Will the American public buy Bill Clinton’s version of reality or Donald Trump’s Idiocracy? –

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

It was a historic moment on Day Two of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia when Senator Bernie Sanders stood up with the Vermont delegation to place Hillary Clinton’s name into nomination for president as the first woman ever to break that glass ceiling.

While many of Sanders supporters are still disappointed that he did not win the nomination, by the time former president Bill Clinton took to the stage and started speaking, it was a packed house and most everybody seemed onboard in the fight to defeat Donald Trump in November.

While the official summary on C-SPAN says he recounted his life with Hillary Clinton while highlighting her accomplishments in politics and diplomacy, calling his wife “the best darn change-maker I’ve met in my entire life,” this was more than a typical campaign biography. It was one hell of a curriculum vitae, the academic term for a resume, Latin for the “course of one’s life.”

But with many political accounts of one’s life, we couldn’t help but notice a number of questionable facial expressions, especially lip bites by Clinton when he mentioned some accomplishments, which I’m sure Tim Roth as Dr. Cal Lightman on ”Lie to Me” would at least cast as embellishment. Surely she didn’t accomplish all those children’s health and education programs all by herself.

Once again it was a bit excruciating to watch the pundits on TeeVee try to analyze the action, without the smarts or the guts to say what really needed to be said. If I had been up there, the real analysis is whether the show was accomplishing its real mission, firing people up to show up at the polls and vote for Hillary or at least against Trump.

Compared to last week’s Republican convention in Cleveland to a nearly all white audience, this was an amazing sea of American diversity in Philly. Women cried. Latinos cheered. African Americans smiled, and gays and the disabled waived their signs and clapped enraptured at being accepted on a big stage broadcast on national television.

If mainstream America and independent voters tuned in, this show worked like a charm.

If they were off playing Pokemon somewhere, it might not have worked well enough.

On Tuesday, Gallup and other polling outfits had Trump and Clinton even in the polls. Is this working well enough to get “Her” the bump in public support she needs? So far so good.

There was a weird couple of hours in between the Sanders nomination speech and Bill Clinton’s 45 minute sales pitch that made Day Two look like Assistant Secretary try out night, with an out of place homage to 9/11 that seemed to try to bolster Hillary’s image as a tough war hawk. It’s not clear that is the direction progressive Democratic voters want to take the country, so the talking heads on PBS, with strange looks on their faces as if a producer were screaming in their ears to talk about something else, stopped showing the speeches and covered the time with commentary.

But in the end, Bill Clinton said it best, whether you believe him, or not. Contrasting his story of their life to the characterizations of his wife at the Republican convention, he said: “One is real. One is made up.”

Now that Roger Ailes is gone at Fox News over sexual harassment allegations, we are left wondering if Rupert Murdoch’s boys, who have taken over the network, will get around to transforming that right-wing Republican, nationalistic, patriotic American fake news outfit into something real in time to prevent Trump from ascending to dictator. They have been making it up for nearly two decades, giving credence to those who think belief is equal to reality.

It remains to be seen if Trump’s victory over the establishment Republicans can go all the way to the White House, where we will all live in a reality show called “Idiocracy.” Or whether Hillary’s bid to be the first woman president on the heals of Barack Obama being the first black president will be enough to save some semblance of American democracy for the children of the future.

As of yesterday, I would put the odds at 50/50. Every day that goes by without another major disaster and a successful show in Philly makes the odds go up. This morning I’m thinking 55-45.

What do you think?