There's just no way around it. The Republican Convention is poorly designed compared to the Democratic Convention and conveys an effect is one of exhaustion and confusion. John McCain put Rick Davis in charge of the convention because Davis was doing such a poor job managing McCain's day-to-day campaign. But Davis did a poor job with the Convention as well. The whole convention atmosphere portrays age in a particularly unappealing way. David Kurtz of TPM notes that the delegates at the Republican Convention in Denver are older on average than the Democratic delegates in Denver. Make that considerably older. I'm 54 but I'm pretty sure that I would have been considered a young man among the Republicans. I think there was actually some "blue hair" in the crowd. But it's not just the age of the delegates. The aging feeling was enhanced by the fact that the Republicans featured elderly speakers like Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman on Tuesday night. The pale blue background used for the speakers didn't help either. A little brighter than eggshell blue, the background reminded me most of a Carolina blue for University of North Carolina sports teams As a University of North Carolina Ph.D. and Tar Heel fan, I normally think of Carolina blue as a great color. But in this setting, it looked so weak and tired that it reminded me of a nursing home environment. Strength in exhaustion--not such a great theme. The sense of aging and impending death was elevated to a painful level by the Republican use of flags in the background. Every once in a while a lone American flag would ripple in the background as the speaker was making a "serious" point. But the isolation of the flag in back of the speaker was disconcerting and reminded me more of a funeral than anything else.
Who knows, maybe the Republicans wanted to create a nursing home and funeral effect as a way to appeal to senior citizens like my mother.
It that's the case, they should have gone all the way and made "Taps" the theme song for the GOP convention. Maybe the late Johnny Cash would have agreed to sing it.
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