Slow Parade

A wise person once said, “Be careful what you wish for.” After pining away for more than a week for an unscripted convention, today I got my wish, but it was not what I wanted.

I have been struggling for hours to compose this blog entry, because I have been desperately searching for an interesting way to describe the first day of the convention that wasn’t. To say that it was boring, wouldn’t do it justice.

So after searching my iTunes library for musical inspiration, I found it in the song “Slow Parade” by the Broken Records of Edinburgh, Scotland.

As long as we understand the word slow to mean ‘really slow’, like so slow that it is literally painful to stand and watch, the image works.

I won’t bore you with the details, because there are too few to be boring. Like any good parade, the Republican parade has all appearances being visually appealing. The stage, the lighting, and the balloons high in the rafters of the Excel Energy Center hold promise. What happened inside the Convention Center was simply this: The convention was convened at 2:30p CDT, and almost as quickly as it was convened it was adjourned for 2 hours. It then reconvened for some procedural votes, 15 minutes of Laura Bush, Cindy McCain, and 4 Gulf Coast Governors speaking of Hurricane Gustav, and was then adjourned. There was nothing was done today that could not have been done better tomorrow.

What made it worse than boring was the mood of the people in the hall. The delegates who paid a LOT of money to come to the convention knew it was a wasted day and were more than disappointed. The members of the media who are utterly exhausted from last week, went through the motions, but they all knew that despite the fact they were going to work hard all day and night the only news of importance was happening outside of the hall. One policeman in the hall summed it up best for those working the event when he stopped and asked, “Why is this so boring?”

I don’t know anyone who has high hopes for tomorrow. We still don’t know what the schedule will be, and I’m not sure anyone is losing sleep over it. There is nothing to suggest the parade will be anything but slow tomorrow, even if there are more people marching.

The inconvenient truth is that the rate of speed and lack of energy is not merely due to the appearance of Hurricane Gustav. If the measure of the quality of a convention in this political age is based on charisma and star power (and not the ability to govern), the Republicans have no one to match Ted Kennedy, the Clintons, and Barack Obama. There is no one in the party who can ‘perform’ the way those four can. I’m not sure the Republicans could match the 85,000 who attended Obama’s acceptance speech. If politics were a rock concert the Republicans could not share the same bill as the Democrats.

This is a slow parade.

But there is the prospect that on Wednesday the Republicans may have a “moment” that will enable their parade to not just match, but surpass the parade we watched in Denver. This moment may make the entire parade worth watching. This moment is the vice-presidential acceptance speech of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

The level of interest in Sarah Palin and her speech is growing exponentially as we learn more and more about her and her family. In Denver, the Democrats and Obama met very high expectation (no small feat). On Wednesday we don’t know what to expect from Sarah Palin, but the interest in her is becoming so intense that I would not be surprised to see the ratings for the evening break all convention records. If on Wednesday night, with the whole nation watching, she rises to the occasion, it will indeed be a moment of beautiful imperfection. If she rises to the occasion, McCain’s acceptance speech on Thursday night will also command our attention. “Who is this man who asked Sarah Palin to be his running mate?

I’ve never seen anything like this. None of us have. Which is why this slow parade is all of a sudden worth watching. Unlike Denver, we don’t know what will happen on Wednesday, and the tractor beam of curiosity is beginning to capture America.

In a world of political rock stars and well-financed political machines, the most unlikely thing has emerged. One of “the rest of us” has a chance to go to Washington, DC. Something unscripted is occurring. Something human is occurring and there is no one who knows how this is going to play out.

Today I may have been bored, but as the day unfolded and as I learned more about Sarah Palin, I found myself beginning to edge to the end of my seat in anticipation of Wednesday.

It may be a slow parade, but there is the hope it could become a thing of beauty.