Truth - Al Franken [45]
For twelve dark years the Republicans have dealt in cynicism and skepticism. They’ve mastered the art of division and diversion, and they have robbed us of our hope.
Screw you, Zell. Really. Honest.
Disgusted with Zell’s speech and Cheney’s follow-up, which did little to improve my mood, I headed over to Tavern on the Green to party with the California delegation to the Republican Convention. You might not expect that I would seek comfort in that particular environ. But my pal Darryl Worley, a jingoistic but bighearted country star whom I had bonded with on a USO Tour to Iraq, was providing the night’s entertainment and had hooked up some VIP passes for my staff, my wife, Franni, and me.
Dancing with my wife to Darryl’s down-home, twangy melodies, the ugliness of the evening’s speeches melted away. As Darryl’s lead guitarist, Soir, was pickin’, we were grinnin’. Everybody in the place was grinnin’. Sean Hannity came up and put his arm around me. I’m not kidding. It was like that.
My twenty-three-year-old producer, Ben Wikler, danced with the second-most-beautiful girl in the place (after Franni—who is not a girl, but a woman). Impressed by Ben’s fancy footwork on the dance floor and his rugged good looks, the California Republican beauty seemed to want to make more of the evening. Ben, however, demurred. Not because he’s gay, as so many good-looking dancers are, but because he was thinking about his girlfriend, Beth, who is even more beautiful than the Republican lass (although, in my opinion, still a hairsbreadth short of Franni).2 All in all, it was the kind of bipartisan night that brought back memories of the kinder, gentler days of the Ford administration.
The next evening, as I waded into the crowd on the convention floor to deliver my final evening of field reports for Air America Radio, I ran into that same stunningly beautiful Republican young woman. She gave me a smile that looked like the sun rising over the ocean (much like my wife’s smile—though thirty years younger). We got to talking about the differences between Republicans and Democrats, and I had an idea. I asked her to make me a promise. When she got home to California, would she get on the Internet and watch the keynote speeches of the two party conventions? Zell Miller’s and Barack Obama’s. She said she would.
You might have picked up from this chapter that I wish that the Democratic Convention had had a somewhat harder edge to it. Not a dishonest, contemptible Zell Miller 2004 edge, but a genuine, hard-hitting Zell Miller 1992 edge. I think it’s possible to fight hard without selling your soul. Sometimes you can gain your soul by fighting for what you believe in. So, if I had been in charge of the messaging for the Democratic Convention, instead of whoever the hell was in charge, I would have changed a lot of those speeches. But I wouldn’t have changed a word of Barack Obama’s.
Here’s the part of Obama’s speech that made me proudest, not just of my party, but of my country:
Alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga. A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper—that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the