Anger Management

BOSTON – Forget Disneyland, for the next few days, Beantown is the happiest place on earth. Or at least the most civil.

The Kerry campaign has put the kibosh on Bush-bashing, preferring to make their candidate's positive vision for the country the overriding theme of the convention.

It's the Anger Management Platform – and a very sensible strategy.

Unfettered rage at Bush, his corporate cronyism and his lies about Iraq (oops, I think that's one of the proscribed phrases; my bad) have fueled the Democrats since a movement of outraged activists gave the party a much needed spine transplant during the primary season. Kerry picked up the baton in Iowa and has run with it to great effect. At the moment, fifty-four percent of Americans feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction – and nearly three-fifths say we need to change course.

Now it's time for Kerry to convince voters that he's the one to chart the new direction, and to define just what that direction will be.

So everywhere you go here – or, at least, everywhere the police allow you to go – everyone is reading from the same positive playbook.

At a star-studded and jam-packed pre-convention event honoring Bill and Hillary Clinton – the A-list affair was so overbooked that many VIPs had to hover outside the door, waiting for someone to leave before the fire marshals would let them in – the former first couple was humble and on message, with Bill describing himself and Hillary as "foot soldiers for Kerry/Edwards". They had clearly gotten the anger management memo, and the former president, in particular, avoided the more critical stance he has recently adopted toward Bush. The only whiff of a dig at W. was Clinton's assurance that the one thing Democrats could count on was that, this time, "every vote will be counted" (this must be on the list of pre-approved phrases; I've heard it a number of times since arriving in Boston – and it never fails to draw a cheer).

As Tad Devine, Kerry's senior campaign strategist, described it to me: "I tell everyone, 'It's okay to throw the occasional elbow, just avoid the flagrant fouls'."

The harmonious vibe at the Clinton party was so strong that William Safire, the New York Times op-ed page's conservative grise, turned to me after scanning the room and said, "There's so much discipline and unity here, it feels like a Republican Convention".

If there were one place where you would have expected the kid gloves approach to fall by the wayside, it would have been at the tribute honoring the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, held at the Old West Church, on Cambridge Street. The event was standing room only, and was attended by some of the most progressive members of the Democratic Party, including panelists Jim Hightower, Al Franken, and Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers of America. Four years ago, Wellstone had spoken at the Shadow Convention in Los Angeles, delivering a fiery call to action to progressive Democrats: "I'm tired of waiting? It's time for us to find our own voice, to do our own organizing, to push forward on reform, to push forward on issues of economic justice, and to make the United States of America, this good country, even better."

But even among this most passionately anti-Bush crowd, the wellspring of rage bubbling just beneath the surface remained almost entirely bottled up.

You know that the Positivity Party is in full swing when Al Gore, who the L.A. Times' Ron Brownstein says has been "channeling the Democratic id in podium-pounding speeches that seem designed to end with the distribution of pitchforks", takes to the Convention stage and delivers an unfailingly upbeat message. One of his few discordant notes Monday night was, like Clinton, a dig at 2000: "Let's make sure," he said, "that the Supreme Court does not pick the next president – and that this president is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court." The former VP was quick to point out, however, that he's made peace with the contentious past: "I don't want you to think that I lay awake at night counting and recounting sheep." He didn't say anything about lying in bed counting and recounting dangling chads, however.