Obama like Bush? Yea, it's a stretch but we got to give it to Chicago Sun Times' columnist Steve Huntley for trying. He argues that Bush and the Obama share certain attributes such as arrogance and stubbornness.
Hil is giving Bill the brush off, the NY Daily News reports. Hillary -- who will deliver the convention's keynote speech on Aug. 26 -- will be introduced by Chelsea, not her husband. It was her idea to try to mollify her female followers. Good luck with that: "He has a problem with Hillary's more fanatical women supporters, and this is a way to help with that," an official told the News.
Columnist William Porter of the Denver Post visits a blue-collar hotel in the shadow of the convention. The 70-room Newhouse is chock full of hard-working, middle-class people that comprise the Dems' base. Pols must've found the thread-count unsatisfactory because not one is staying there. "We're a working person's hotel," the hotel manager said. "There are no amenities they'd be interested in, that's for sure."
The editorial board at USA Today joins the NYT to berate the business-as-usual elements of the convention: the glitz, the glam but most of all the private donors. They chide McCain and Obama for participating in such old-style politics while purporting to be reformers. For shame! So the paper's putting up its staff at the Newhouse, right?
Sen. Nancy Spence writes a somewhat vapid column in the Rocky Mountain News extolling the merits of democracy and condescending to readers about how conventions are more than merely well-scripted mega-galas -- they are a window into the American political system: "The kinds of lessons program delegates will learn at the Denver convention could well assure that future generations in some countries grow up in a democracy."
