One name kept popping up in the international coverage of last week’s Democratic National Convention, and it wasn’t John Kerry. The name was H.L. Mencken, the famous journalistic curmudgeon who covered political conventions for nearly a half-century, and whose words describing the process have never been equaled: “There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging… It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming.”