Boring ...

Desperate to look like sensible, middle-of-the-road moderates, the Democrats managed to put on one of the most boring political conventions in history.

Why anyone would bother to watch it is a puzzle. There was no fire, no brimstone, no fireworks, just a lot of far-out liberals trying to convince the voters that deep down inside they're really moderate conservatives who share the values of the majority of the American people.

In the past, Democratic National Conventions were almost always real down-in-the-gutter slugfests. This time around the people running the show went out of their way to make the gathering look like Sesame Street.

You can just imagine the frustration of the feature speakers at having to have every single word in their speeches carefully scrutinized so they won't give voters the impression that they are the left-wing bomb throwers that they have always been.

As they stand on the podium uttering their sanitized, pre-approved remarks one can imagine what it is costing them to suppress the urge to let fly with the angry rhetoric that is their stock in trade. It must have been boiling up in their guts and it had to have taken an extreme effort to bottle up the suppressed bile before it boiled over.

In the end, they were forced simply to recycle all the usual Democratic claptrap and flat-out lies that underlie their party line and everybody has heard a thousand times. As a result, those masses of delegates who came to Boston hungry to satisfy their need for raw meat are finding themselves being fed a diet of political fat-free yogurt.

Take for example the appearance of Mrs. Heinz Kerry on the same platform as Senator Kennedy who she once called a "perfect bastard," and insisted he is not to be trusted.

Noted for her tendency to be less than genteel -- she recently told a reporter to "shove it" -- Mrs. Kerry was all sweetness and light É and as dull as a cake knife. If the convention officials thought that by confronting the voters with a sanitized version of this spitfire they could clean up her image and make her look like little Mary Sunshine they were wrong. It would take a lot more than that to remake her image. They should have kept her under wraps instead of parading her before the voters.

They should have also realized that Americans want their first ladies to be É well É ladies. They want the president's wife to be in the same mold as Jackie Kennedy, or Nancy Reagan or Laura Bush, none of whom would ever have told anybody to "shove it." The voters are not looking for a modern version of Tugboat Annie, even if she's worth a billion dollars.

The main reason Barack Obama, the keynote speaker, was so widely acclaimed is due to the fact that the people who came on before and after him were just flat-out boring.

Obama's main theme -- that there is only one America and we're all a part of it -- is just plain deceptive once you realize that the Democrat idea of oneness is not most Americans' idea.

His party believes in one America only if it is their America and that America is a socialist America.

Let's look at who is supporting John Kerry. The U.S. communist and socialist parties and the head of the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, for example. If you cast your vote for John Kerry these are the people who you'll be joining.

Is that the one America the American people want? The day after the election do they want to wake up realizing that they were on the same side as the communists and the Sandinistas who brutalized Nicaragua before they got thrown out? The convention would have been better if the Democrats had shown their real selves and engaged in shouting and screaming and shaking their clenched fists as is their usual practice, instead of trying to look like a bunch of loveable pussycats who won't really tax you down to your last dollar or surrender our sovereignty to France and Germany as soon as they get to the White House.

Michael Reagan is a syndicated columnist.