CONVENTIONAL WARFARE.(The Talk of the Town)

There's a case to be made that it hardly matters how eloquent or effective John Kerry was at the Democratic National Convention last week. What matters infinitely more is that George W. Bush is the worst President the country has endured since Richard Nixon, and even mediocrity would be an improvement. Indeed, if one regards the Bush Administration's sins of governance--its distortion of intelligence in a time of crisis, its grotesque indulgence of the rich at the expense of the rest, its arrogant dissolution of American prestige and influence abroad, its heedless squandering of the world's resources--as worse than the third-rate burglary and second-rate coverup of thirty years ago, then President Bush is in a league only with the likes of Harding, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan.

For the most part, however, the speakers at the Democratic National Convention refrained from making that case. In the lingo of the week, "Bush-bashing"--at least, for those speakers featured in the shamefully narrow sliver of prime time on offer from the networks--was forbidden. "Making the sale," selling Kerry to the electorate, was the goal of nearly every pronouncement from the stage. In the rehearsal rooms of Boston's Fleet Center, Party scriveners "scrubbed" speeches of any rhetoric that risked alienating those voters who remain, thirteen weeks from Election Day, undecided. The bookstores around town were well stocked with bilious volumes like "The Bush-Hater's Handbook," "The I Hate George W. Bush Reader," "The Lies of George W. Bush," but only hints of such outrage sneaked past the Party apparatchiks.

Kerry and his team had reasons for controlling the tone of the Convention and stifling any shrill indulgences. To condescend to Bush, to affect a collective sneer, would be a gift to the Republicans; and--a lesson learned from Conventions past--it is easier to decry divisiveness when you aren't displaying it. The event's language was designed to bolster Kerry and to criticize Bush only by way of invidious comparison. (Not that the comparisons and references were terribly subtle. No one needed an Enigma machine to figure out why Jimmy Carter was recalling his days aboard a nuclear submarine or why Bill Clinton was now cheerfully discussing the fact that he, just like a certain President and Vice-President, had chosen not to serve in Vietnam while a certain Democratic contender had volunteered.) The attempt to establish authenticity is a universal in politics--Yitzhak Rabin had it, Shimon Peres didn't; Eisenhower had it, Stevenson didn't--and it has long been a particular burden for Democrats, who, since 1968, have routinely been cast, by their opponents, as the party of white-wine-swilling weaklings.

Kerry's authenticity, the Democratic strategists have agreed, resides in the valor of his youth. And there was something undeniably effective in the way the Convention was militarized, with all those retired generals and comrades-in-arms on the stage to testify to his bravery under fire. Certainly it cast a harsh light on Bush--not only on the President's soft berth and spotty attendance in the National Guard but also on his flight-suit swagger, the calls to "bring 'em on." The greatest similarity between the first J.F.K. and the current one lies not in their Ivy privilege or clambake geography but, rather, in the fact that both built a Presidential campaign narrative from acts of Navy heroism. Still, the Convention's display of martial virtue was a little worrying, too: one wonders if future Democrats, in this age of a volunteer, professional Army, will be able to challenge a conservative Republican without the moral credential of three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star.