Subscribe to one of our news e-mail lists . Everybody complains that political conventions have declined into nothing more than predictable TV shows. So last week there was one Republican Convention on the big stage, where the newly domesticated party leaders felt your pain and the gospel choirs whooped. By one estimate, there were as many as 900 such celebrations. But the G.O.P. is a party with a lot to celebrate.
Cash is the Ecstasy of politics.
Or a convention so muscle-bound with money. At the downtown hotels, there were limos too long to turn into the oval drives. At the airport, there was Learjet gridlock. Everywhere there was Representative Tom DeLay, House Republican whip, chief money pumper and master of the revels, who spent the week stroking donors in a series of private vintage railway cars, which just happened to be the defining perk of the robber barons of the last Gilded Age. Union Pacific supplied the cars.