Meh...

Love BuzzFeed's Ben Smith's tweet after Obama's acceptance speech last night: Oba-meh. Pretty clever.

That's the sense I got listening to the speech while making supper. Obama has nothing new to say. It was just a re-hash of stuff we've been hearing over and over again.

I'd go so far as to say "meh" sums up the entire Democratic party right now. The "face" of the party is either old (Clinton, Biden, Carter, Reid), sleazy (Emmanuel), old and sleazy (Pelosi, Frank), strident (Strickland), and dishonest (Wasserman Schultz).

It portrays itself as the party of women, but their women come across as either victims (Sandra Fluke) or extremists (Nancy Keenan).

It portrays the Republican party as racist, but in attempting to divide the country along racial lines, it becomes the more racist of the two parties. When 90% of African Americans cast their votes in 2008 for Obama, that's racist. And when people of color are considered more likely to vote Democrat than Republican, this has less to do with the Republicans being (supposedly) racist than it does with the Democratic party pandering to minorities by promising cradle-to-grave protection a la The Life of Julia or telling lies about how the evil Republicans want to protect millionaires and billionaires, abandon the middle class, yank the safety net out from under the poor, and end Medicare as we know it (well, that part may be true since even Democrats acknowledge that Medicare as we know it is not sustainable).

Contrary to the tired cliche that the GOP is the party of old white men, I actually see a GOP on the rise, featuring fresh, young, and yes, diverse faces. Mia Love, Susanna Martinez, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, Condi Rice, Scott Walker, to name a few.

Even Mitt Romney, though not young compared to (say) Paul Ryan, comes across as fresh, if for no other reason than he brings a new skill to a previously unmet resume item for presidential candidates: business acumen. Obama had very little on his resume in this regard to commend himself back in 2008. In fact, he had very little to commend himself at all, other than the ability to tap into the zeitgeist and offer a nebulous "hope" and a symbolic victory over racial prejudice. And though he now claims to have more foreign policy experience than Romney, back in '08, Obama had no experience in this regard either. And critics of the president point out that Obama has quietly adopted many of George Bush's foreign policy decisions despite having trashed them in the lead-up to his election back in '08.

So what's new and fresh about Obama? Nothing. All he can say this time around is that "change" doesn't come easy, that it's going to be a long, hard slog, so he needs four more years to finish the job. In other words? "Hey, folks, cut me some slack. I never promised you a rose garden." But in fact, yes he did. That's exactly what he promised. In soaring rhetoric surrounded by phony Greek columns, he assured us that he was the change we were waiting for, that the oceans would stop their rising, etc.

Last night, there were no Greek columns and no pandering promises. Just a plea. Let me keep my job.

Meh.