I didn’t see the Edwards speech on TV, so I’m not entitled to have an opinion about it. Worse, I had to follow along in the transcript in order to parse the few sound waves that managed to drag themselves up to the 7th floor Valhalla where the bloggers sit in judgment. Nevertheless, I hereby judge him absolutely, and in four categories:

1. Content. I like the Two Americas theme and the recognition that race matters in this country. With these, Edwards uttered truths we all know but that need to be said flat out instead of studiously ignored…as with Kerry’s focus on the middle class. And I appreciated the few policy details Edwards served up; at this point, I am duck-billed by the platitudes.

2. Role. Edwards role was, it seems, to help the Party step into its asbestos underwear, including laying the Negativity Trap for the Republicans. Since the entire campaign is focused on the Undecided — come on, people, what more do you need to know?? —I wonder if the Democrats really can win without going negative. I dunno; I’m just a nosebleeding blogger. I thought he and the Convention overall have done a good job neutralizing the Democrats-are-girlie-men meme.

3. Performance. Eh. He’s not a fiery orator that yokes your ankles to a chariot of rhetoric and drags you around the arena three times. He’s an intimate speaker, and you can only achieve intimacy in a 7-story sports stadium by being a sophisticated phony. So, I sort of don’t care. But I do care if he can reach those Undecideds in whose hands my children’s fate rests. And I don’t understand those folks at all. What, are they in a coma? Are they too thoughtful? Perfectionists? Slightly retarded? Will someone please explain it to me?

4. Swim suit. Oh yeah. A perfect face in which you can read nothing. No clothing can do that face justice and makeup can only detract from it. Every night before I drift to sleep, his is the face I see. It’s a tragedy what being VP will do to that punim.

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John Edwards – The forgotten Osmond Brother – knows how to build applause by waiting it out. And he knows how to accept applause while looking embarrassed at it.

He opens with sentences that serve the purpose of pumping in the key phrases: volunteers, respect others, valor, what he’s made of. It’s how you make the character argument.

Trying to set the terms of the rest of the campaign, reject negativity. Great if it works. Doubt it.

Trying to beat the Big Lawyer rap.

And into the Two Americas, a narrative central to populism that we’ve forgotten. Of course, it requires Americans to vote for the sake of others – the way it ought to be, but necessarily a tougher sell than “Tax breaks just return your money to you.”

“What’s the first thing that goes? Your dreams.” Not much applause, but I thought it was affecting.

Some specifics about tuition tax breaks. Excellent! I’ve been hungry for a few damn details.

“Moral responsibility” for eliminating poverty. Yes! We need to have this discussion elevated to the moral plane. And he goes after minimum wage. I wish he’d said how much working fulltime for minimum wage amounts to – around $11,000 a year. “Not in our America.” Damn right.

He is setting the table. Now it’s bringing race into the discussion. This is just what he should be doing: define the terms of the campaign, and leave plenty of room for Kerry to plop the main courses onto the plates he’s set out. (Hmm, if I worked on it, I could probably come up with a worse analogy.)

Terrorism: Well, this one’s already on the menu. I hope Kerry does the Clinton thing of listing 40 things he’s going to do to make us safer, steps Bush has not taken. “I’m strong, we’re strong, and together we’ll be strong” is not doing it for me.

Appreciating our soldiers: The Democrats make a believable support-the-military party, IMO.

Details about how we can be safer. Why the hell aren’t we doing this stuff already? I like details.

He’s telling us about a hypothetical mother. This sort of stuff loses me. It goes all sentimental. I can’t tell if it works. It just makes me wince.

We don’t have to fight alone. Yes.

Hope is on the way. I always like a good call and response. Plus, I do believe and have believed that this year it’s all about the hope. Hope vs. fear.

We choose hope over despair. Damn. I want him to hang W with fear, not despair.

There’s been a lot of talk at this convention about “one America.” Unusual rhetoric f or a party in an America more divided than any time since the Vietnam war.

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At 8:50 this evening, CJAD, 800 on your AM dial, reported that John Edwards accepted the party nomination and recounted what he said in his speech. Only problem: It’s now 9:50 and Edwards has yet to give his speech. Apparently, Canadian Press jumped the gun with the transcript – explicitly embargoed – circulated by the Democratic PR folks, and CJAD ran with it.

Not surprisingly, it made the top listing at Google News.

Foolish, naive blogger boy! 53 years young and I didn’t know that real journalists ignore the explicit embargo. For example, the NY Times site also ran an article about the speech before the speech, although they said “in remarks prepared for delivery” (The CP article skips the qualification.) But don’t you usually see that locution in print articles that had to be put to bed before the event actually transpired? What’s the ethical justification of running embargoed news in real time on your web site?

Sheesh. All part of the weird set of conventions that constitute delivering the “news” in a “timely” way..

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At this point, thirty years after New Journalism and Post-Modernism, you’d think we wouldn’t still need to have this argument, but, here goes: Objectivity isn’t objective. Or, as my friend AKMA puts it, “The only people you can trust to be objective are the ones who know that objectivity can’t be reached.” If you need proof of this, look no further than the lead article in today’s Boston Globe.

I have no quarrel at all with the article. In fact, I read it with interest this morning over breakfast. Glen Johnson does a fine job reporting on the second night of speeches at the Democratic Convention. It is, by the canons of professional journalism, objective and balanced. And it makes perfectly clear what others have said: Objectivity is a form of rhetoric. What’s perhaps especially instructive is that its content is another form of rhetoric: the big-tent political speech.

“Kennedy Leads the Attack: Convention speakers rip Bush in shift of rhetoric,” says the headline. Keeping in mind that reporters don’t get to write their headlines (yet another type of rhetoric), it nevertheless reflects the article’s upshot. It begins:

The second night of the Democratic National Convention featured harsher criticism of the Bush adminstration, with Senator Edward M. Kennedy accusing the president of making the world a more dangerous place for Americans and the son of a Republican icon countering the president’s stand limiting stem cell research. Tereas Heinz Kerry told her own story even as she extolled her husband’s virtues, declaring, “By now, I hope it will come as no surprise that I have something to say.”

Readers can quibble with what Johnson considers to be significant enough to make it into the lead. No mention of Obama, who lit the largest fire under the crowd, going with the current “master narrative” about THK that she is an outspoken woman (ooooh, imagine that!), and falling for the Democrats’ publicity stunt of putting Ron Jr. on stage. But a lead by its nature has to leave out most of the story, so arguments about it are inevitable.

Instead consider this only in terms of the conflict of rhetorical forms. When Ted Kennedy was sitting on his porch in Hyannis putting together his speech, he undoubtedly thought about how to structure it in order to crank the crowd up. His speech doesn’t begin with a lead, any more than mystery stories begin with a declaration of who done it. He thought more like a composer than like a journalist. He used phrases that he thought would pull us forward and up. He had no information to convey; he wanted instead to express the state of the country from his point of view in a way that would move a crowd of 35,000. The result was, in my view, a speech he could be proud of, although not the best in his career.

Now listen to the speech through Johnson’s ears. (Yes, I’m being presumptive.) Johnson’s job was not simply to transcribe events. For that, we could just read the transcript or watch the rerun. He knew that Kennedy wasn’t going to reveal some new fact — “This just in! Osama is W’s godgather!” — so he was looking for significance elsewhere. He noticed a pattern among the speeches that gave him the lens through which to present Kennedy’s speech: The Democratic speakers are being more negative about Bush than they were last night. It’s an interesting, defensible observation. But it’s an artifact of the reporter’s desire to come up with a lead. It was neither the substance nor the intention of the speechmaker (“Fire up a crowd, in part by attacking Bush” is different from “Democrats go negative on second nioght”), and it wasn’t the effect (“We really need Kerry to be president!”) that the night had on the crowd. That’s not a criticism. It’s merely to point out that rhetorical forms, such as objective journalism, make unnatural demands, especially when applied to other forms of rhetoric.

Objectivity is, as Heidegger says, a peculiarly modern mood. It is a form of discourse and, as such, structures thought, frames the questions, determines the content and the rhythm of a piece of writing. It’s a useful form of rhetoric, long may it wave. But it is not what it represents itself as: A privileged way of expressing the truth. The newspaper article about Kennedy’s speech can be accurate or not, fair or not, but it is no more true than the shouts of those in the Fleet Center who found it heartening.

There literally can be no objective account of a political speech, for in every case the account must transform a different rhetorical form, and that requires an act of literary interpretation. And what in human experience escapes all forms of rhetoric? Rhetoric ultimately means the structuring of experience through and in language, whether spoken or not. And even if you can find something we experience outside of language, the imposition of the rhetoric of journalism would be even ruder.

Further confirmation: Compare the Globe’s headline with the Washington Post’s: “Speakers Focus on Healing Divisions: Newcomers Set Themes.” It’s the exact opposite of the Globe’s, emphasizing healing and newcomers. It’s not that one is wrong and the other is right, but neither is objective.

danah boyd in Salon talks about blogging, journalism and objectivity. A snippet: “Properly evaluating the role of bloggers at the convention requires escaping the most obvious framing paradigms.” Go, danah! Bloggers look to the media like home-office media because “media,” “publishing,” “journalism” and “broadcasting” are the framing terms the media naturally brings to public writing. But that frame gets in the way, I believe, of seeing what’s actually going on.

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I’m not going in to the Convention until 11am these days. I don’t go out drinking afterwards, which means I’m asleep by 1am. So why am I so beat? Ok, aside from being old, fat and out of shape, why am I so beat?

Crowds are exhausting. Trying to be alert is exhausting. Sitting in one place is exhausting. Being spoken at is exhausting. Being snarky is exhausting. Being exhausted is exhausting.

I’m thinking of covering the speeches tonight by coming home and watching them on C-SPAN. I can’t hear what the speakers are saying when I’m in the Fleet Center and there’s nothing else going on when the speeches are happening, at least as far as I can tell. So, why should I be there?

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Ted Kennedy: The speech a monument — and the best Senator in history — would give.

Howard Dean: That afternoon when talking to 1,000 screamiac supporters, he let loose and reminded us why we stood in the snow for him. For the speech to the Convention I would only have stood in light hail.

Barack Obama: The good news for Hillary is that she might get State Department when Obama is President in 2012.

Ron Reagan: Good to hear about this adminisration’s embrace of medieval science from Reagan’s bad boy. A staid presentation, but every degree of passion would have been taken as a sign of a kink in his psychology.

Ilana Wexler, the twelve year old: Conventions should have a “You must be taller than this to ride” sign on the podium because it’s so rare that trotting out a kid — no matter how wholesome, enthusiastic and charming — can make it over the tackiness hurdle. I don’t know if Ilana did because the frequency of her amplified voice was above my hearing range. (Seriously.)

Teresa Heinz Kerry: He talk was literate and artfully constructed, but was the point to prove that she’s too intelligent to raise her voice? Even so, I thought there was a bit of the “Shove it” Teresa in the multi-lingual opening: Juggling while unicycling, saying, “Yo, Bushes, let’s see you do this!” Nevertheless, I’m a total sucker for appeals to new Americans. Does anyone love our country more?

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I’ve learned to show up later at the Fleet Center. So, this morning I took a look through the many events scheduled around the city. Unfortunately, the ones open to the public tend to have titles such as “Advancing Affordable Housing Preservation through Tax Credits” and “Hip hop + Politics = Youth Voter Empowerment?” I mean, how could they insult that last topic by ending it with a question mark! Meanwhile, the ones marked private include “LA Senator John Breaux’s Carribbean [sic] Carnival with Musician Ziggy Marley” and “Golf/Clambake with US Reps. Bill Delahunt & Steven Lynch, FL Sen. Bob Graham, Hawaiian Rep Neil Abercrombie and NY AG Elliot Spitzer.” Get those guys together and they spell trouble! Oh yeah, better hide your copy of the Interim Corn Subsidy Appropriation Bill because they’re gonna call Ziggy over to see how to make it into a bong. Party! …

…More at Boston.com

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So, what is the experience itself like?

Obviously, I can’t speak for the delegates, protestors, service providers, real journalists or even for other bloggers, but for me it’s a lot like going to a sports arena and watching a sport that consists of talking loud.

There I am, seven stories up in the Fleet Center, facing a giant screen which is only partially obscured by a giant bank of giant speakers. At 4 o’clock, when the Convention is gaveled to order by Terry MacAuliffe — a man so clean and well groomed that you want to take him home and dress his anatomically incorrect body in lots of fun outfits — the hall is more empty than full. Speaker after speaker comes onto the screen and mouths phrases that contain the two out of the three words “strong,” “proud” or “children.” Every now and then, you hear a crowd far below, clapping and yelling. Apparently some of them have funny hats on.

Then, once the TV cameras start carrying it live, it all comes to life. The big names come out, dragging their ant-like bodies into the light. Their smiling visages are projected on the giant screen: A 40-foot Clinton biting a 3-foot lip. You can hear the fourth echo of some of their words, but the rising endings of their phrases are wiped out by the white noise of enthusiasm they’ve elicited.

Then 35,000 people decide to leave at the same time and take the T from the Haymarket Station.

Last night, after I finally got home, I watched the Tivo’ed version of Clinton’s speech. So I can say with some certainty that the main difference between seeing it live and seeing it at home is that at home you get better reception.

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Listen to an NPR piece on blogging the convention here.

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Three links from Bill Koslosky, MD, about stem cell research. I’m running to the Convention and haven’t had a chance to actually look at the links, but Bill particularly recommends this one, which “discloses the fact that stem cell research is really not expected to be used as a therapy for Alzheimer’s.”

Also a map and an explanation…

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