And furthermore, I plan to vote for _____, because...

Fairly complete honesty forces me to admit that as far as I can tell, when it comes to “truth telling” at conventions (see my previous blog), the Democrats are only slightly better than the Republicans. I don’t know if they told any outright lies like Paul Ryan’s story of the GM plant, but their “shadings” of fact and of what actually happened and when and as the result of whose deeds and misdeeds seem to have followed close on those of the their counterparts in Tampa. Pilate was whispering his eternal question in speakers’ ears in both arenas.

(By the way, the most annoying thing the Democrats did last week was insert “God” into their platform. That was a cheap shot at the Holy One, worthy of another blog, maybe someday.)

I think a purist mind in politics is impossible to maintain. I excuse no one; since I am a Democrat most of the time I’d like to see that party do better. I even emailed someone at the Convention’s web site and chastised them not only for their misrepresentations but also for their silence on deficit/debt issues. Their response? “Send money to US!”

I think two things:

1) Politics is about deciding who you believe, even when they are not telling the truth. Put more baldly, it’s about whose lies you want to believe and whose half-truths you want to trust.

2) In the end, we rely on promises made in campaigns to capture our votes. That’s not as small as it sounds, because the promises politicians make are enfolded in the narrative they tell about and the vision and hope they have for our nation…and,

…at the end of these two weeks, I think the Democrats tell the truer overall narrative: we got into trouble economically because of the poor stewardship of our nation’s finances during Republican administrations (particularly W’s), and because of the deregulation of financial institutions the Republicans constantly push for. It’s really hard to deny those facts, and they are recurring facts.

Further I think the Democrats have a corner on the hope and vision thing: they more widely represent the wild and often unwieldy and marvelous human diversity of our nation, and are therefore far more likely to govern in a way that keeps us together rather than tears us apart. And, very important to me, I think the only real chance of our facing up to the environmental crisis is, for now, in the hands of the Democrats, small as that chance is.

And since I generally want to believe Democrats (whether they are in fact always truthful or not), and since I generally much prefer their vision for our nation over that of the Republicans, I will vote for Obama/Biden and (here in Ohio) for Senator Sherrod Brown.

There you have it.