On to the Conventions.

• Author: Durst, Will
• Position: Off the Map - Viewpoint essay

For those of you blessed with sweet selective memory loss, now might be a good time to prepare for the national political conventions that will shortly be washing over this country like a sugar glaze waterfall on a Krispy Kreme donut parade.

As in baseball, National Political Conventional Wisdom holds that the home team (meaning whoever gets to use the South Lawn for impromptu touch football games) bats last. So the Democrats will convene first at the end of August in Denver, and the Republicans follow the next week in St. Paul. The Republicans are in for a treat. Late summer in the Upper Midwest. Come for the humidity, stay for the mosquitoes.

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Last time around, way back in those $1.69/gallon of gas halcyon days of 2004, the Republicans chose to convene in New York the week after the Athens Summer Games, and the Democrats inexplicably picked to meet in Boston two weeks before the Olympics--a move that proved to be about as successful as lighting a Weber grill in a broom closet filled with oily rags. Two weeks of the most exciting athletic competition on the face of the planet did a pretty good job of wiping away any residual memory of John Kerry. Not that John Kerry himself didn't do a terrific job of making us forget about John Kerry.

And then the Swift Boat Boys started running ads, and John Kerry not only failed to respond but decided to go on vacation and be seen in spandex while windsurfing. None of which helped. And the Republicans and George W. Bush accepted the nomination a full month after John Kerry and then stole Ohio while everyone was focused on Florida, and that pretty much was that. Again.

This time the Democrats are in Colorado as a kind of celebratory dance trying to spotlight their enhanced prospects in the Rocky Mountain states, which used to reliably be a major suckhole for them...