Putting Out More Flags

...It is the Democrats' great good fortune that the two parties they comprise are disguised as one...

...In this attempt to seize the imagination of independents and centrists, and to recast themselves as the party of common sense, Democrats made a bold raid on the Republican rhetorical arms cache...

...True, there were moments of brazen disin-genuousness last week, the most arresting being Madeleine Albright's vow that a Kerry administration would combat weapons of mass destruction by "focusing on where they are instead of where they are not"—this after Albright had supported the invasion of Iraq, based on information about WMD gathered on her watch...

...This is leaving aside her galling attempt to recast her upbringing in the upper reaches of Mozambican society under colonial dictatorship, and her education in apartheid South Africa, as human-rights credentials, rather than the opposite...

...If Republicans hope to convince Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Every speech in prime time—every single one—used the word "patriot...

...You would have thought you'd stumbled into a gathering of Straussians...

...It is easy to be deluded into believing one party's story before you've heard both sides...

...There was Ted Kennedy, blundering through his speech (patriots at Lexington and Concord, he said, "fired the shirt round the world"), with its sour little jokes and the vote-repelling blitheness with which he quipped, "The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush...

...And not just Ron Reagan's "apolitical" endorsement of Kerry...

...They are inspired and energetic, and understand the global economy and such modern concerns as mass immigration and the environment...

...Democrats are campaigning as if they have discovered the open-sesame of the military vote—the "backdoor draft" that keeps reservists on active service long after the Be-All-That-You-Can-Be ads had promised them they would be back in grad school...

...Their problem is that they can rally at most an eighth of the electorate behind the idea of a technocratic Baby Boomer ruling class...

...Perhaps most electorally harmful, given the personality-focused way campaigns are covered nowadays, was Teresa Heinz Kerry's paean to her own self-assertiveness, in which she was permitted to vent the delusion that hers is the candor of a feminist who had fought for her rights, rather than a billionairess who is simply used to being listened to...

...This allows them to use the history of the industrial-age patriots who won World War II to lay claim to power for the postmodern, perhaps post-national visionaries who come out of the better grad schools...

...And they are extremely lucky to have a candidate like John Kerry, a pure product of the new camp with the one credential—military heroism—that is unimpeachable in the old one...

...In most places, the left is obviously a two-headed thing...

...But if the reference went over the heads of confused Middle Americans, abortion advocates had no trouble recognizing it as a bone thrown their way by the Democratic campaign...

...To nobody's surprise, there were two conventions...

...And the party talked stirringly...

...Instead, the Democratic party has asked its activists to shut up for a sec so it can talk to the broad American middle class...

...Second, there was the prime-time convention shown to 40 million citizens, during which John Kerry spoke of his faith, and both he and his vice-presidential nominee solemnly took up their wartime responsibilities and promised to increase the size of the military...

...It is easier to see what the Democrats are trying to do if one compares them with the left in other Western countries...

...Speaker after speaker invoked President Bush's own self-description in 2000 as "a uniter, not a divider," and asked voters to be the judges of the president's record of unifying them...

...Democrats also made use of that staple of religious revivals, the conversion narrative...

...Democrats sought to show that they were patriotic enough to protect the country from terrorism, and did so by dragging dozens of uniformed Democrats on stage over the last two nights, rather as Republicans used blacks at the 2000 Philadelphia convention...

...Such parties' problem is that the economy on which their success was built exists no longer, and their economic platform consists of riding a failing welfare state into the abyss...

...All pollsters—including the Democratic guru Stanley Greenberg, whose wife, Connecticut congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, headed the platform committee— had predicted since the 2000 elections that the next presidential race would be decided "base to base," and that whichever party did the best job of stirring up its activists would win...

...the public that the "real" Democratic party is a bunch of extremist double-talkers, they are overconfident...

...Kerry's own challenge to President Bush—"Let's never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States"—will have been received in living rooms across the nation as an insistence that James Madison be given his due...

...Every ten minutes or so, every day of the convention, short video snippets of Republicans who were sick of Bush and had decided either to change their party affiliation, or simply to vote for Kerry this time out, were projected on the walls at either side of the dais...

...First, there was the daily grind of party work, held for the benefit of activist delegates, who this year were more hard-line than ever before...

...95 percent of them think the war on Iraq was a mistake...

...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Boston SOME PARENTS probably had visions of incontinence on long family car trips when Alexandra Kerry promised Thursday night that, should her father become president, our children will be able to "control their own bodies...

...But in Boston, the Democrats have told their story with far more skill than parties usually do, and have made a far more damaging assault on the pillars of the Republican voter coalition than even the most pessimistic Republican could have feared...

...Only 2 percent of them are pro-life, according to the Boston Globe...

...Some of my best friends are in the military...

...There was Al Sharpton, calling for reparations for slavery and (as he surely intended) stomping on the groundbreaking speech of Barack Obama the night before, in which Obama made the case that the inner-city poor need not count on government to solve their every problem...

...It began a wholesale redefinition of an exhausted party and provided voters with a blizzard of uplifting patriotic imagery, boldly tacking against the most deeply held conventional wisdom...

...The Bush promise to "restore honor and integrity to the White House" was subtly mocked in Kerry's insistence that he would "restore trust and credibility to the White House...

...Gay activists, however, surely recognized the allusion to Kerry's opposition to a constitutional amendment to block gay marriage...

...There is a party (let's say the Social Democrats in Germany) that has a proud record of winning benefits for the working class through the past century, and an even prouder record of summoning its members to the service of the country...

...Then there is another party (let's say the Greens in Germany) who represent the cream of the 1960s generation...

...The week had its dud speeches, too, which will do the Democrats some damage...

...Virtually all the prime-time speeches quoted from either the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or Lincoln...

...But even if its effects were achieved partly through code and judicious scheduling, the Democratic convention in Boston was the most successful party gathering in decades...

...There was Jimmy Carter, blaming the Bush administration for failures of the Clinton Middle East peace process that happened before Bush took office...