How are you supposed to run a party convention?  And how are you supposed to behave when you stage one?

Can’t look to the Constitution for guidance; the Constitution was silent on political parties, since its writers hoped against hope that parties might never develop.

But we can look at recent election years, and we can see how parties behave in different environments.  There is a way to behave when the nation is at war, and there is another way to behave when the nation is enjoying an economic boom.  There is a way to behave when things are bad and your party has the solutions to fix it; there is a completely different way to behave when things are bad and your party is the one that caused it.

We have the opportunity to witness such a contrast this summer. 

At the GOP convention, the Republicans were serious, adult, optimistic, confident (with good reason) that if returned to office, the Republicans can solve most of the nation’s problems.  The Republicans know how to bring back manufacturing, how to make us energy-independent, how to control the border, because they just did it eight years ago.  They didn’t give the impression that it would all be fixed overnight, but they clearly conveyed the assurance that they know what they’re doing, and we can trust them.

By contrast, the Democrat party’s convention in Chicago opened with exuberance, with joy, with a complete inability to acknowledge the nightmare that most Americans are living through today — possibly because they feel they don’t dare admit to it, but possibly because many of them truly do not feel it themselves.

As bureaucrats, as politicians, as the most connected “commissar class” in modern society, they are insulated from these issues.

Opening night in Chicago saw a cavalcade of minor county and state officials, from county executives to lieutenant governors, clearly chosen to represent the rainbow — black and white, young and old, male and female — all bounding up to the microphone to deliver their brief pep talks and talking points, each one more jubilant than the last.

One minute, they were giving credit to the Biden-Harris regime for rebuilding roads and bridges, when those roads and bridges were the states’ responsibilities, which states had been neglecting for years.  The next minute, they were patting themselves on the back for handling power outages, without admitting that it was Democrat policies that caused those power grid failures in the first place.

Their speakers shamelessly cheered the handouts that the Biden-Harris regime has spread around the country — without acknowledging that such handouts are paid for by record inflation and the collapse of America’s standing in the world economy.  Their speakers attacked President Trump as wanting to deny women their reproductive freedom, when all he’s trying to do is return to such time-honored, moderate policies as the Hyde Amendment, parental notification, and a health care system that again focuses on people’s health rather than on political buzzwords and social engineering.

We saw a giddy old woman girlishly say that, as proud as she is to be a lieutenant governor, she’s equally proud to be “a friend of Kamala Harris.”  Now, there’s a message for the uneducated if ever we saw one.  Knowing what every American knows about how Kamala Harris built her career and made her fortune, one would think decent people would only grudgingly admit to being her acquaintance if they had to, under oath.  Imagine bragging about the friendship of a onetime mistress of a political hack, whose luxury cars and well paid, taxpayer-funded commission gigs were gifted to her, not legitimately earned, whose political career was launched from a bedroom.

But what choice do they have, this year of all years?

The nation’s electric grid is failing, overloaded and underpowered, specifically due to intentional Democrat policies, at the state and federal levels, from their needless wars against natural gas and nuclear power to their budget-busting devotion to windmills and solar panels.

Average Americans can no longer afford to dine out anywhere near as frequently as they could five years ago, specifically because of such Democrat crusades as doubling the employment cost of restaurant employees with minimum wage hikes; raising the utility costs of the businesses; and forcing them to shutter or curtail their businesses by 50, or 75, or 90 percent during the COVID-19 era. 

The average American can no longer afford to build or buy a home, or even rent an apartment, as most studies now declare that you need double the income to move out on your own as you needed just five years ago, due to soaring mortgage rates and jumps in new home prices, homeowners’ insurance and property taxes, utility rates and home repair bills.  So much of this is caused by the runaway inflation specifically — and intentionally — caused by Biden-Harris economic policies.

The average American can no longer buy a new car.  Even extending loan rates on new models from four or five to six or seven years hasn’t been enough; the Biden-Harris drum beat to scare the automakers out of making gasoline-powered cars has succeeded.  The automakers are forced to make electric vehicles that nobody wants, so automakers have to spread that massive cost across their product lines, rendering virtually every model unaffordable.

Young female athletes are afraid to enter the sports that used to be their highway to earning college scholarships.  This crop of Democrats have insisted that hardworking girls compete directly against boys in drag, so the first place girls’ medal — and its accompanying acclaim and scholarship money — is guaranteed to go to a boy.  Worse yet, the girls must shower and change in the same locker rooms as these boys, as the fights for women’s rights of a generation ago are turned on their heads.

It’s typical for a political campaign to blame everything wrong on the opposition party, but it’s different this year; virtually every problem we face can be clearly traced back to a specific Biden-Harris executive order, a specific Biden-Harris appointee, or a proudly touted Biden-Harris policy. 

They promised to make gasoline and diesel fuel skyrocket in price.  They promised to put an end to the coal that affordably creates work and heats our homes.  They specifically cut off export markets for American manufacturing and drove major trading partners into the arms of the BRICS economic alliance. 

And they intentionally encouraged the illegal importation of tens of millions of noncitizen foreigners, forcing cities, counties, and states to somehow fund the massive health care, education, housing, and food burden that this invasion has spawned.

There’s nothing to be proud of, in looking at the policies of the past four years — no accomplishments to cheer, no great strides to cite with pride in campaign ads or stump speeches.  Most terms have a mixed record — inflation might be up, but we won a war, or crime might be up, but unemployment is down — but not in this case.  On every single issue, domestic and international, the Biden-Harris regime has been an embarrassing failure.

Perhaps it’s no wonder the speakers are giggling like schoolgirls, smiling their vacuous smiles and laughing up a storm at the podium in Chicago.  Denying responsibility, avoiding reality, and laughing like a hyena got their nominee all the way to the top of the ticket.  Why shouldn’t it work for their party’s lower rungs of hacks, con men, and Marxists, too?

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker.  Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his brand-new nonfiction book on the 2024 election, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

Image: William Warby via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.