against the traffic in women.

Now *there* are some specifics. I hope I hear some from Kerry tonight, too.