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 politics, from the traditional conservative-liberal orientation to
the male-female or what he does not shy away from calling, in the currently popular phrasing, the Mars-Venus
axis. Forget about ideology. The parties are agreed on all
essentials. It is now, in the era of what Mr. Kristol is not the
first to call “postmodern politics,” just a question of which party is
able to snap up the most, and the most popular, symbols. These, in
1996, are mostly Venusian.

Though in terms of substance, for example, the Democrats have become
the “me-too” party, in terms