Outside the Republican convention hall, Twin City cops and National Guardsmen in full-scale battle gear were arresting
credentialed journalists like Amy Goodman and pepper-spraying peaceful demonstrators -- though you didn't hear much about that from the respectable TV commentators who were safe inside, battling balloon drops.
Inside the hall, we were treated to an odd combination of "Naughty Librarian" Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain trying for the nth time to appear natural while reading the teleprompter and bashing his own party,
and 2380 raucous Republican delegates -- 1.5 percent black, 5 percent
Hispanic, 32 percent female, 80 percent over 50, and nearly 100
percent over-fed -- trying to appear jubilant, grinding to the
heavy-metal rhythms that someone in 
the RNC hierarchy must have thought were a cool idea.
We also had yet another recapitulation of the Arizona Senator's horrific five years in a POW camp, after being shot down on his 23rd mission over Hanoi back in 1967.
Indeed, if McCain somehow manages to win this election, he will have no one more to thank than Nguyen Van Dai, the
68-year old retired Vietnamese colonel who actually launched the SAM missile that downed McCain's A-4 Skyhawk on October 27, 1967.
In any case, after watching the Republican Convention from mind-numbing start to finish, it is now crystal clear that, apart from McCain's 41-year-old combat narrative -- supplemented by the less familiar narrative about Palin's decade-long battle to combine procreation, small-time government, and the Assembly of God's "Plan for Alaska" -- the Republican Party has become the equivalent of the US housing industry.
It is intellectually bankrupt, with almost no new ideas. As former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan correctly put it, "They went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives."
Worse than that, the Republican Party has also turned its back on many of its old favorite best ideas and brand values -- for example, "small government,"
"balan
ced budgets," "non-intervention," "environmental protection," and
"the US Constitution."
Palin's first 15-minutes of fame temporarily blinded many commentators to this basic fact. But even the most faithful die-hard Republican strategists now agree that, apart from the novelty of her Bat Mitsvah, this abbreviated convention was a gigantic, expensive messaging mess -- and, on balance, a gift to the hapless Democrats -- who are otherwise still fully capable of losing this race, even with a full-scale political and economic gale at their backs.
We'll explore the numerous contradictions in McCain's program below.
(c) SubmergingMarkets, 2008