Obama's Ideological Convention

[Geee]

American Spectator:

The morning after last week's Republican Convention, Mitt Romney took off to Louisiana to view the damage caused by Hurricane Isaac. The move apparently caught Barack Obama by surprise. America's empath-in-chief had to scramble his schedule to follow Romney.

That small event capped a convention that generally succeeded in introducing the Romney-Ryan ticket as calm and competent people, a credible team capable of dealing with the nation's economic crisis. The first night of the convention was its best, a parade of Republican governors introducing business people from their states to refute Obama's "you didn't build that" line. Ryan's speech was galvanizing, Romney's passably good, and no one really stepped in the electoral kimchi, which is the underlying fear of every convention manager.

On the last night of the convention, television viewership rose to about 21 million households. As a result, the Republican ticket gained a bounce in the polls which, according to a Rasmussen poll released Sunday, looked to be in the 4-5 point range.

But post-convention poll bounces usually fade after a week or two. Tonight begins the Democrats' turn. Their goals are much different from the Republicans' and for the next three nights we'll see a parade of speakers who will try to blunt the Romney campaign's attacks and sell American voters on the idea, to counter Paul Ryan's memorable phrase, that the next four years of Obama will be better than the last four.

Which is a pretty tall order. There are three million more Americans out of work than there were four years ago, our national debt is more than $5 trillion higher, and the median family income has dropped by about $2,500. Obama's 2008 campaign promised a presidency that would be post-partisan, with a new political order in Washington that made compromise and big solutions to big problems the rule rather than the exception. But partisan conflict is higher than ever because Obama, Reid, and Pelosi's idea of compromise is Republican surrender.