The convention of Hope [their caps, not mine] has just ended and a very interesting week (or two) of politics has gone by the wayside. A period that started with Obama picking his running mate, progressed through the staged unity of the convention, and ended with the One speaking from his own personal temple constructed at INVESCO Field was surprisingly upstaged by the McCain campaign. Here is a brief look at my take on the week that was.

Obama picks Biden. What was Mr. Hope & Change thinking with this pick? After basing his entire campaign on the theme that he was an agent of change and that he rejected the “old politics”, Obama goes out and picks a living symbol of the status quo as his running mate. Joe Biden, 36 year senator Joe Biden, is going to bring change to America? As one pundit said at Fox News, “Who knew that the agent of change had been sitting in the Senate for the last 36 years?”

A topsy-turvy world. It seems that the reason many gave for Obama getting Mr. Insider as his running mate was that it added experience to the ticket, and perhaps it did. But what type of experience exactly? Just because Joe Biden has been a part of the Foreign Affairs committee and its chair does not mean that he has any real experience in the area. What foreign leaders has Biden dealt with and what problems has he solved? And if that is seen as out of bounds, then ask yourself this: Seeing that Biden has been consistently wrong on his foreign affairs pronouncements (remember, according to Old’ Joe the surge wouldn’t accomplish anything), is that the type of experience you really want? And the idea that picking a person with experience somehow transfers experience to another is laughable!

Where are the celebs? Everyone knows that Hollywood is totally in the tank for Obama, but the stars were conspicuous by their absence. Sure there were some at the acceptance speech by Obama, but even then they were largely out of sight of the public. It seems that the McCain ad really struck a nerve when he linked Obama’s rise to his celebrity status. Even though Oprah was there crying her fake eyelashes off, the celebs were mostly out of sight-out if mind, and that had to be by design.

The Clinton Convention. Even thought they were nowhere on the ticket, this convention was all about the Clintons. Hillary did her part to try to heal the Party fissures, but even that didn’t seem quite sincere. Because in all of the things that she said in her speech, and even in urging her voters to board the Obama bandwagon, Mrs. Clinton stopped well short of really endorsing Obama. She urged her voters basically to vote for the party, but she never said that she believed that he was the man to lead…just that he was the winner of the nomination. Then there was Bill; the speculation over what he would say, and how he would say it was a source of much drama in the days leading up to his speech. He gave a pretty good speech and he actually gave Obama something of an endorsement. And strangely, Bill Clinton was the only speaker who really made an effort to sell Obama the candidate, not just appeal to Party loyalty.

The One speaks from his Temple. The craziest thing that went on that I saw was the temple that was erected for Obama to give his acceptance speech from. If nothing before pushed the idea on the public that Obama was being set up as some sort of secular messiah, the construction of that temple…complete with Roman columns…sealed the deal. I mean really, how many other presidential aspirants have ever given a speech from their own personal temple?! And speaking of the speech, what was so great about it? It was just more Democratic Party boilerplate and the usual list of socialist plans: raise taxes, grow government, increased dependence in the populace. But what struck me was the part of the speech where Obama talks of his grandfather getting an education using the GI Bill, and his mother managing to raise him as a single parent and helping to create a better life for him…and then he unravels it all by saying that it shouldn’t be that way! He says that, if elected, he will basically take that responsibility from the individual and transfer it to the state, because no one should have to struggle like that to make it. Does this man not understand that those “struggles” are what make America great? Does he not know that he is the American Dream and that his plan would destroy the Dream forevermore? And why does he fail to understand that the American people generally want to earn their way in the world, rather than be perpetual wards of the State?

Stealing Obama’s thunder. The day after the convention, John McCain was able to effectively push Obama from the front pages and lead news stories by announcing his pick for Vice President. By picking Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, McCain shook up the ideas of a “status quo” pick and wrested the headlines from the DNC. Gov. Palin was a good pick, in my opinion, because she does several things for the McCain campaign: she appeals to disaffected women voters, she is the ultimate Washington outsider, and she can appeal to the conservative base of the GOP which has been very wary of McCain. Now, some feel that Palin is damaging her future political prospects by running with McCain as his VP, but if she is part of a winning ticket I don’t see how her career is going to be adversely affected. Others are arguing that her addition to the ticket somehow takes the issue of experience from McCain, but I fail to see how that works. Gov. Palin has nearly 2 years on the job in Alaska, has a 65% approval rating, and is the only person on either ticket with any executive experience! And honestly, she has about as much political experience as Barack Obama, since he has only been in national office for about 3 years and has spent 2 of those running for President! Gov. Palin has a record that she can stand on, while Obama has only rhetoric and the unabashed adulation of the media and the celebrity set. But all of that is actually irrelevant, since the only people whose experience matters reside at the top of the ticket, and in that contest McCain wins hands down; the experience that Biden has cannot be transferred to Obama, no matter how hard the media tries to make it so.

So that’s what I think about the way things are, and I am looking forward to what the GOP does at their convention that kicks off early next week.