After skipping day 1 of the RNC to watch Hurricane Gustav, thankfully, miss New Orleans, the RNC’s first two days became one.

Notes about the RNC: The first thing that I noticed was the simplicity of the stage, especially when it is compared to the flash and glamour of the DNC’s stage. The stage of the RNC is really minimalist and frankly kind of ugly. This is of course either stupid or brilliant. It either feeds their armature at govt image or feeds the image they want to create of the Dems as elitist. My guess is the second.

The script is not really but kind of surprising. McCain hates the culture wars. That is why the Dems in the Senate like him. McCain has always been lukewarm about the issue of abortion and frankly doesn’t like talking about it. He isn’t a social conservative but he has no problem voting that to expand his base. Palin is a culture warrior. Since adding her to the ticket we are now back in the culture wars.

Abortion, the gays, religion, blah blah blah let’s fight…

With this comes the tactics of Bush and Rove that McCain back in 2000 despised. They will attack Obama’s patriotism and every Democrat’s patriotism…a la ‘country first’. Then they will attack the media for being biased. Now the media is biased in a sense. Fox News is biased, MSNBC is in part biased, and various people on CNN (Glen Beck and Lou Dobbs) are biased. But Wolf Blitzer, Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric? Give me a break.

John McCain says the coverage of Palin is sexist and biased. Yes the biased people have taken sides. But McCain claims the non-biased people are now biased. This is crap. They are vetting Palin because that is what reporters do. They did it to Obama…a la Rev Wright…and Palin gets no special treatment.

I leave you with Joe Klein of Time Magazine’s words or McCain’s attacks:

September 3, 2008 2:04

Angry Amateurs

Posted by Joe Klein

The story of the day out here in Minneapolis is the McCain campaign’s war against the press. This has been building for some time. Those of us who have criticized the candidate–and especially those of us who enjoyed good relations with McCain in the past–have been subject to off-the-record browbeating and attempted bullying all year. But things have gotten much worse in recent days: there was McCain’s rude, bizarre interview with Time Magazine last week. Yesterday, McCain refused to an interview with Larry King, for God’s sake, because Campbell Brown had been caught in the commission of journalism on CNN the night before, asking McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds what decisions Sarah Palin had made as commander-in-chief of the Alaska national guard. (There was an answer that the unprepared Bounds didn’t have: she had deployed them to fight fires.)

So what’s going on here? Two things. McCain is just plain angry at us. By the evidence presented in the utterly revealing Time interview, he’s ballistic. This is a politician who needs to see himself as the man on the white horse, boldly traversing a muddy field…any intimations that he’s gotten muddied in the process, or has decided to throw mud, are intolerable.

The second thing is more insidious: Steve Schmidt has decided, for tactical reasons, to slime the press. He wants the public to believe that there is an unfair–sexist (you gotta love it)–personal assault going on against Palin and her family. This is a smokescreen, intended to divert attention from the very real and responsible vetting that is taking place in the media–about the substance of Palin’s record as mayor and governor. Sure, there are a few outliers–and the tabloid press–who have fixed on baby stories. That was inevitable….the flip side of the personal stories that the McCain team thought would work to their advantage–Palin’s moose-hunting and wolf-shooting, and her admirable decision to have a Down Syndrome baby. And yes, when we all fix on the same story, whether it’s a hurricane or a little-known politician, a zoo ensues. But the media coverage of the Palin story has been well within the bounds of responsibility. Schmidt is trying to make it seem otherwise, a desperate tactic.

There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is “a task from God.” The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.

Why must we be forced to watch a horse race? When you think about what this term implies you realize how off base our news coverage is. We frankly should not even care about polls. News stations should not even report polls. Why do news stations report polls? Do the polls actually have any bearing on how we vote?

A poll tells us nothing about Obama or McCain. I have watched hours of political news over the summer and learned nothing important. I know some many irrelevant things now. I know the trend of polls in Ohio, the names of the campaign managers, and the internal predictions of each act on the polls. But I still haven’t learned one damn specific detail about how either of these guys is going to do anything they say they will.

I must take that back. Last week I read an op-ed by Obama’s economic adviser in the Wall Street Journal. So I actually know what the effect of Obama’s tax policy would be on me. But this information was not repeated once on network news.

It is day two of the Democratic convention and it has been a bust. It was a bizarre mix of the inability to read Teleprompters, electronic feeds breaking down, and misguided speeches promising warm and fuzzy notions of sugar plum and fairies dancing in my head.

Government affects our lives. But unless the political parties explain to us the effect of their policies on us we have nothing else to vote on except personality, patriotism, and sadly race.

What is worse than this unspecific bull crap emanating from the convention is the media coverage. If the Democrats can’t tell us what effect they will have on our lives it is up to the media to tell us. That is their job. They are supposed to investigate for those of us who do not have time. They are our shortcut, our heuristic, our insight into the sprawling beast we call government.

Watching the convention has been like watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics. The news does little more than point the cameras at famous people and talk lucidly about grudges between people. MSNBC, which has been the lightning rod for criticism this year, isn’t even covering the convention. They only televise a few of the speeches – otherwise it’s just a bunch of talking heads raging at each other focusing on highfalutin issues that tell use nothing about what the candidates intend on doing. Though I am sure MSNBC would argue that they aim for a more educated and decided audience. Both Fox and CNN should be commended for at least showing more speeches but again they do little to explain what this means for us. Frankly Fox probably does this best, although in a very biased way.

The Democrats have not even had the chance to go on message because the media has only been covering the disappointment of the Clintons, the effect of the Clintons, the anger of the Clintons. The Clintons aren’t running for president. The policy difference between Obama and McCain should be what drives former Clinton supporters’ decisions of who to vote for. But if they are never exposed to coverage of policy differences they are left up the creek without a paddle. So is the falling of cable news a slave to profit.

I hope Clinton’s speech last night will shut up the media. The election is far too important for us to be wasting time on personal feuds. The media has a job to do and they need to stop reporting on high school style psychodrama and start telling us what effect an Obama or a McCain presidency will actually have on our lives. I, like most Americans, would like to vote on the issues and so far the convention has made it clear that the Democrats have no intentions of telling us what effect they would have on us so we must turn to the press. The media owes it to this country to forget the horse race and do their damn job.