Steyn's Convention Wrap-up

Mark Steyn has a good convention wrap-up.

'The embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world," declared Ted Kennedy in a moment of Revolutionary War nostalgia. Or he would have done, if he'd managed to stick to his text. But, in a strikingly erratic performance even by his standards, what actually emerged from the Senator's lips was: they "fired the shirt round the world".

That sums up better than anything what the Democratic Party's been trying to do this week for its Presidential candidate: fire the stuffed shirt round the world, put a rocket up a guy who seems weighed down by his own self-importance and project him into the stratosphere.
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Floundering for a cause with which to rally the citizenry, the Democrats eventually found one: themselves.

"Our greatness is also measured by our goodness," declared Howard Dean.

"I've seen it in the people I've met and their desire to take our country back for the American people. I saw it in a college student in Pennsylvania who sold her bicycle and sent us a cheque for $100 with a note that said, 'I sold my bicycle for democracy'."

Really? John F Kerry's bicycle cost $8,000. Why doesn't he sell his for democracy? If you throw in the designer French T-shirt buttock-hugging lemon-hued lycra shorts, you'd probably be up around an even 10 grand. When Howard Dean and John Kerry and John Edwards talk about "change", what they mean is you send these bazillionaire grandees the 100-dollar bill and they'll keep the change.
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There's a narcissism about the tone of this convention which cuts to the heart of the Democratic Party's problem: they don't believe in anything except their monopoly of goodness.
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That's the essence of this convention: a condescending media congratulating a condescending leadership for effectively communicating to a condescending governing class their plans for everyone else. John F Kerry should enjoy it while he can. Electorally speaking, he'll lose his shirt.