I've never been big on family reunions. In my family they usually take place at my aunt and uncle's small but surprisingly sprawling split-level ranch, with plenty of undiscovered corners to curl up in the fetal position in, nursing my own private bottle of peppermint schnapps.  I have so many second cousins I don't know at this point that reunions are a little like Amway conventions. 

I am getting worse at names, too, as I get older — not because I can't remember them with a little effort at the outset, but because I'm just not doing names anymore.  I never liked them in the first place, I much prefer generic labels, and now names have all gotten so inane.  What is a Dyvingston?  I can't imagine what the point of it could be. 

Even immediate family reunions, in time, become extended family reunions as the ill effects of rampant mating make themselves felt.  Have you noticed that?  The center never holds.  Old sibling rivalries reemerge.  Traumatic memories, long buried, are recovered at the most inopportune and inappropriate moments.  Hide the knives.

The best you can hope for is to find a long-lost cousin you remember vaguely from thirty years ago — who might as well be someone you sat next to on a Greyhound once for forty-five minutes in college (sans the handjob) — latch onto them, and talk sports.  I must say, in my youth I did not understand how useful a cursory knowledge of sports can be in situations like this, and refused to know anything about them.  But Boston is a great place to be from for this topic.  Everyone hates us.  You'll never lack for lively diatribes.

For me, the national parties' quadrennial conventions are kind of like extended family reunions.  Overflowing with crazy aunts and crusty uncles, blowhards banging on at the table for hours about God knows what all, and lots of backstabbing behind the scenes. We all know the formalities are a bad act, but we grin and bear it, knowing, too, that it'll soon be over and we can dish about who was shooting up in the downstairs bathroom, who passed out in the hall closet, and which second cousins hooked up in the utility room.

I didn't watch any of the convention, except afterwards on the internet, where I could pick and choose.  You miss some of the drama that way, but I've always been one of the ones at the reunion standing outside in the cold with my flask in my coat, chainsmoking, talking sports and contemplating corners to fetal up in.  I'll sound awfully jaded, but I don't need to see what's going on to know what's going on. 

Despite all the history being made at the convention, it was, again, the Clinton psychodrama that drew the most interest from commentators.  Psychodrama is, after all, more fun by far than the serious business of making history.  Everyone agreed that the Clintons behaved.  Some even proclaimed their redemption and rehabilitation was at hand.  There were apparently fears in the press corps beforehand that the Clintons would erupt in racist slanders, spin their heads around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and projectile vomit on the convention delegates.  This did not happen.

But the fact that this did not happen didn't stop the Hillary-haters from parsing every syllable of her speech for hidden threats and coded insults.  Maureen Dowd saw "submerged hate," and the Times blog, The Moment, hinted there was something Machiavellian about Clinton aides coming on-stage before her speech with various suit jackets — red, orange, light blue and teal — holding each one up to the lights to see which would look best in the hall.

Meanwhile Michelle Obama got a free pass for what was, frankly, a weird speech in which this ambitious, successful black woman worshipfully obsessed on the men in her life, and focused exclusively on her roles as sister, daughter, mother, and devoted wife.  No mention of her pursuit of the American dream, her years at Princeton and Harvard Law, or as an associate at the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin where she first met her husband.  No mention of her time as Associate Dean of Student Services at U of C, where she developed the University's Community Service Center.  Or her $273,618 a year post at the University of Chicago Hospitals (where she out-earned her husband almost two-to-one). 

Instead we learned that her brother was even better at basketball than Obama, and that while Michelle sometimes thought he was looking down on her (literally, tee hee), she had come to realize he was actually "watching over her" (awwww!).  Her mother was on camera a lot, but hardly mentioned (twice, by my count) while brother Craig alone garnered 8 mentions. (The rest of the speech was devoted to her crippled father and her totally awesome husband.)

If this was the first you had heard of Michelle Obama, you would not have known she had a career aside from being Mary Magdalene to Barack's Jesus Christ Super Star.  True, she is not The Candidate, but the calculated omission of her career achievements was as cynical as anything the Clintons are capable of.  All that was missing was the tray of chocolate chip cookies.

Political pundits, ever intrigued by strategies and schemes while pretending to esteem authenticity, were mainly impressed with what they imagined was a successful appeal to those who might be threatened by a black woman's sharp intelligence and success.  To many, the avoidance by Michelle of her own impressive autobiography in her speech was a subtle stroke of political genius.  But here's a news flash:  those folks who are so afraid of the "angry black woman"?  Weren't watching. 
 
As for Mr. Obama, he delivered the speech everyone expected him to, more or less, but after the banquet was over and the table had been cleared, the carcass of the Clinton era dumped into the rubbish bin of history.  Obama's — and the nation's — schizophrenia about race (he keeps reminding us that the other side is going to keep reminding us that he's got a funny name and doesn't look like other presidents) tempered and dampened what might have been a more widely celebrated moment. 

And McCain's announcement that he had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate undeniably stole some of the Democrats' thunder coming out of the convention.  Palin won't snatch any of Hillary's supporters who weren't already leaning hard towards McCain, and may even repulse many of them with her retrograde social views.  But she's likely to keep women like my mother, life-long Republicans and self-identified Evangelicals who were flirting with Obama, from jumping ship. 

What an irony it would be if Hillary put all those cracks in the glass ceiling only to have Sarah Palin break through it in the end.  One thing Palin's nomination ensures is that Hillary will redouble her efforts on behalf of Obama.  Maybe there are a few scraps left on that old carcass, after all.  I'm sure Maureen Dowd will be raiding the fridge for leftovers.