Hypocrisy convention

All this might matter less if Gore hadn't chosen to define himself as a populist crusader leading the fight against big oil, big insurance and big tobacco. "They're for the powerful and we're for the people," he said in his nomination acceptance speech. "We need to give the medical decisions back to the doctors, and take them away from ... the insurance companies.

"Behind the flashing [Bush] video is an agenda of rising gas prices and smog-filled skies that is of Big Oil, by Big Oil and for Big Oil."

One never knows, however. All this hooey might make sense to a campaign finance reformer who has flouted the existing campaign finance laws, taken foreign donations from Buddhist nuns and is currently raising record dollar amounts in soft money for his own "populist" run.

But how different is the phony leader from the foot soldiers assembled in the Staples Center to anoint him? At the Los Angeles charade, speaker after speaker touted the Democrat gathering as a convention of the people that showed the "real face of America." This was a not-so-subtle dimarche to the Republican "show convention," which they claimed was a purely "cosmetic" effort to pretend that Republicans were inclusive and cared about America's minority communities.

"Let's be honest about, this," lied Joe Lieberman. "We may be near Hollywood tonight, but not since Tom Hanks won an Oscar has there been that much acting in Philadelphia." In other words, when Republicans are inclusive it is just to hide their white sheets while they are in front of the cameras. So the principled Lieberman has now joined the ranks of the racial McCarthyites.

In fact, the Democrats in Los Angeles were themselves not who they claim to be. A New York Times survey of those attending showed that the delegates were well to the left of the American people, and even the Democratic Party itself. Thus 86 percent of the delegates to the Democratic convention, including Gore, oppose vouchers that would let the poor rescue their children from failing schools and send them to private school like Al Gore Jr. But only 54 percent of voting Democrats agree. Meanwhile the general voting public is split on the issue 47 to 46 percent. At the same time, 60 percent of African-Americans, across class lines, support vouchers.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Democratic delegates were also far wealthier than most of the people (57 percent had incomes over $75,000) and far more of them are members of unions (31 percent). They were also more African-American (by 80 percent) and more Native American (by 30 percent) than the general population. (Who knows how many of them were Armenian, Russian, Arab, Jewish, Polish, or take your pick of any non-politically correct category, since our left-wing media can't be bothered to ask about such "over-represented" groups.)

This ethnic distortion is explained by the fact that the political mentality of the Democratic Party is now so rooted in the discredited past that it has a rigid racial and gender quota system for delegates. How rigid? A black female delegate from Mississippi was denied a seat because the quota for women had already been exceeded. As if to underscore the unseemly irony of liberals' 180 degree about-face on civil rights since the 1960s, the woman in question had been one of the original Mississippi Freedom Party delegates who, in a legendary moment of the civil rights struggle, were denied seats at the 1964 Democratic Convention simply because they were black.

The Democratic Party is now a party of the last century (or perhaps even the previous one) -- a party of racial quotas and racial preferences, of class warfare and impossible socialist dreams. As Jesse Jackson said, on the second convention night, it's not just about race or gender; it's about "redistributionism."

On the final night the leader himself mounted the podium, mentioned Bill Clinton just once and then rejected the entire Clinton legacy -- the good along with the bad. Goodbye to the New Democrats, triangulation and a party willing to embrace Republican programs in order to preside over a boom that old-fashioned Democrats would have called "a Decade of Greed," the way they did the Reagan boom of the '80s.

The sum total of Gore's Big Speech, in fact, was that McGovern-Mondale liberalism is back, class warfare is back, Big Government is back, and no article of leftist faith -- racial quotas, unlimited abortions, support for bankrupt government school monopolies -- will go unchampioned. This, in a new century that is looking backward on the ruins of the socialist schemes of the last. This, to an America, half of whose citizens are invested in the stock market and expect one day to be in the brackets that Gore wants to tax even more. This, to a people that is weary of division and partisan warfare and that wants to elect a party that will govern its prosperity and keep the profits flowing. Gore called the speech he wrote "A New Journey." A better title would have been "Back to the Future."

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