It was typical of the obtuseness of the press that it made such long and loud complaints about the fact that the two parties’ political conventions in August were “staged” or “scripted.” Well, duh!—as my teenage daughter would say. Frank Rich was just one of many complainers about the “year of the prefab convention” and took the occasion to show that he knew how the professionals did it. Yet you would think that the point of The New York Times’s having its former theater critic write political commentary would be that he—presumably more skilled at reading the subtext of staged material than someone like Ted Koppel— would of all people be most likely to see that these were the two most newsworthy conventions in years.

Ultimately, it was that well-known critic, Irving Kristol, who spotted what was there for anyone to see: that the 1996 conventions revealed a tectonic shift in American polit ...

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