OPINION: "I'm John Kerry," began the candidate on Thursday night, "and I'm . . ." Theatrical pause. ". . . reporting for duty!". If you were playing the John Kerry Drinking Game, wherein you take one belt for every Vietnam reference he makes, you were likely in a coma 10 minutes into his speech, writes Mark Steyn.
The rest of us stuck with him as he attempted to connect his flimsy reassurances on the current war, which he presumably hopes to win, to his service in a war 40 years old, which America (thanks in part to the efforts of young John Kerry) contrived to lose.
Today's Democrats were anti-Vietnam to a man 35 years ago. If they were still conscientious objectors, they'd conscientiously object to the ludicrous opportunism of their presidential campaign. Instead, they're having a grand old time.
They cheer the non-stop Viet-retro cavalcade - a stageful of Swift boat veterans, the war-wounded triple-amputee Max Cleland, the sonorous Kerry invocations of "we band of brothers, a little older, a little greyer, but we still know how to fight for our country".
But they cheer it mainly as an excellent post-modern jest, a way of sticking it to the Republicans.
To anybody else, including those sought-after "swing voters" in "battleground states", it's starting to sound a little weird. You get the feeling they were this close to turning the stage into a jungle set and having the senator swim silently up the aisle, his boot-blacked face suddenly emerging from the deep like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.
As it was, even Alexandra Kerry's childhood anecdote about Dad diving into the briny to retrieve the family's sinking hamster cage and perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the occupant conjured a vaguely Me Kong Delta imagery.
You were surprised the surviving hamster, Licorice, and assorted gerbils and guinea pigs weren't brought up on stage so Kerry could embrace them and drone: "We band of rodents, we're a little older, a little greyer, but for the sake of our country we're ready to go round the old hamster wheel one more time."
John Kerry says he's running on his record. In fact, of his four decades of adult life, he's running on his four months in Vietnam. Of the other 39 years and eight months, there's nary a word.
Take any one of the showbiz luminaries at the Democratic convention - Glenn Close, say. Imagine if she's up for a big role in a new movie and the producers ask: "Well, what have you done?" And she says, "I've got a great resume. I did summer stock in Vermont in 1969. Third Indian maiden in Rose-Marie."
And no, I'm not comparing Vietnam to summer theatre: what I'm saying is that whatever you were doing in 1969, it's simply nutty to emphasise that at the expense of the subsequent 35 years. Certainly, no previous veteran - Dole, Bush snr, Carter, McGovern - ever thought to do it.
The leap from Vietnam 1969 to the Oval Office 2004 is a non-sequitur, literally.
Vietnam's paying diminishing returns for Kerry. The more he harps on it, the more hollow seems the post-Vietnam Kerry - ie, Senator Kerry - and the more he sounds like a man whose worldview was frozen in the Sixties.
"We believed we could change the world," he said of those times. "And you know what? We did - but we're not finished." Just what we need: more boomer self-congratulation.
Amid the variously laboured song titles selected for the convention - "We Are Family", "You've Got A Friend" - the one that struck me as most pertinent to the Kerry campaign was "Blowin' In The Wind". The archetypal weathervane pol thinks he's got it figured out: the voters want tough talk - "strong", "stronger", "strengthen" evidently all poll-test well - but rather less action when they switch on the evening news.
So Kerry's position on the war is this: "Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response." Got that? If the Empire State Building's taken out, he'll certainly respond to it.
Next time round, there won't be any "Bush lies" about where the WMD are because he'll wait until they're smoking in the middle of a big crater in Chicago.
That one line encapsulates the stale, dozy complacency of the supposedly complex Kerry. Others evidently feel differently, but it seems to me emblematic of the Democratic Party's problem intellectually: it's in a state of denial.
It's a September 10th party, so convinced in its bones that the "war" is just a racket got up by Cheney and Halliburton that it's come up with an ingenious racket of its own - a poseur warrior for a party that couldn't be less interested in the subject.
Will it work? Don't bet on it. Many of those yearning for respite from Bush will feel faintly queasy at the thought of four long years like those 40 minutes last Thursday night. The one thing we can say for sure about a Kerry presidency is that it will be no laughing matter.
The only joke, if such it was, in the entire speech ran as follows: "Now, I'm not one to read into things, but guess which wing of the hospital the maternity ward was in? I'm not kidding. I was born in the West Wing!"
(Exclamation point from Senator Kerry's original text!)
Get it? The West Wing of the White House is where the Oval Office is! So JFK's very birth was freighted with destiny - along with maybe 25 per cent of his fellow Americans. I mean, how many wings does the average hospital have? It doesn't exactly narrow down the presidential field.
Come to that, isn't it a little strange to know which wing of the hospital you were born in? I was born in the Wellesley Hospital, Toronto, but I haven't a clue which end of the building. Senator Kerry looked mighty pleased with his joke (I have the feeling he made it up himself, rather than procuring the services of a professional) but it communicated not so much a sense of humour as a sense of entitlement.
It reminded me of the pre-Diana royal family, when princes and princesses would on rare occasions give awkward stilted TV interviews in the course of which some lame regal jest would be greeted with massively exaggerated laughter by the sycophantic host and audience as evidence of how "human" this particular royal highness was.
Meanwhile, when anybody enjoys himself at Kerry's expense he stands on his dignity like Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers movies. When NASA releases unintentionally hilarious photos of the senator in a "space bunny" suit, he huffs and puffs about "dirty tricks", even though he's posing for the picture.
There's a weariness in the electorate these days: the last three years have been heavy. But even if the war ended tomorrow, the great plonking humourlessness of a Kerry presidency would be far heavier on the national psyche.