Dems' hoopla leaves behind a party of unnoticed victims

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

There's no doubt that the Democratic National Convention is the big show in town this week, pure theater, players strutting and fretting upon the stage, overstating and overdramatizing. At the Wang, they'd get the hook. At the FleetCenter, they'll get an ovation.

That's politics.

But what's happening offstage is the more important show.

More than 900 pairs of soldier's boots were placed around City Hall last week to represent the American servicemen and women who have been killed in Iraq so far.

Boston, a city famous for its firsts - first in the country to have a public school, public park, post office, college, public library, subway - is now the first to mandate random searches on its public transportation.

Anti-DNC protesters are marching and protesting in a caged zone - another bid for SECURITY.

Roads and highways are closed. North Station has been shut down. And police are everywhere.

And yet, despite all this, nothing is secure.

``In case of a catastrophic emergency during the Democratic Convention, authorities are planning a boat-lift evacuation for residents and commuters who can't get out by land.''

Lovely.

News reporters are lamenting America's disinterest in watching this convention - and the upcoming Republican convention in New York - on TV.

But Americans aren't watching, not because we don't care about politics but because we've seen this show before. And we've heard all the promises. A chicken in every pot. No child left behind. A kinder, gentler nation. Are we better off now than we were four years ago?

Only those who have stock in Halliburton.

Kerry will bask in the praise of his supporters and he'll praise them - it's all in the script - and he'll accept the nomination and the show will go on. It's all show, and it seems frivolous, somehow, not the process, but the big, self-serving, cordoned-off, balloon-festooned party.

The 9/11 commission report is the real story. It's the one you want to tune in to hear about. The one you read and reread in hopes of what? Discovering something we didn't know? Something we could change? Something that would give us a different ending?

Studying the pictures of the hijackers as they went through airport security at Dulles, reading what they said in the cockpit, imagining, for the zillionth time, how it was for all those people who were only trying to get somewhere, and how it could have been, if government had done its job, brings you right back to Sept. 11 - to the devastation of it. And to the horror. And you look up and you wonder, why is there a party going on?

We are not safe. That's what the commission said. Despite the loss of lives, despite a war, despite all the infringements on our freedom, closed roads, metal detectors, surveillance, random searches, color-coded warnings, we are not safe.

So why the party?

``The most important failure was one of imagination,'' the commission found. ``We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.''

Leaders still don't understand. Democrats and Republicans are doing business as usual, going ahead with their more-show-than-substance conventions as they always have, campaigning as if this is just another year.

It isn't.

We're at war. We're not safe. And the Democrats, if they want the White House, need to take off their party hats, and get serious now.