Dem convention, night three: Savior of mankind to explain where it all went wrong

Here’s the schedule. Tonight’s show began at 4:30 p.m. ET, but things don’t really start rolling until “Barack’s Angels” formally bestow Hollywood’s benediction sometime between 7:30 and 8. Then comes Caroline Kennedy to remind America that what you think is the sun is really just Teddy’s angelic smile, shining down from heaven upon The One’s good works; then Eva Longoria and careerist loser Charlie Crist; and then John Kerry, who once lost a presidential election in part due to flip-flopping, who’s going to try to get away with a line like this.

More Kerry excerpts: “It isn’t fair to say Mitt Romney doesn’t have a position on Afghanistan. He has every position.” #NBCPolitics

— Mike O’Brien (@mpoindc) September 6, 2012

After that comes our garrulous moron of a VP to explain how Romney’s gon’ put y’all back in chains (Democrats have pushed him out of primetime in favor of Dick Durbin) and then, at long last, the man of the hour. If you’re wondering how far the goalposts have moved, Joel Pollak summarizes Clinton’s message last night elegantly:

“Yes We Can” became “No One Could Have” – Americans should not, Clinton urged, be disappointed in President Obama for failing to achieve the great things he promised in his soaring speeches–or even the bare minimum that we had expected. It was never actually possible, given the state the country had been in. “No president–not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years,” Clinton said.

That excuse is not only an acknowledgement of failure, but an admission of fraud. If he had not promised to do more, and to be more, than any other politician, Barack Obama would not only have lost the election in 2008–he would also have lost the primary to his rival, Hillary Clinton. At the time, Bill called Obama’s rhetoric what it was: a “fairy tale.” Today, Clinton is a willing accomplice to Obama’s bait-and-switch confidence game.

Quite so. I like Timothy Carney’s formulation too:

Promise 20x. Get elected. Deliver 5x. Deploy Bill Clinton to say, “nobody could have delivered 20x, re-elect this guy” ow.ly/dvBiP

— Timothy P Carney (@TPCarney) September 6, 2012

Read Philip Klein to refresh your memory of what that 20x entailed. The golfer-in-chief is going to ask for a mulligan tonight because, as it turns out, slowing the rise of the oceans wasn’t something his superpowers were able to handle. (Almost no one at the convention is talking about the oceans these days.) Even the Onion can’t resist marking the occasion by goofing on his ridiculous overpromising. Quote:

With the 2012 Democratic National Convention now under way in Charlotte, Beltway observers are reporting that the mood inside the Time Warner Cable Arena remains spirited and optimistic, despite a noticeable lack of the delusional, completely-out-of-touch-with-reality magic that characterized the event four years ago…

“Obviously, people are never going to be seized by the exact same patently bullshit sense of destiny they were last time around, but I would like to see this convention have at least a little more of the totally deceptive electricity we saw in Denver,” convention attendee David Lowell said. “I think maybe in the next day or two people will really start to build up to moronically thinking real change is finally on its way.”

Political analysts have said that if Obama wants to regain momentum, he must use the 2012 convention to reproduce the spirit of unexamined and wholly unearned confidence that propelled millions of deluded young people to the polls in 2008, and must persuade those who voted for him four years ago that their sad, childlike trust was not misplaced.

Here’s your thread to track this year’s ridiculous overpromising, which apparently will include a section on entitlement reform. If that sounds familiar, it should. While we wait, via BuzzFeed, here’s a video trip down memory lane for the only man in America who likes Obama more today than he did four years ago. I’ll leave you with this from ABC, a strong candidate for headline of the year after 42 months of 8+ percent unemployment:

• Bobby Jindal: Paternalistic, big-government liberalism is the biggest loser here
• Chris Christie: “I’ll be here to welcome” Obama when he comes to tour the NJ coast again next week
• MSNBC consensus: Obama’s speech was historic, amazing, “one of the best of his presidency”

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