GOP Convention Day 2 Barely Crossed The Low Bar Set By Day 1

Well, day 2 of the GOP convention was definitely better than day 1, but that was about as low a bar to cross as possible. And it didn’t make it by much. The theme of the night was supposed to be “Make America Work Again”, but there was virtually nothing about any policies or programs that might actually accomplish that. There was, however, an unceasing attack on the evils Clinton that continually prompted chants of “lock her up” and ended with Ben Carson literally saying Hillary was in league with the devil. Trump, Jr. took to the stage and, once again, used words that had already been published elsewhere, but this time it was OK because the words were actually written by the speechwriter who wrote it for him. It’s pretty hard to believe that a professional speechwriter would have to recycle some his old quotes, but I guess that’s what we’ve come to.

Even the roll call of the states, a time-honored tradition, managed to be tarnished as a number of states reported their totals for Trump, Cruz, Rubio, and others only to have the secretary record all those votes for Trump due to an RNC interpretation of the primary rules of those states. Needless to say, it doesn’t quite give the roll call much meaning when whatever is reported by the state is not what is actually recorded. It was also totally unnecessary as everyone knew Trump had enough delegates to win so that it only annoyed the state delegations whose votes were overruled – a number of them actually walked out. Alaska had actually changed the rules at their state convention in order to make sure the votes to the other candidates were counted, but they were overruled by the RNC. In retaliation, the state asked that the delegation be polled which then held up proceedings by 30 or more minutes, making it difficult to keep the roster of speeches on schedule.

By the standards of day 1, I guess you could say that day 2 was a success. But it is pretty hard to see how any of the speeches made last night swayed any undecided voter – it was all just more red meat for the base.

I would just like to say how incredible it was to see Republicans associated with the Trump campaign spend the whole day denying that any part of Melania’s speech was plagiarized, saying it was just a few of the same words, or the same three word phrase appeared in “My Little Pony”, or Chris Christie’s classic statement that 93% of the speech was original which means it wasn’t plagiarism. There is no way that you can look at the two speeches and see that the train of thought and phrases in Melania’s speech follows Michelle’s speech almost exactly. You could have moved the sentences around and paraphrased here or there to make it conceivably original, but whoever wrote it could not even be bothered to do that. And to see people sit there and totally ignore that evidence just shows where the Republican party has gone. From climate change to gun violence, evidence is just totally ignored – they exist in what others have correctly labeled a “post-truth” world. And the basic thrust of the convention so far has simply been fear and hatred, showing the party is completely in a “post-policy” mode where they have absolutely no solutions to offer. It really is quite frightening to see that this is where a major party in the country has ended up.