More than one person has observed to me the funereal vibe in the Xcel Center this week. “It’s like the walking dead in there,” said one new media broadcaster. Maybe on Sunday and Monday, before the proceedings kicked into typical gear. But now I liken things less to Dawn of the Dead than to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, sans a hysterical Kevin McCarthy pulling at lapels and begging everyone to wake up.

But yes, there is a stale morbidity here in St. Paul that cuts through the on-message onslaught of support for Gov. Sarah Palin, the excrutiatingly scripted weirdness of it all. Everything looks right: funny hats, bejeweled and flashy patriotism, self-important college kids and twenty somethings emulating the 80’s triumphurate of Rove, Abramoff and Norquist, old GOP dames and grandfatherly elephants — god knows what is going through their heads. And the operatives, and the groupies, oh my.

But there is something missing. A heartbeat — a pulse. I found it, last night seemingly, at the Target Center in the Twin City of Minneapolis.

There was Barry Goldwater Jr., who at 70 years old was looking quite hip, telling the crowd of some 12,000 largely conservative fans they were “a new generation.” He quoted his late father once telling conservatives to “grow up — you can take back the party if you want.”

“With the Ron Paul revolution, we will take back the party,” he added, raising the electric, pretty eclectic, crowd to its feet. Paul looking like a spry grandfather at his own 73 years, belted out his own stemwinder, covering everything from the legalization of marijuana (how can congressmen pump their fists in their air over the evil herb when they happily, regularly indulge in the more dangerous, but legal drug alcohol, he demanded), whittling government down to its constitutional size, lashing out at the Patriot Act, FISA, Executive Orders, the income tax and the police state. Sounds like a lot of radical nonsense to me — though I could have sworn I’d heard nearly every single point made in some varying degree from good old fashioned conservative, Republican quarters pre-9/11. Pre-Bush.

The crowd loved Paul last night. One lady, who traveled from Iowa with her three-year-old daughter, told me she had seen Paul speak like four times before. It was his best speech, she said. He was more relaxed, more confident — “maybe we helped him as much as he helped us.”

No doubt. Across the way in St. Paul they weren’t even giving him full access to the convention hall, despite garnering 1.2 million votes in the presidential primaries. Fred Thompson, who was given a prime time speaking role, got a paltry 286,000 votes. Joe Lieberman spoke, and he isn’t even a Republican. You bet that the decked out Target Center, tricked out with giant screens, thousands of fans and a rock band with a sexy lead singer extolling the Ron Paul Revolution like an ancient encomium, fortified his speech like a can of Red Bull.

But the crowd was also lifted by ideas — ones advanced by earnest libertarians and conservatives for years — but unlike the convention across the way, the “ideas” weren’t lifeless accessories to be brandished at predetermined moments like the “SERVICE!” signs waved on the floor of the RNC last night. Ideas are what the Republicans seem all too eager to undermine cynically to win this election. As Rick Davis of the McCain campaign said Tuesday night, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

It can’t be a good thing if after all of this narrative-stroking, all the American voter takes away is that to run for president, one has to be a carefully constructed, perfectly massaged and TV-ready automaton.

Too bad most of electorate missed the convention of The Living.