Republicans to Cities: Drop DeadBy Kevin Baker, The New York Times

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/13848-republicans-to-cities-drop-dead

A leading Republican columnist, trying to re-stoke her candidate's faltering campaign before the first presidential debate, felt so desperate that she advised him to turn to cities.

"Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city -- don't they count anymore?" Peggy Noonan lamented in The Wall Street Journal. "A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings."

But the fact is that cities don't count anymore -- at least not in national Republican politics.

The very word "city" went all but unheard at the Republican convention, held in the rudimentary city of Tampa, Fla. The party platform ratified there is over 31,000 words long. It includes subsections on myriad pressing topics, like "Restructuring the U.S. Postal Service for the Twenty-First Century" and "American Sovereignty in U.S. Courts," which features a full-throated denunciation of the "unreasonable extension" of the Lacey Act of 1900 (please don't ask). There are also passages specifying what our national policy should be all over the world -- but not in one American city.