Time for Democrats to grow a backbone

The Defiant Ones

By CHARLES M. BLOW, NYT

The rousing start to the Democratic convention here in Charlotte, N.C., makes last week’s Republican convocation in Tampa, Fla., look like, well, a tea party.

If viewers thought Democrats might tuck in their tails and run away from the president’s record, they were mistaken. The speakers gave full-throated, bare-fanged defenses of Barack Obama — rattling off hours of his accomplishments — and they used that record to draw a stark distinction with the plans of Mitt Romney, whom they attacked with unfettered ferocity.

The Democrats came to the party ready for a fight.

If you had to sum it up in a word, it would probably be defiance, as in defying the polls, defying the pundits and defying some harsh political realities.

The energetic and consistent speeches — all a variation on the theme of an already present and still-growing America that the Republicans are willfully and possibly even congenitally blind to — ran counter to tight polls, the “enthusiasm-gap” hawks of cable news and a still-struggling economy.

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