Boston
SOME PARENTS probably had visions of incontinence on long family car trips when Alexandra Kerry promised Thursday night that, should her father become president, our children will be able to "control their own bodies." But if the reference went over the heads of confused Middle Americans, abortion advocates had no trouble recognizing it as a bone thrown their way by the Democratic campaign. Kerry's own challenge to President Bush--"Let's never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States"--will have been received in living rooms across the nation as an insistence that James Madison be given his due. Gay activists, however, surely recognized the allusion to Kerry's opposition to a constitutional amendment to block gay marriage.

To nobody's surprise, there were two conventions. First, there was the daily grind of party work, held for the benefit of activist delegates, who this year were more hard-line than ever before. Only 2 percent of them are pro-life, according to the Boston Globe; 95 percent of them think the war on Iraq was a mistake. Second, there was the prime-time convention shown to 40 million citizens, during which John Kerry spoke of his faith, and both he and his vice-presidential nominee solemnly took up their wartime responsibilities and promised to increase the size of the military.

If Republicans hope to convince the public that the "real" Democratic party is a bunch of extremist double-talkers, they are overconfident. True, there were moments of brazen disingenuousness last week, the most

The week had its dud speeches, too, which will do the Democrats some damage. There was Jimmy Carter, blaming the Bush administration for failures of the Clinton Middle East peace process that happened before Bush took office. There was Ted Kennedy, blundering through his speech (patriots at Lexington and Concord, he said, "fired the shirt round the world"), with its sour little jokes and the vote-repelling blitheness with which he quipped, "The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush."

There was Al Sharpton, calling for reparations for slavery and (as he surely intended) stomping on the groundbreaking speech of Barack Obama the night before, in which Obama made the case that the inner-city poor need not count on government to solve their every problem.

Perhaps most electorally harmful, given the personality-focused way campaigns are covered nowadays, was Teresa Heinz Kerry's paean to her own self-assertiveness, in which she was permitted to vent the delusion that hers is the candor of a feminist who had fought for her rights, rather than a billionairess who is simply used to being listened to. This is leaving aside her galling attempt to recast her upbringing in the upper reaches of Mozambican society under colonial dictatorship, and her education in apartheid South Africa, as human-rights credentials, rather than the opposite.