Andrew Sullivan on The Convention, Day 1

Andrew Sullivan's reaction to day 1 of the Democratic Convention; masterful and right out of the Republican playbook [I must add, less all the lies]. You can find his reports here, here and here

A couple of snips:

TO THE RIGHT OF BUSH: For the Democrats to run to the right of Bush on the war - while leaving behind the question of whether the war in Iraq was right or not - is their only hope of victory, but also, oddly enough, the most direct path to victory. They also evoked the anxiety many Americans have that, in a time of war, they are so reviled around the world. Americans are prepared to fight alone, but they'd prefer not to. Carter spoke to those anxieties:

After 9/11, America stood proud, wounded but determined and united. A cowardly attack on innocent civilians brought us an unprecedented level of cooperation and understanding around the world.
But in just 34 months we have watched with deep concern as all this good will has been squandered by a virtually unbroken series of mistakes and miscalculations.

If you're a worried undecided voter, you may nott agree with all that. But you'll be troubled by enough of it to consider Kerry. And then there was the gut-punch: the indirect use of Bush's dubious National Guard service. In fact, the way in which the Democrats used the service record of Kerry against Bush was straight out of the Republican playbook. It's a pretty low blow, and Carter delivered it with a deep thud. When you describe someone as weak on defense and a draft-dodger, you're usually a Republican. But not this time.

And another:

CLINTON AT HIS BEST: Carter's was the better speech, but Clinton was magnificent. I think he was better last night than at either of his own conventions and certainly better than any of his SOTUs. He performed a brilliant rhetorical trick: he deployed the usual canards used against him to buttress Kerry. Rather than attack the wealthy as recjpients of tax cuts, he attacked himself as a now-wealthy man. And then the coup de grace: he put himself and Bush in the same camp as draft-dodgers, in stark comparison to the patriotic Kerry! My jaw was on the floor at that point in a mixture of admiration and horror. But it was mighty effective. And the way in which he described the cost of the tax cut in terms of squandered attempts to improve homeland defense was another smart move. Use the Republican tax cut issue against the Republican security issue. Wedge against them for once. If the constitution didn't prevent it, the man would still be president. After last night's speech, you can see why.

We have all suspected that Sully had turned on Bush and this sure makes it sound like it.

I left Sully's typo's in the blockquotes.