It's more than a new day... It's a whole new era.

I was just checking news off my Yahoo home page. As I was reading through a story about the line up of speakers for the Democratic National Convention in Denver week after next, it occurred to me that I haven’t really heard much about the Republican convention, scheduled for the following week.

To see what I could find, I searched the term “Republican National Convention”. Ironically, the results were by and large all articles about the Democratic National Convention with minor quotes as to what some minor Republican or another thought of the DNC activities.

Thinking that perhaps there was some left-leaning bias on the part of the Yahoo search engine, I switched engines. Twice. I tried Mozilla/Firefox, and all I got was quick little news blurbs about the official IT provider for the Republican National Convention, the withdrawal of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as sponsors of the Republican event. On Google, the most “newsworthy” article on the topic was a blurb declaring that Vice President Dick Cheney will be speaking one night at the Republican convention.

Regardless of where one’s politics lie, it’s hard not to admit that the Democrats are demonstrating a level of leadership that this country hasn’t seen in recent history. I agree with very little of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has to say in the way of politics and social policy, but I am very impressed by the level of leadership she has exhibited in uniting her party in Congress. Speaker Pelosi is speaking on the first night of the Convention, along with Michelle Obama.

Since I can’t find any information online about the RNC line-up, I’ve been racking my brain to think of who the Republicans have in their arsenal who is going to be able to inspire and energize their choir, let alone a politically disenfranchised nation, the way Barack Obama and his supporters are inevitably going to. I can’t think of much of anyone, really.