Conventional Change

Toward the end of the Democrats' convention, a couple of veterans for John Kerry stood on the Boston Common watching a group of peace-sign carriers for Dennis Kucinich pass by. "What is this, a time machine?" one of them asked. Like the Kucinich delegates, the vets opposed the war in Iraq. But they excused Kerry's vote to support it by explaining that it was really a vote to give President Bush authority to seek an international consensus. I asked whether that was letting Kerry and the rest of Congress off too easy. After all, it's Congress's duty to declare war, not just pass the buck to the President. They shrugged. "Goes back to the Gulf of Tonkin," one said. Indeed.

The Democrats are not poised to address long-term problems like the War Powers Act, or the drift from democracy to empire. For almost everyone under their big tent, beating Bush is the only issue. Almost no one at the convention, including Kucinich delegates and other progressives, had much appetite for criticizing Kerry.

It was a stroke of genius for the Democrats to pick a theme for their convention that's been working itself out for decades in our culture: healing the rift over Vietnam. At the pageant in Boston, liberal-minded Americans could unite in a consensus that the war was a mistake and that soldiers like Kerry and his "band of brothers" were its victims and heroes, not villains.

Unfortunately, all that healing was of no help in generating a solution to the Vietnam-like situation now unfolding in Iraq. Kerry and John Edwards are mute on the crucial question: How and when do we extract American soldiers from their current directionless, violent predicament? Now that the crazed rightwing think-tankers in the Bush administration have had four years to get us stuck in Iraq and earn the enmity of the world, the Democrats seem to be preparing to drift onward, not with the same "forward-leaning" intensity as the Republicans, but, to use another of the boat metaphors that were so ubiquitous at the convention, without a rudder of their own.

The cost, if Kerry wins, is that the Democrats may beat the Republicans and take office without any effective pressure from within the party for peace, for a more humane program at home and abroad, and for a more rational set of policies that will take us off perpetual high alert.

Even the protesters were polite. When they ventured out of the insane dog pound set up for them outside the convention center – under some elevated tracks, with razor wire enclosing it, a mesh roof on top, and snipers overhead – demonstrators, led by the anti-war group Code Pink, argued briefly with the police. The police insisted the protesters take down a big pink sign – "Bring the troops home now" – that they'd hung on the outside of the giant wall surrounding the convention center. The protesters put it up again a few feet away. But when they finally made their speeches, most endorsed Kerry, only pleading with him to take a more anti-war stance.

Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin spoke to some TV cameras, wearing a sticker that said, "80% of Democrats say Iraq was a mistake."

"The Democrats will lose the election if they don't fire up their own base," Benjamin said. "I'm a Green. I'm giving him free advice because I want to see Bush out of office."

Eric Wasileski, a retired Navy fire controlman, also faced the cameras. "Vietnam started on a lie, and this war started on a lie as well," he said. "Mr. Kerry, you were in Vietnam and you said when you got back it was wrong for the politicians to send people to die there. I pray to God President Bush does not get reelected, and Mr. Kerry, if you take the reins of power, remember your words."

Fernandez Suarez de Solar of Escondido, California, held up a picture of his son Jesus, who died on March 27, 2003, in Baghdad. "I have two goals," he said. "To demand the end of the occupation, and bring home all the troops, and, specifically, here for the Democratic Convention, to put on the table very clearly, what is the position about the war?" De Solar declined to say whom he would vote for in November. "I support the Democratic Party," he said, "but I can't support any candidate." Then he hustled off for a meeting with Michael Moore.