Tale of two conventions

With McCain's acceptance speech, the battle right royal for the White house begins. Each party has thrown down the gauntlet and challenged the other for a duel. November 7th, we will know.

However one thing I noticed between the two party conventions kind of surprised me. Both parties more or less had the same goal for the convention.

The democrats had one main goal - unite the party behind Obama.

So what did they do ? They brow beat Hillary into falling in line. Pushed President Clinton to retreat for now. They then orchestrated a unity of sorts and then brought in Biden to solidify the blue collar, small town voter base. They needed to do all this so that Obama could launch himself with the party's traditional solid base in his pocket.

On the other hand, the republicans had one main goal - unite the party conservatives behind McCain.


So what did they do ? They change the whole subject and theme of the election. Cleverly, they bring in Sarah Palin. A total conservative, with introductory pictures and videos showing her firing a gun, electrifying the party base. Up until this time, the hard core conservatives of the party were one foot in and other foot out of the Straight Talk express. But with this VP pick, looks like all are on board now.

This leaves McCain to take the high ground and play the reach out across the aisle game. Sarah's speech yesterday left no one in doubt who will be the lead attach dog and McCain's speech made it quite clear which group he will be targeting - Independents & Hillary Democrats.

Its very ironic that both candidates in this so called historic election have more or less the same issue - locking in their party base.