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• Thursday, September 4, 2008 06:07 AM

  MCE: Don't forget Houston in 1992.

  Quick -- how many sneering epithets did you hear thrown at McCain at the Democratic convention? How many people there mentioned his name without prefacing their remarks with a statement that they liked and respected the man, and acknowledged his military service? How many chants did you hear of "zero,zero,zero?" When speakers at Denver criticized McCain, they were careful to establish that they were critiquing his policies, his public positions, and the fact that he was wrong about invading Iraq.

  Now who uses phrases like this? "snide and obnoxious" "college campuses, the latte counters and the urban centers" "hick and bitter and backward and antediluvian?" The only word in that last litany that Obama used was in the context of a statement that was definitely not an attack on the people he was describing, although the "liberal" media definitely tried to spin it that way.

  When Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of a quaint little village in the American heartland, spits out the word "cosmopolitan" in the most contemptuous tone he can manage, a lot of people out there know that he's just come within an inch of calling Obama a "rootless cosmopolitan." (Go look that up. The phrase has a lot of political baggage. It does not refer to a vodka drink without radishes). And although things haven't gotten as thoroughly ugly and demagogic in St. Paul as they did in Houston in '92, the more negative, hostile tone coming out of this convention is quite an unpleasant contrast to the tone of the proceedings in Denver, and I think swing voters will notice that.

  —Susan Wood Read Susan Wood's other letters
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