Conventions are stupid

Now that delegates (representing voters) nominate candidates and not party insiders, political conventions serve no political purpose. They have degenerated into hollow, simplistic carefully-choreographed media spectacles like the Oscars. Half of the convention airtime is just music, applause, and cheering anyway. At best, they're just an occasion for party self-medication, self-adoration, and rehashing what we already know. Does anyone think that a "great convention", 3 months before the actual election, will actually help their candidate win? If undecideds base their votes on what is said at the conventions, then our political process really needs rescue.

I know the delegates, staffers, and volunteers deserve a big party to feel good after all the hard work they invested into getting their candidate this far, but come on. Politics seems more about pomp and festival these days rather than the actually hard, boring, complex, frustrating work that it must be.

I can summarize 3 days of the DNC into half a page:

- Love and happiness
- Clintons, Kennedys, Obamas
- Starry-eyed media speaking in superlatives
- How awesome Denver and Colorado are
- How awesome and cool Barack Obama is, and there may be a fist-bump sighting
- Obama is a regular guy just like us and worships the Christian god
- Obama's father was from Kenya and was raised by a single mom
- Obama is a "transcendent" politician because he's black AND white, and will let you have abortions AND guns
- Obama, despite reporting $4M income on his last tax return, understands the struggles of ordinary working people and will help us achieve the American Dream
- Upstart politicians using the convention podium as a career springboard, as Obama did in 2004
- Maybe Iraq will be discussed, but in a 2005 mindset (when the war was a more useful talking point for them)
- Unity
- Hope
- Change
- Other abstract one-word cliches, without concrete plans (or honest desire) to actually realize them in a measurable way
- John McCain = George Bush
- John McCain doesn't know how many houses he owns
- Maybe a Hillary coup d'etat to become the nominee

And the RNC will be much worse.

Now they could have just mailed that statement out, and saved millions of dollars and labor hours. Maybe they could have invested those resources to tackle all the critical problems that McCain, Obama et al. promise to fix.