Politics as a Specific Economic Stimulus

There was a story as a run up to the conventions this week and next week about the economic impact of national political party meetings. A lot of the usual suspects are included in a list of economic upticks such as hotels, restaurants, cabs and car services, and my favorite and (all in all, least surprising) prostitution.

For cynics, who feel 'professional politicians are out to screw the common folks anyway', I guess this is reassuring, except, at least in theory, our neighbors attend these nominating conventions (okay, not my neighbors, technically. I don't even know most of their names, and even fewer of their last names, but I see them around and they're too busy trying to make ends meet for themselves and their families to head off into the wild blue yonder for a national political convention, regardless of how swell the entertainment may be after the floor fights are over).

There's been a nationwide search, say news stories, for hostesses, and I assume hosts as well, with the mostesset, or close to it. The ABC TV News story quotes advertising with special pricing to conventioneers with proof of party membership. I smile even as I type this because I'm thinking of a two months ago all that viral advertising on line about "I'm voting Democrat" and "I'm voting Republican" and no mention of special pricing for knee pads was mentioned. Cynic that I am, I have to wonder why not?

Americans are funny about this stuff. Maybe it's our Puritan heritage. I never got used to walking through Dr Mueller's or Crazy Sexy in Frankfurt am Main and listening to negotiations on sex acts similar to what you goes on when buying a car, albeit with different outcomes desired for getting the chrome off a trailer hitch. Pick us up and put us in a new environment and we'll do things we'd never do in our little town, no matter how large or small that little town is. Sometimes, when Denver or Minneapolis becomes Reno we become people we don't even know, or (later, much later) want to know. And we always hope you, whoever you are, don't recognize us, or yourself in us.

And when so often those whom we select to seek public office later are revealed to be flawed and failed in too-human ways, I won't name names because I don't have to, we're always angered and we feel betrayed. We forget they are we and we are whom we have always been and are as capable of surprising as we are of disappointing one another.
-bill kenny