Opinion: Democrats Take Their Turn With Gaffes And Negative Press At Convention
Proving that there is no such thing as escaping criticism from the “other side of the aisle”, the Democrats are taking their turn at being scrutinized for every word they say and chastised for many of those words spoken in Charlotte, North Carolina – just as they scrutinized and chastised the words spoken by the Republicans in Tampa, Florida last week.
Commonly referred to as “what goes around, comes around’, the Republicans are finding plenty to take shots at as the Democrats conduct their week in the ‘often dubious’ political spotlight called “the Convention”.
The Democratic Party’s week started off with the media jumping on the fact that protesters wasted no time taking to Charlotte’s streets to protest. The first protest to hit the streets – as well as the police and the press – was a group of American veterans who were protesting that a soldier was incarcerated for allegedly leaking info regarding the WikiLeaks’ website. That story is so old, many had probably forgotten about it – but not the handful of veterans who started to demonstrate. Before they were finished, scores of Occupy protesters had joined them and sat on the street to block traffic – including busses carrying delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
The immediate comparison was that the protest was bigger and more disruptive than any displayed last week in Tampa. That was the first negative story for the Republicans to jump on.
The next major happening involved misspeaks or, at least, “misleading speaks” from several speakers on Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention. After three speakers – the high-profiled San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel who used to be President Barack Obama’s White House Chief of Staff – claimed that there are 4.5 million more jobs under Obama, the skeptical listeners started “fact checking” and found that their facts are less than honorable.
The truth is that Obama only had the opportunity to gain 4.5 million jobs because he started out his term as president by losing millions of jobs first. Shifty? Yes, very shifty indeed. It’s like claiming you lost 20 pounds after you quickly gained 17 pounds just before starting the diet. Overall, you lost 3 pounds from start to finish. The same is the way logical people are looking at the jobs data that Castro, Patrick, and Emanuel talked about. Yes, 4.5 million jobs were gained, but only 300,000 jobs were increased in total during the Obama presidency due to the horrendous number of jobs quickly lost before January 2010 – the first year of his presidency.
And then there was the headline all about the Democrats dropping “God” from their platform. In addition, they dropped the former part of the platform which referred to Jerusalem being the capital of Israel. Sen. Dick Durbin was true to form by trying to evade the issue by yelling at Bret Baier on MSNBC on Tuesday night, but by Wednesday night the DNC caved in to the widespread and just criticism – ignoring Durbin – and put “God” back in the platform where He belongs.
But even the amendment to put “God” and Israel back in the platform was seen as nothing more than a joke. The voice vote on the floor obviously had more “no” responses than “yea” responses – each of the many times the vote was taken. Yet, it was laughingly concluded that the “yea” votes had won and “God” was reinserted into the Democratic platform as a resounding “boo” filled the Convention hall.
The best part of all this for the Republicans, of course, is that the week isn’t over yet. Stay tuned.
About Scott Paulson
Scott Paulson writes political commentary for Examiner.com and teaches English at a community college in the Chicago area. The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CBS Local.
