Chris Stirewalt
It’s been hard to avoid the sense the Democratic National Convention to this point has largely been about the past.
That sense has mostly come from the grip that the Clinton family has held on the proceedings until Wednesday night, but much of the discussion here has been about past grievances.
John Kerry’s remarks Wednesday struck me as coming from someone who was having trouble getting over the old injuries.
For a guy who is a U.S. Senator, rich in his own right and married to an even richer woman, Kerry sounded like a victim when he was bleating about “swiftboating,” “McCain-Rove,” and the like. It was off-putting.
Some of the shots at Republicans — Joe Biden and Ted Strickland, especially — hit the mark. Tweaking the party in the White House without sounding like victims or haters.
But on a night that was supposed to be dedicated to the armed forces, I heard mostly about the failures of the Bush administration, some reaching back to his first term.
But Bush-hate — the Keith Olbermann kind — hasn’t won Democrats anything. If they head into this election looking to punish George Bush, they’ll be giving John McCain a big advantage.
Democrats ought to listen to what Evan Bayh told them — Bush will be out of office in five months. And right now, Iraq is stabilizing, gas prices are dropping, and George Bush has reached a point of lame duck irrelevancy in the minds of most Americans.
Here in Denver, the Democrats have assumed an air of fighting against grave injustice and wrongs. Hillary Clinton invoked Underground Railroad engineer Harriet Tubman’s advice for escaping slave owners in a context of beating Republicans in an election, for goodness sake.
Rehashing the old injuries Democrats feel they have suffered will be a turnoff for swing voters.
