Do the Democratic and Republican conventions still have a point?
At the last Republican convention, Alex Jones stole my spaghetti.
We had both found ourselves at a dinner at some nice Italian restaurant in Cleveland, and I’d wandered off to join a few reporters who were talking with Roger Stone at another table. When I came back, the “InfoWars” proprietor had taken my seat and my pasta, which he was then attempting to spoon-feed to another journalist.
When you’re a newsperson, moments like this are the real appeal of the conventions. Campaign operatives get a bit loose and tell you things they might not otherwise. You run into the bizarre hangers-on of the political world, like Jones, a conspiracy theorist who became an early and aggressive supporter of Donald Trump.
And if you’re lucky, like me, you might get an anecdote you can dine out on for a couple of years, because otherwise these things are largely newsless affairs.
Reporters like to go to conventions because they’re fun. News organizations send those reporters partly as a show of force, proof that they can still put boots on the ground in our era of layoffs and diminishing revenues. The bigger outlets might even throw a party, complete with novelty guests like Stone. The next day, the journalists and operatives will all share stories about the person of some prominence who was booted from the party after a sixth martini.
Not this year, though. Like nearly everything else in American life, the conventions are now online, and those so inclined will have to mix their martinis at home.
This is, needless to say, something of a disappointment to those of us who love going to conventions for gossip or, if we’re trying to justify our presence to editors back home, the cultivation of sources.
Decades ago, in a much different America, political conventions had a clear and distinguished purpose: It was where each party, every four years, chose their candidates for president and vice president. Delegates showed up from around the country to push for the selection of this or that candidate, stirring arguments were made from the main podium, and deals were hatched in rooms that were actually smoke-filled.
That was then. Now we have these extended infomercials for each party, speeches that are forgotten the moment they’re finished, the awkward gyrating of largely symbolic delegates as some pop song drones in the background. Any surprises are on hold until something truly weird happens, like that time Clint Eastwood spoke to an empty chair.
This is not to say that the conventions no longer have a reason to exist. Many Americans, we’re told by the people who claim to know these things, only start really paying attention to the presidential race once the conventions start. And this year, we’re informed by those same people, the conventions have taken on an “outsized importance” due to COVID-19, the spread of which has made traditional campaigning impractical or even dangerous.
The irony, if you can call it that, of this outsized importance is that the conventions will be virtual this year. The comparison most frequently made is to a Zoom call or Google Hangout, which may steal away what little drama was left from what had already become scripted, choreographed displays of party unity.
So, it’s fair to ask, what’s the point of all this?
From the perspective of the parties, conventions still make a lot of sense, first and most important because they get a lot of coverage. The networks will block out time for the major speeches. Many articles will be written and published. It will trend on Twitter. People, perhaps many millions of them, will tune in.
Polling indicates that there aren’t all that many undecided voters this year. Still, in a close election, anything a party or candidate can do to slice away some small sliver of the electorate is worthwhile. The viewers and readers will hear and perhaps even absorb each party’s core message, the central argument for why Joe Biden or Trump should win the election.
And they’ll be able to take a closer look at each party’s rising stars, the Buttigiegs and AOCs and Hawleys and Haleys. In 2004, for example, Barack Obama — an Illinois state legislator on his way to a Senate seat — gave a speech that proved much more memorable and important than the one delivered by that year’s Democratic nominee, John Kerry.
This is all worthwhile. It’s good for people who don’t obsess about political coverage to be reminded of what each party stands for, who the leaders are, how they act, what they say.
The question, though, is whether these four-day virtual conventions will mean much of anything come November. Even when the conventions were high-drama affairs covered to the hilt by all the networks, the most the candidates could expect from them was usually a “convention bounce” in the polls that evaporated in a number of days. “Why does the CW worry about the ‘convention bounce’ if the CW also says the bounce dissipates within two weeks?” wondered Newsweek’s “Conventional Wisdom Watch” after the 1992 conventions.
Then again, maybe this year is different. We really have little idea how these things will look, let alone how they’ll play with voters. Maybe this week’s Democratic convention will be remembered as the moment when Biden opened up an overwhelming lead over Trump. Perhaps it will be remembered as the time Kamala Harris proved that she was Biden’s clear successor, or the start of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s march to the nomination in 2028.
Or maybe, next week when the GOP convention gets underway, Trump figures out how to reverse his fortunes with a great display of showmanship.
Who knows. But whatever else happens this year, the conventions will be new and different. It’s an opportunity for the parties and the candidates to be creative and do something we haven’t seen before. Even technical glitches, of which we should expect a few, hold the promise of making things less scripted and more human. If the conventions are failures, they are likely to be failures of the interesting kind.
And when you think about it that way, it’s all sort of exciting, isn’t it?
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