Dispatch #19

On today’s Polskieradio website, Professor Zbigniew Lewicki is quoted, “To wszystko jest na pokaz, te wszystkie konwencje, to jest jedna wielka szopka.” That is, “It’s all for show, the entire conventions, it’s one great puppet show.” Most of them, anyway, and this year, particularly, the Republican Convention.

In my earliest post to this blog, I stated that nothing to be said by either side in the process of this campaign was likely to make much of a difference on the outcome, that economic factors exclusively would determine who wins. If the economy were on the mend, Obama would win comparatively easily. If the economy were slipping or sliding into an echo recession, Romney would likely win. If the economy were stalled, Obama would still win, but so narrowly as to cripple his prospects for governing proactively in his second term. With the close of the Democratic Convention tonight, I have to qualify—the current word is “backpedal” from—my original claim regarding the irrelevance of partisan discourse in contemporary American political culture. On two counts.

The first has to do with an economic performance so lackluster, so non-descript as to defy obvious, common understanding. We seem to be milling around, not going anywhere. In their convention, the Republicans tried to characterize the current state of economic affairs as abysmal, not as abysmal as the Great Depression perhaps, but a continuing abysmal that does not bode well, that does not gain much by comparison to the Great Depression. A Great Recession then, one that we have not begun to recover from because of the failure of Obama and his policies. The Democrats, in their convention, have characterized the economy as having avoided collapse—a Second Great Depression—because of Obama’s policies. The bank bail-out, the auto industry bailout, and the stimulus preserved the economic system in its weakest moments. They present instead the image of an America on the road to recovery, “a long one,” but one on which we have “turned a corner.” So I have to concede that not only is there a “real” economy, with reasonably clear measures and indicators, there are also, at times, when those indicators aren’t moving, competing “fictive” economies derived from our fears and hopes about it. These hopes and fears can create a discourse about the economy that could affect the outcome of the election, though they may have little direct connection to the “real” economy.

The second count has to do with the speeches of Michelle Obama and former President Bill Clinton, which were authentic, intelligent, lively, beautifully delivered, and so far above the standard fare of political discourse, that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party cannot help but benefit, at least subtly and possibly immeasurably. (Puppets can't do this.) Barack Obama, a highly regarded rhetor himself—and, I think, overly confident about his powers of persuasion—could not match their efforts, but he will regain no little standing by being the husband of Michelle Obama and the father of her children, as well as by being the clear choice of a former president who currently enjoys the status of elder statesman-in-chief. All rational independent voters who watched the second day of the Democratic Convention now lean toward voting Democratic.