One of the most striking differences between the convention speeches by Ann Romney and Michelle Obama, was not the oratory, at which the latter is obviously more adept, but the audience. The Democrats listening to the First Lady looked like America.
In the Republican Tampa audience, it took scouring the crowd to find someone younger than 40, female, not to mention of a coloring other than deathly pale. Ann Romney herself reflected the weird white people motif of the GOP, with her obvious wrinkle tucks and her pill popper demeanor.
When the Republicans tried to go Hispanic, suddenly the in-thing for political duopoly, they chose a Cubano, the most un-representative of all U.S. Hispanics.
Think about it: the overwhelming majority of Cuban Americans are here because they or their parents were admitted to the United States under an open-ended "parole" program. All they had to do was say they were Cuban and didn't like the bearded guy over there.
The Republicans wore cheese-head hats, held up ridiculous signs and brought in a famed aged actor to make a fool of himself. Where did they get these people? Of course Romney looked passable in that crowd! A monkey would have.
At the Charlotte, N.C., gathering last night and the next few days, I'm seeing the much broader variety of human beings that make up the U.S. of A. The Hispanic speaker came from among the Mexicans, who account for two thirds of all Hispanics.
Although her came from recent immigrant stock, do note that many Chicanos' ancestors had been in what today is the United States for decades when the Jamestown settlement was established, let alone when the Puritan Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
As for the Republican slogan "we built it," African-American slaves built the house that Obama lives in, not white businessmen. Irish and Chinese immigrants, treated worse than slaves for a generation or two, built the railroads. And the list goes on ...
You could see the heirs of these and other immigrants at Charlotte, as much as you could not their absence at Tampa. Oh, yeah, Paul Ryan is Irish Catholic, but he's the kind of Irish Catholic who has turned his back on the unions and the solidarity that allowed the Irish to survive ethnic and religious prejudice in this country.
Michelle Obama said it: we can't slam the door behind us when we rise (as Ryan has). We have to reach back and help others. That's the real the United States of America. It's at the Democratic Party's convention.
