Program Note: All this week, ChrisWeigant.com will be covering the Democratic National Convention. We hope to bring you a varied picture of the convention itself, and to further this end, we will be featuring a special voice here. As you'll read below (and all week long), Malcom Fox will be one of the youngest people attending the convention. His reports will give valuable insight into how the youngest Democrats view the race, the candidates, and the convention itself.

One side note to make, as well -- during the next week, ChrisWeigant.com will become more of a traditional blog. By this, I mean that multiple postings can occur on any day, by multiple reporters. We cannot commit to posting on any sort of regular schedule, due to the chaotic nature of attempting to cover such events. As technology and time permits, we will strive to get the word out, so check back frequently during the week. Malcom's articles will be part of this mix, and should be appearing daily. Follow along all week with us, as we attempt to tell our stories of attending the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

-- Chris Weigant

My Road to the Convention

I was five when President George Bush "beat" candidate Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. At the time I had no clue about politics or party philosophy. However, I did know Al Gore received more overall votes in the election than George Bush, and then the members of Supreme Court voted on who would become the next president, and they elected Bush. The election was the first political event that I can remember clearly in my life, and although I was always bound to be a liberal (given the household I grew up in), that lost election established my anti-conservative opinion. I followed the Kerry/Bush election in 2004 with determination (or at least all the determination a nine-year-old can muster), thinking I could somehow impact the results of the election. Of course I was wrong.

Just watching the elections myself could in no way help the candidates I supported; instead I decided to learn the policies and approaches of each party. I listened to the news (I'm partial to Morning Joe and MacNeil/Lehrer), and although some may debate whether MSNBC is really a credible news source, as a liberal it made me happy. I enjoyed mocking Bush's policies in my elementary and middle schools, feeling incredibly smart because no one else did so. As 2008 rolled around, I wanted to get involved in electing a Democratic president -- the kind that that I felt this country needed. The country was a mess as a result of two wars that weren't paid for and a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans which resulted in an economic crisis that could only be compared to the Great Depression -- our worst economic condition in more than eighty years. I asked Mom how I could involve myself in an election and try to make a minuscule difference for the Democratic Party I supported.

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Program Note

This is going to be the shortest Obama Poll Watch column of all time. I am in the midst of packing and running around getting ready to travel to the Democratic National Convention. I will be flying all of tomorrow. So you're getting your OPW column early this month. There simply wasn't any other time to fit it in.

There will indeed be a column Monday, and it'll be somewhat of a surprise for convention week, so I encourage everyone to tune in as usual on Labor Day.

Back to the polling, you're going to have to draw your own conclusions this month. I'm going to present the raw data and the charts, and that's all I have time for. Obama's approval numbers went up, but so did his disapproval numbers, so you can interpret this any way you'd like. Here's the new chart, updated for August:

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

August, 2012

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We have reached the eye of the hurricane. Half the storm is over. The Republican Party held their national nominating convention all week, and the Democrats are getting ready to hold theirs next week. So we enter these few days of calm between the howling winds, and to mark the occasion we're going with a unique format here today.

Rather than our usual weekly wrapup, awards categories, and suggestions for effective talking points for Democrats to use next week, we're instead going to do something we don't believe we've ever done before -- concentrate almost exclusively on the other side's talking points. The Democratic speeches for Charlotte are being fine-tuned right now, and so we felt it was important to lay out the Republican talking points that need to be shot down next week.

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OK, let's get right to my immediate impressions of the final night of the Republican National Convention. I'm going to quickly describe the opening acts, and then get into the big speeches of the night.

Tonight, the first person I saw on stage was not named McConnell. Oddly enough, when I turned on the teevee, PBS was interviewing Mitch McConnell. Strangest thing, and total coincidence, I guess.

Connie Mack talked about Cuba and whatnot. The audience yawned, from what I could see.

There was a mandatory Ronald Reagan video, and the crowd genuflected in unison.

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I promised to post this, but I don't have time to update the site to make it easily play here. If you're interested in hearing the interview I did on Jamaican radio this Monday, with Rob Richie of FairVote.org, here is the mp3 file if you'd like to download it and play it (it's about 12 minutes long). When listening, please bear in mind that it was 5:45 A.M. in my time zone.

-- Chris Weigant

Welcome once again to my musings and snap judgments which I jot down right after watching the Republican National Convention speeches, and before I read what the rest of the online universe has to say. This way, my opinions might be wildly out of sync with everyone else, but at least you'll know they're not influenced by others. My Day One impressions were fairly close to what others are saying, so make of that whatever you will.

Today I sat through almost four hours of convention-watching, although I apparently missed some sort of Ron Paul video at the start, which would have been a lot more interesting than seeing Mitch McConnell. For some reason, I always turn on the convention when someone named "McConnell" is speaking, which was a little eerie when I noticed it.

The audience for McConnell seemed to be either asleep or comatose. Or perhaps working off those first-day hangovers, who knows? Mitch did get in one good line about "left-wing fever swamps" but even this failed to rouse the crowd. McConnell always seems to me to be auditioning for the part of "The Owl" in a elementary school play, but maybe that's just his bad taste in glasses, I don't know (Note: I wear glasses myself, so this isn't any sort of "four-eyes" putdown, it's just those frames look wrong on his face, that's all).

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Before I read what the rest of the online world took away from the first night of the Republican National Convention, I thought I would share my own impressions. These are hastily jotted down, after watching roughly two and a half hours of speakers and pundits (some speakers I missed because I was either flipping through the channels, some of which didn't carry every speech).

I tuned in while the guy from Virginia (McConnell? didn't even catch his name, and am too lazy to look it up, sorry) was speaking. His speech was pretty boring, but he did have the best anchorman "helmet hair" I've seen since... oh, I don't know... John Edwards, maybe? This is a real accomplishment, what with Romney and Ryan setting the "perfect hair" bar so high in the GOP.

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America's oldest pastime is not baseball, or football, or indeed any professional sport. It is not going to the movies, or watching television, or spending time on the internet. It's not communicating with each other via email, telephone, or any other method. America's oldest pastime will be on full display for the next two weeks, because before any of the rest of these things even existed, America has had a love affair with politics that endures and lives on to this day. But politics -- especially as practiced during the national conventions -- is nothing more than intolerance and bigotry writ large. But, unlike the more virulent forms of bigotry, political bigotry is not only celebrated in America but actually downright inevitable -- or at least, it has been since our country began.

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Maybe it's just me, but doesn't it seem like the Republicans just keep right on raising the bar for craziness right up into the stratosphere? Things that seemed crazy just a few months ago now seem only mildly cuckoo, in the frenzy of stark raving looniness emanating from the right wing these days.

The truly amusing part of the week, though was the mad dog that did not bark in the night. Now, mankind has been attributing bad weather to angry gods since the beginning of time, pretty much. You could indeed make a rational argument that nature's fury is what caused some of these early religions to spring up. Even today, we have otherwise-well-respected religious spokesmen who are eager to speak to the nation and decipher what is the divine reason for things like hurricanes. That is, when the hurricanes aren't aimed at their big shindig. Haven't heard a peep out of these folks this week in identifying the reason behind Isaac... strange, isn't it?

What's even more astounding, for those who like to unlock the mysteries of coincidence, is where we were exactly four years ago -- heading into the 2008 Republican National Convention. Don't have an image of this in your mind? Here's one to look at. That's Hurricane Gustav, the second-most-powerful storm of the 2008 hurricane season. Because of the storm, both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney skipped the 2008 Republican National Convention, even through they were president and vice president at the time. Nobody wanted the inevitable comparisons with Katrina, which had arrived almost exactly three years earlier. The Republicans all but canceled "Day One" of their convention as a result.

Fast-forward to today, and we have a timeline: Hurricane Katrina. Three years later, Hurricane Gustav interrupts Republican National Convention. Four years later, Isaac threatens the first days of the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Draw your own conclusions.

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Happy Thursday, everyone!

We are turning over the podium to a guest author today, for perhaps the final installment of our "let the commenters write columns" experiment. The reason is good news, however, as I will be starting to write again on Tuesdays and Thursdays from now on (or until further notice), as I have reached the milestone on my writing project that was the goal for this month already. Woo hoo!

Anyway, we got the following column submission from "michty6" a while back, but didn't even have time to do the formatting required until now. Sorry for the delay! When submitted, the article was preceded by a cartoon which I couldn't use for copyright reasons -- but, thankfully, we had the perfect C.W. Cunningham cartoon to use instead.

Without further ado, I now turn the soapbox over to "michty6" for the day.

-- Chris Weigant

About the Cartoonist | Reprint Policy

Trickle Down, Trickle Out, And Trickle Up

I can't imagine how the rich and wealthy persuaded Reagan to become the biggest advocate for trickle down economics or where they even got the idea from. Personally I imagine a meeting with Mr. Burns and Count Fudge-ula (from the Simpsons) with many other wealthy people up in his castle, sitting 'round the table:

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