Now that the Democratic National Convention is in the rearview mirror, let's evaluate it by the numbers. I believe the conference can be summed up in five:
(1) 16,000,000,000,000 - Just as the DNC was scheduled to kick off on Tuesday, the national debt clock clicked over to the staggering and dangerous sum of $16 Trillion. More than $5 Trillion of that total has accrued under President Obama, and a top administration official has testified that the White House has no plan to restore the national debt to a position of sustainability.
(2) 46,700,000 - The Department of Agriculture released a report on Wednesday stating that the number of Americans dependent on government food stamps climbed to a record-breaking 46.7 million this summer.
(3) Three - US manufacturing shrank at the fastest clip in more than three years, according a study released on Tuesday. President Obama touted manufacturing jobs and growth in his acceptance speech on Thursday. Three is also the number of times thousands of DNC delegates objected to the re-inclusion of God and Jerusalem during contentious and embarrassing party platform voice votes:
(4) Zero - The number of times the president mentioned the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ("the stimulus") in his primetime acceptance address on Thursday night. These are his signature legislative accomplishments, yet he decided they didn't merit any attention.
(5) 368,000 - The number of discouraged workers who gave up on seeking jobs and simply dropped out of the labor force in August. This figure is nearly four times the number of jobs created over the same period.
The Democratic National Convention opened with $16 Trillion in debt and closed with a dismal jobs report. Everything in between those harrowing bookends was just noise.