Scared straight: notes from our nation's awful political spectacles.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Major-party political conventions

ATTENDING A major-party political convention is a lot like putting a metal dish into a microwave. You know something bad's going to happen, but after four years you need to be reminded of the acrid smell.

Whatever was wafting over Denver and St. Paul this summer, it certainly wasn't the fine, fresh scent of freedom (even if I did spy a Ron Paul banner behind a Cessna on the last day of the Republican National Convention). Both friendly cities became concentrated police states, where local and state and even national law enforcement dressed up like hyper-militarized Ninja Turtles, just in case any loose scattering of "anarchists" was able to assemble a division of tanks. Almost every type of local business I frequented complained of drastically reduced sales, as sensible locals fled far from the scene rather than watch the gruesome spectacle of thousands expressing actual enthusiasm for 19th century political parties that ran out of fresh ideas long ago.

I would ignore these made-for-TV exercises altogether if it weren't for the unhappy fact that the participants share duopoly power over history's most lethal military and control a guaranteed income stream coming straight from you and me. Figuring out what they're up to strikes me as an act of citizen self-defense. And/or self-mutilation.

In Denver, at the Democratic National Convention, I went to investigate one hope and one fear. The hope: Would Barack Obama's stance against the Iraq War really "change the mind set" of Washington foreign policy, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle? The fear: Are the Democrats really planning to run domestic policy the way they've been campaigning--significantly to the left of any Democratic ticket since Michael Dukakis? Both answers were disappointing.

On foreign policy, Democrats are all political intent, no guiding principle. Outfits such as the three-year-old Truman Project, "the nation's only organization that recruits, trains, and positions a new generation of progressives across America to lead on national security," distributed guides of military terminology to young activists and organized a series of confabs to discuss Democratic approaches to the world's persistent challenges. These foreign policy events were among the most well-attended of the week, dwarfing similar panel discussions from conventions past. And they produced little if any evidence that the candidate who rode anti-war sentiment to the nomination will do any real...