The Convention Blog

When the deal ends it ends totally. After the thursday night session, sitting in my hotel room,  it was satisfying to know that we had gotten to the end. This was made clearer friday morning when suddenly half of the cars that had been in the hotel parking lot were gone, the army was gone and the cops had cleared out. When the deal ends, it ends totally and everything that came with it just disappears into the air.

I spent my friday doing just about anything other than paying attention to the next day on the campaign trail. This included wandering around downtown Minneapolis and again being struck by how Canadian the place is. I mean this not just in terms of the climate but also in terms of the way in which the city is lain out and the building styles used. The other things that accentuate this are the indoor sports facility used (for now) for baseball and football, as well as the skyway system used to connect most of the major buildings on the second floor. The only difference is that in the Canadian cities that have such connections they tend to be underground instead of at level two. Having the Mall of America around emphasizes the sense of Canada that this area has because it is very much like its bigger counterpart and original megamall in Edmonton, Alberta (the West Edmonton Mall). To me the only real difference was that the MOA doesn’t have an ice rink in the middle of it and the Wild don’t practice there sometimes as is the case with the WEM and the Edmonton Oilers. The other similarity was that, on this friday, the high temperature might have been fifty degrees and the clouds moved in late in the afternoon.

What a good time to go inside and watch some meaningless mlb under the doomed baggy dome. The good people of the Twin Cities have decided that freezing through April, September and October if they ever get that far is a small price to pay for the pleasure of sitting outdoors during June, July and August and have decided to build a downtown outdoor stadium for the Twins that opens in two years. Of course, in three years, they’ll remember why the Metrodome was a good idea in the first place. The actual game wasn’t nearly as interesting as what happened on the way back to the hotel from it. Late friday night is always an interesting time to be on public transit and the Twin Cities provided no exception to that observation. I was wearing an old school logo Patriots sweatshirt because it was the only warm clothing that I had taken on the trip and this got the drunks going. First was the guy who had actually bet his house on the Patriots in the last superbowl and couldn’t get his head around what we had been doing on this trip or how the Patriots lost the last super bowl. I actually found explaining the latter to be a good bit easier than the former but both pretty much got nowhere. Then there was the Metrodome employee who spent five minutes explaining how the happiest day of his year was the day of the Super Bowl. I found the idea that anyone in a city this far away from Boston cared this much about our NFL team or would actually have been dumb enough to make a bet on the Super Bowl with that point spread after seeing the game in December to be somewhat amazing. The Metrodome guy was easy to deal with because I less than politely pointed out that the Patriots losing did nothing to either make the Vikings better or keep them in the Twin Cities and that unlike the Vikings, the New England pro football team has gotten into six super bowls and won three of them during its lifetime and those were all during the living memory of everyone on the train  (the Vikes have, of course, gotten into three and lost them all at least twenty seven years ago meaning that almost have the people alive now have no memory of them playing a Super Bowl). Plus, if the happiest day of your year involves watching someone else’s football team lose the Super Bowl, what exactly does that say about the condition of your life and your personal priorties ?

Saturday, I finally got to leave for home. In airline logic this meant that my journey took me from Minneapolis to Atlanta where I got to hang around for four hours. This was a good time to think about the regional demography of the United States because it clearly illustrated the point regaring where different racial/ethnic groups live in large numbers. Atlanta has a much larger African-American population and a much larger native born African-American population than does the Twin Cities but the Twins seem to have good success in luring immigrants of color from abroad. The other thing that it pointed out was the regional variation in cuisine. For dinner I figured I would get a salad with chicken and ordered the same only to realize when I got it that, because I was in the South, this meant that salad was usually chopped up meat and some veg mixed up in mayo rather than greens, meat and some kind of dressing. Region still counts for a lot in the United States and food and demography clearly prove the point.

Following that, it was supposedly time for the last flight home. the airline in question boards thirty minutes before departure time and, as I found out in MSP, gets quite sniffy if the passenger has the nerve to assume that they follow the usual 20 minute protocol commonly found around the industry. So, we get on the plane and sit………The reason why we’re sitting is because airtran has decided that it wants to hold the plane to accomodate six passengers who are on a late inbound flight. That would have been fine except this went on for 55 minutes past depature time and an hour and twenty five minutes after we boarded for “an on time departure”. I have never been on an airline that waited this long or chose to accomodate six people at the expense of the other 194 on the airplane and have been left at the gate several times in such a circumstance (more than once arriving just in time to see my flight pull away without me). So, instead of getting to Boston at 11 PM, we finally got here at 12:05 AM. And, to make matters worse, on the way to Boston, someone in the front of the plane had a medical emergency that the MD sitting next to me ended up dealing with for the last hour and a half of the flight while all of the passengers looked at the ongoing hubbub with a great deal of concern. Thus, instead of simply cruising to the gate and exiting the plane, our egress with delayed further because a medical crew had to come onto the plane and remove the ill passenger. I’ve no quarrel with that but my complaint was that their earlier stupid decision made it very early sunday morning by the time we actually got into the terminal. Then there was the obligatory delay while the least efficient baggage ground staff at Logan did its magic. Why is that when I got to the terminal in Denver the bag was waiting for me and ten minutes after I did in MSP, my bag appeared but in Boston this takes another 30-40 minutes on a consistent basis ? I could guess but that would sound too much like a right wing talk show at this point.

Following that it was home in a torrential downpour arriving at our house at about 2:30 AM. At that point, the long and exiciting journey came to an end and the campaign bubble was totally exited.

The biggest thing that came out of this experience was the quality of the two tickets running and the people working on their behalf. Barack Obama and John McCain are excellent choices, far better than the quality of the Administration in office at present in my opinion. They are worthy of our attention and worthy of making the effort to see in person if you’ve not already done so.

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It was given the number of groups lined up to  take him up on the offer. Conservatives would like to, Obama wants to and the protest groups literally did fight this week. McCain did the job that needed to be done even if Conservatives didn’t like it nearly as much as they did with Sarah Palin the night before. The bus ride home was more one of quiet resignation than it was of the celebration that had taken place the night before. McCain stayed within the core Conservative brand, hammered Obama on taxes and energy, talked about security and claimed to be the change candidate. The speech was an odd fusion of Clinton ‘92 and Reagan/GW Bush. All in all, it did what it had to do. This Convention, on the other hand, well may not have because of bad luck and bad choices on McCain’s part. The bad choices involve speaking lineups on national television and the decision to go after the media the other night, as well as to have Sarah Palin go after Obama on the same night. So far what we know about her is that she can give a good speech, she can attack Obama and she likes hockey and killing moose. The joke should have been that the Republican Convention was sponsored by the NHL. Nothing funnier than a bunch of Southerners and Washington insiders, many of whom have never been on skates in their lives, praising the game’s virtues. The Convention as a whole showed the demographic problems Republicans have and this is part of their problem: there are a lot of middle aged white people around but not enough anymore to assure a win, especially not if the other guys are out there organizing first time voters and younger people. Simply put, a large youth turnout this year elects Obama, anything else then it depends on which demographics turnout. Obama needs the youth vote too because, while it is easy to say he is encountering problems because of its skin color, the harder, more accurate reason for these problems has more to do with his personal experience and his policy choices. A lot of people like Obama, the problem is that most of the policies that he is advocated are the same things that the Democrats have been talking about for decades. You can see this when McCain hammered away on energy and taxes. Both are big concerns with the groups that McCain is hoping to mobilize because 1) they recall the miserable Carter years, 2) Obama is still too vague on his tax plan for a good chunk of undecideds especially in big, expensive, real estate markets, 3) Obama’s energy policy isn’t about energy, it is about global warming and that is obvious when people look at both it and its endorsements. This opens the door for McCain, especially if he makes Conservatives gag a little bit about having him at the top of their party’s ticket. It reminds them that Reagan is dead and, in a lot of ways, so is the movement that he led. The idea that McCain actually got this nomination, as well as the age of many of the Republican identifiers shows this. The Republicans used to be the party that mobilized young voters and won elections but not so much anymore. This party has demographic and age problems that it will have to deal with in the aftermath of this election regardless of the outcome.

This convention will probably not do for McCain what the DNC did for Obama. It wasn’t as big of a spectacle, it featured the most unpopular president in history, a lot of bad luck and a lot of talk about issues that make Conservatives happy but repluse swing voters. McCain’s VP choice, on the other hand, offset a lot of that because talk of her sucked the oxygen out of these other topics. Either way, this election is not decided. John McCain and Barack Obama are excellent candidates who have run excellent campaigns and now the sixty day sprint to the end begins……

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Wednesday was diversity night at the RNC with the bulk of the warmup speakers coming from minority communities and/or being female. This kind of signalling is important to show these communities that the Republicans are interested in having their business and it doubtlessly hasn’t ever been more important than it is this year. The 2004 Bush campaign made a big effort at broadening the base of the Republican Party, something John McCain acknowledged needed to be done during his short appearance here wednesday night, and this kind of event does go a way toward doing that. Plus, if the McCain campaign can get 5-8% of the vote among some of the minority communities, it might be enough to flip a couple of swing states and win the election. 

In addition to introducing Sarah Palin, the point to the third night of the convention was to differentiate the Republican from the Democratic ticket. This was most effectively done by Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. I’ve never seen Romney give a speech with that much flair and passion and with such a hot message. He’d be a very good candidate if he could be as passionate in his own stump speeches as he was last night. Huckabee was understated and, as is often the case, very effective in sticking the knife into the Obama brand and in explaining why it was ok for people of modest or average means to be Republicans and how the Republicans were the real party of opportunity. He riffed when he went after the media about the Palin kid thing, that was not in the text and it reminded me of a press conference George HW Bush once gave in which he was asked a variety of questions about Dan Quayle with Qualye’s hometown audience booing each more lustily than the last as they resounded over the PA system. Personally, I wouldn’t do this because I think it alienates more people than the schmoozing that GW Bush and McCain have done so succesfully. Ask the Obama folks what happened to their coverage after they flew the press to Chicago on the night that Barry was meeting with Hillary at Diane’s house……

The keynote was Rudy Giuliani who was really solid and played well in the house by talking about experience, taxes and security but I have to wonder how well these issues and his presentation of them played in the country. He did a good job of introducing Sarah Palin as well. Palin did a good job presenting the speech. I have a clear view of the teleprompter and could following along. She only riffed in a couple of places and had trouble making the points of emphasis strongly enough. I know what the points of emphasis are because they are underlined and bolded in the text. She was very good in explaining herself and her family, as well as in selling John McCain. I thought it was a mistake to saying anything about Obama or Biden because there will be time for that but this was her chance to introduce herself to the country. Instead, she did about half of that then attacked Obama at his weakest points. The R’s would be wise to keep hammering on taxes and elitism but also to move off the experience thing because it is too easy to 1) show people that being mayor of a town about half as big as Amesbury, MA in terms of population and a state that has 80,000 people more than does the city of Boston might not be the way to inspire confidence in one’s leadership ability and 2) Obama can flip that back on McCain by suggesting that he’s been in DC for too long and is out of touch. On the other hand, the idea that Barry has no energy policy really, little to no foreign policy experience himself even Biden does, is kinda snobby and wants to tax the snot out of average Americans would play really well with the kinds of voters who will decide the election. Supposedly there is some clip of two Fox commentators inadvertently speaking into a live mic about how bad a pick they thought Palin was and how the R’s are going to lose in two months but I haven’t looked for this yet and can’t vouch for its accuracy.

Oh well, the balloons come down at about 10 PM tonight, the big show ends and the good people of the Twin Cities get their town back in a couple of days. We all finally get to go home and to exit this bubble in which we’ve been living for the past three weeks. I think I can feel ok about missing the sunday morning political shows…..

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First, we can’t upload photos from here because the internet connection available just isn’t good enough. I have a bunch of pictures but no way to upload them. Maybe friday. The weather has turned into what one would expect from Minnesota. It is now quite cool here instead of the 95 degrees and heat that prevailed earlier in the week. Today is the last scheduled day that we have here. The students head for home mostly on friday but I don’t go until saturday because faculty have to stay until a time friday that was well after the last flight for the East Coast had left and we are still far enough east that there is no redeye from here to there.

The other thirty percent references those Americans who respond in polls that they have a favorable opinion of the President and/or his job performance. Last week it didn’t seem that there was anyone who had anything nice to say about the current administration, this week it seems there isn’t anyone who doesn’t have nice things to say. Bush spoke via videolink on tuesday night and gave both a valedictory, as well as a ringing endorsement of John McCain. The entire second night of the convention was intended to give McCain conservative/reformer credentials and to testify to his particular character. In many ways it was a repeat of the 2004 Convention because the themes seemed to be 1) McCain was  a person of quality as measured by his adoption of a Bangledeshi child and his war experiences, 2) McCain was a reformer in the tradition of TR or the Conservative Heritage Brand, Ronald Reagan, and 3) that McCain was right on the issues as Republicans were. Two things jumped out about both nights of the Republican Convention and they are 1) the McCain people clearly don’t want to talk about who exactly was running the country for 6 out of the last 8 years. I agree that the current Democratic Congress has not been the most productive or energetic ever but the fact remains that they did not hold the majority throughout most of the Bush years and the fact remains that Bush was president for eight years and is pretty unpopular in a lot of the swing states that will decide the election, as well as in the country as a whole.  This is a marketing problem for the McCain people to overcome and they are giving it their best shot by trying to reposition the Republican brand away from what it was during the Bush years and more toward a reform/TR type thing. They are also trying to run down the value of the Obama brand by raising doubts about Barack Obama’s experience and highlighting the experiences found on their ticket.

I thought it laughable that the McCain people got hacked off at Campbell Brown the other night for refusing to take their vague answers about Palin’s executive experience because they were the ones who made the claim. They shouldn’t get so snippy that they refuse to talk to a journalist who has the audacity to question their claims. This will not serve them well during the coming weeks with the media but it might rally the faithful to support their ticket without asking too many questions. On the other hand, I still think the old adage about not getting into a fight with people who buy ink by the truckload is well worth remembering here, especially for McCain, whom a lot of people on the left argue has been as much the candidate of the Washington press core as he has anything else. 2) The second thing that jumps out is that, just like the Obama campaign, the McCain folks haven’t gotten too much into the nuts and bolts of policy, they have just discussed it in the more emotive terms that will resonate favorably with the electorate.

The security situation around the Xcel Center on tuesday night could best have been described as difficult. The cops were clearly having a difficult time and at times did not seem in control of the situation. I exited the hall at one point to give credentials to two of our students and could hear some human noises but more interesting a regular BOOM, BOOM, BOOM as the cops shot tear gas and flashbangs at protesters. By the time we left Xcel, the security around the buses consisted of troops not police officers and, when we came back on wednesday, it was a lot tighter and there were a lot more security people than there had been the night before.  

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Courtesy of our friends at the MA Republican Party, I have a guest pass for this week’s events here in St. Paul. This means that I can ride on the official buses, sit in the area and generally wander around the Xcel Center. The bus ride is unusual in several ways. First, the bus comes with its own armed police officer sitting in the first row. Second, the bus has a large number of other police officers and vehicles looking after it as it goes on its way. Traffic was stopped several times so that we could cross intersections more quickly. Third, the bus doesn’t drive in the straight path to the venue, it makes a number of diversionary turns. I’d be surprised if it took the same route today that it took yesterday as well. Fourth, the bus has its own lane as it nears the Xcel Center. Fifth the bus lets its riders off well inside the security perimeter. The riders never see or hear the protests on the other side of the building. Sixth we had a helicopter watching our progress on the way back yesterday and there was a chained gate that led to the interstate that was opened for our bus as we left the Convention and, seventh, the bus was spotless and came with trash bags for delegates to put junk in. Nothing can be left anywhere on the bus.

The other interesting part of having such great access is that it provides insight into what an official delegation does at a Convention. The delegates, obviously, sit on the floor and vote during the Convention but the delegation also has a breakfast meeting on a daily basis replete with prominent local speakers and discusses local political business. In addition, the media that attend are all from the Boston and Springfield markets.

The actual Convention was pretty much like watching Congress yesterday. Business was done much in the way that a legislature would do it, including all of the parliamentary devices that anyone who watches C-SPAN would be familiar with. In keeping with the way in which Republicans signal the audience the session opened with the pledge of alligience, the national anthem and a prayer then closed with a benediction. The most interesting business that went on was the appearances of Laura Bush and Cindy McCain. The both spoke on the theme of the day: Service and used their speeches as a platform to raise money for hurricane victimes. If the Bush Administration has been punished for its bungling during Katrina, there was no way the McCain campaign was getting itself in a similar position.

 The most interesting unofficial business was the campaign’s effort to dump the bad news about Sarah Palin’s daughter under the hurricane coverage. It didn’t work and it was pretty funny to hear many of the people who spent years chasing after Bill Clinton fret that Barack Obama might try to use this as a wedge issue. No chance. Obama’s response was right on the money and most in keeping with his brand promise of a different kind of politics. Plus, if he pounced on that, it would justify attacks from a slew of people on him. Better, from his perspective, to let the media do the dirty work and stay above the fray. Personally, I don’t care what any of these people do in their personal lives and never have. I think it particularly reprehensible to drag their kids and relatives into this regardless of the circumstances. It is the lack of ideological differences and the dominance of the marketing model in American politics that causes this and encourages its propagation.

This morning, I got the bright idea to go watch Arianna Huffington speak to the Washington Center students downtown. To say that nothing went right, would be an understatement. The MA Republicans had breakfast with Mitt Romney and I’m sorry I opted not to attend that. She was pretty good as a speaker but only spoke for about fifteen minutes total. After that Congressman Mickey Edwards, our friend from the Congress to Campus Program, led a panel of Republican state officials looking at the future of their party. It was interesting to hear actual politicians discuss all of the concepts associated with brand failure and struggling, as a business would, to figure out what would come next.

The real convention starts tonight and that should provide its own interesting story for the morning. Tonight will be John McCain favorable bio night with W, Fred Thompson, and Joe Lieberman. 

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We have no idea what will happen here after this afternoon. Nobody does. This is because there is no way the Republican Party will allow itself to be seen as being indifferent to human suffering in the wake of a natural disaster for the second time in a few years. This is truly a lose-lose situation for the Republicans because if they go forward and people really are dying in large numbers they get dinged for that but if they don’t go forward, they don’t get a chance to roll out their platform, their candidates and to mount a response to Barack Obama and the successful Democratic Convention. They would be reducing their marketing effort by one fourth  because instead of having the traditional ads, earned media, convention and debates, they would be giving up the minimum of four hours of network time that they will get just by having the Convention. They lose that way too. There is no good choice here.

Today there will be a short session during which the RNC will do everything that it needs to do as far as business goes. We think, but are not sure, that this will include a mechanism through which John McCain can be designated as the nominee and Sarah Pallin be designated as the VP nominee. This matters because it makes the Secret Service legally able to provide protection to both of them and it starts the funding clock for the general election.

Our group is now housed directly across the street from the Mall of America. Some of us wandered around in it yesterday. Personally, I thought it was the mall taken to its logical conclusion but nothing more. It does have an amusement park and acquarium in the middle of it but, at bottom, it is just a really, really big mall. It is kind of ironic being housed across the street from the major vehicle through which consumerism has taken place in this country since the 1970’s at the same time one is attending political conventions because, anymore, political conventions have become all about marketing products and that is so on a bipartisan basis. Both of our political parties have figured out that it is more to their advantage to sell people things than it is to engage them in a true discussion of the nation’s problems that really is a two-way discussion. This was one of the things that I wrote that the Democrats would have to do to compete with Republicans at the end of Branded Conservatives and, based on what we heard and saw in Denver, it is exactly what they have done. Their problem is that now they are competing with the guys who invented this kind of politics in the American context.

 This should be a very interesting day here because of the odd session and because of the large protest to be staged in St.Paul (I think the cops missed some “troublemakers” this weekend).  This week will be much more of an inside experience for me than what I got last week in Denver.

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 Unlike the DNC amusement park based media party, the RNC one was held in the Guthrie Theatre and the adjacent Mill City Museum, a rehabilitated flour mill along the Missippi River. The event had a totally different but equally earnest feel to it than what the DNC party had. This was much more of a grown up, understated event, featuring more people in suits, a jazz band instead of a midway and food that was more toward the beefy side than what was provided in Denver. The event also had much more local police as security. While the RNC seemed happy to have us, the local cops seemed to want to make sure that there was no trouble because there were almost as many checkpoints to get into this as there were at Invesco the other night. The other interesting thing about this event was that it showed how many media folks cover both conventions: a lot. Several of our students were asked “Hey, weren’t you in Denver ?” by media types and we met one of our speakers from the Regis events who engaged on of our group in an animated debate about prison policy that, to me captured the essance of the comparisons that Democrats and Republicans make to other nations. The very liberal speaker was comparing Massachusetts penal institutions to those found in the Nordic nations and arguing that they were barely adaquate while our student was arguing that compared to China, the US was doing really well. To me, this is the whole difference between liberals and conservatives, the liberals look toward the places in Europe that have the highest standards and complain when the US doesn’t meet those while the conservatives are happy to pick out various parts of the developing world and use those as cases to show how well the US is doing in comparison. In politics, it seems you pick your comparison cases with an eye toward proving your point not toward anything else. The other thing that was clear in this was the nature versus nurture debate.Otherwise, the things that we’ve noticed here are that it is more humid, there is more oxygen and the facilities here are a lot more spread out than they were in Denver where everything was within walking distance to everything else. The Twin Cities police have figured out a new way to clamp down on protestors: raid the places where they are staying and find a pretext to arrest them. These people can then be held until as long as next wednesday for what amounts to the skinniest of reasons. This doesn’t seem particularly constitutional to me but I am not a lawyer and the counter-argument is that it will keep the demonstrators from creating chaos and property damage. The bet seems to be that settling any lawsuits that stem from these arrests will cost less and generate less damaging media coverage than having large riots that get out of hand would cause. The other reason to keep demonstrators in jail until wednesday is that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney speak on monday night. That, in itself, is a sign of how much the McCain people are worried about the McBush charge made by the Obama camp. Bush and Cheney will speak on Labor Day night against an NFL game and before the first night of school for many children and parents. If the idea is to have them speak but only generate a small audience then get them off the stage and out of town as fast as possible, this would seem to be how to do that.There does seem to be a much bigger level of organization to the protest efforts here too. I saw several wall posters recruiting people to come out against the RNC and there seems to be a protest headquarters as well (needless to say they heard the knock on the door from the folks in blue yesterday). All of this assumes there actually will be a Convention here this week and that depends on which Gulf Coast city, if any, loses hurricane lottery. There is some talk of a one day convention or of a fundraising telethon for hurricane victims or a postponement. Given that the NHL’s Wild play in the Xcel Center, sell all their tickest and can play home exhibition games because of that, it couldn’t be a long delay because the primary tenant will want the building back shortly. The idea that the Republicans would just cancel seems equally crazy given how well the Obama campaign is doing in the polls as a result of the DNC.

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The DNC needed a lot of volunteers to actually pull off the Invesco event on thursday night. In exchange for several hours of work in a menial job, the deal was that a credential would be issued that would get the volunteer into the event. We left Regis at 8:30 in the morning, reported to the specified location under the Interstate, were signed in, issued volunteer tee shirts and credentials then were assigned to a team leader. Ours was a guy from Newton, MA who had just finished up at GW. Our job was to keep people on the right path to the two entrances that were actually open and not to let them simply wander around Invesco. The way the site was laid out, the crowd could only walk in a straight line on a few paths and had to show credentials at least five checkpoints before getting to the last checkpoint that was staffed by the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service. At this point, bags were x-rayed and credentials crashed one last time. Good luck sneaking into this event.

Because I come from a long line of people who lived in one of the cloudiest places in the world (Ireland) then moved to another place where the sun barely shines (Boston), I volunteered to work in a tent with the Secret Service. My job was to line people up based on bags or not and to check credentials before the Service folks did it one last time. The bags all had to be x-rayed and having only a couple of lines to do that got people into the venue faster. In addition to being karmic payback for all of my quite justified complaining about airport screeners, it was also a visual study in the impact that Barack Obama’s nomination has had among African-Americans. It is one thing to say or hear that, it is quite another to see it for hour upon hour in face after face. This was true among the political class but was more true among the average people who had managed to get one of the Community Credentials issued by the DNC. This is not say that other people who came through our checkpoint were not excitied, it was that this nomination obviously meant more to the African-Americans in attendance than the simply picking the guy who would be the Democratic standard bearer in the General Election Campaign that it means to the media, much of the political class even within the Democratic Party, and much of the media. I was able to see Joe Biden and Tim Kaine speak and hear Sheryl Crow sing. Sadly, this was more than any of our students working in media placements got to see. None of them were able to leave the building in which they were working and it was located across from the Pepsi Center, well away from Invesco. The students that we had working in Invesco had some difficulty in dealing with some audience members as the afternoon went on. The lower bowl of the stadium was overcrowded, it was hot and this event when on for hours. Probably, many of the people with whom they had to deal were not used to this kind of thing and Invesco was clearly not used to dealing with events that last for twice as long as does an NFL game.

The lead in to Barack Obama was a longish biopic that, if the campaign is smart, it will show as a whole on the night before the election on whichever networks it can get to sell it that much time. Bill Clinton’s folks had produced one of these in ‘92 and it was distributed virally. The Obama pic did a good job of explaining how Barack was just like ordinary average Americans in that it stressed both sides of his heritage, mentioned that his grandfather had fought in Patton’s army then explained who Obama was, what he cared about and how he got where he is. This was a nice bit of work and, in a lot of ways, more useful to understanding the man and his beliefs than was his speech. His actually speech was a nice workman like job that didn’t provide a lot of controvesy. It was solidly centerist, offered some specifics but didn’t contain a lot with which most people could disagree. On the other hand, it didn’t seem in the stadium that it was filled with the soaring rhetoric for which the man has become known. Maybe it looked that way on tv but in person, it seemed like a very good stump speech but that’s all. Once Obama finished, the closing moment when the confetti came down happened as did a huge fireworks display literally shot right over our heads in the upper deck. After that came a benediction in which, in true Democratic fashion, the audience could provide the ending in whatever way their faith tradition did. I am not quite sure the Republicans will end any of their prayers that way. 

After the event ended, it took us an hour to get out of the Invesco Field footprint because nobody remembered to take down the security gates through which people had passed earlier in the day. This is probably because 1) the Service wouldn’t let anyone do that or 2) the DNC was so focused on getting the event to work that it didn’t think about what would happen once it did work. Anyway, this meant that we got back to Regis close to 11:30, most of us had to pack and we had to clean our townhouse too. I got to be about 1 then back up to finish at 4. At 5:30, I moved my gear to the bus stop, the bus left at 6 then it was onto the airport.

The airport security was easy for us because Frontier has its own terminal. While we were waiting for the plane, most of us were surfing the web and found out that McCain had picked Sarah Palin as his VP Choice. Personally, I think this was the smart move to make for four reasons: 1) the gender problem Obama has, 2) the Conservative problem McCain has, 3) She can balance questions about McCain’s age (it would help if she had more experience than being mayor of a smallish city and two years as governor of a small state in population terms ) and 4) she can claim to not be closely associated with the Bush Administration or politics as usual in Washington. The Obama people we spoke with at the airport thought that she wasn’t a good pick because she won’t flip any states automatically. This is very much in keeping with their thinking about the overall election and the hard lesson the party learned with Al Gore in 2000. All that matters is winning the electoral college and that is clearly what their goal is and how they are thinking about everything that happens for the next two months.

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He did too and so didn’t Joe Biden. The problem is that the city bus back here stops in front of their hotel. Oh well, time to find another stop. Listening to the end of the DNC last night, I wasn’t surprised Barack Obama showed up because I’d seen him leave his hotel half an hour earlier in a motorcade that was actually bigger that Joe Biden’s pictured above. In addition to the two suvs, there was a bus that served first to block a clear site line while the two were leaving for their vehicles and an ambulance plus a couple of additional vehicles in which armed secret service agents in kevlar could clearly be seen. The weapons were the small machine guns that they usually carry and were quite visible in the hands as the suv moved along. As for the actual convention, Bill Clinton did what had to be done and Joe Biden seemed to be doing a good job of contrast and of attacking McCain. The Democrats seem to be getting exactly what they want from this event and the question is what will the Republicans do to respond ? One thing that is clear is that McCain isn’t generating the kind of excitement among his target audience that Obama is among his. I’ve never seen any politician who could make people jump up and down screaming but I saw it last night. Just the mere sight of Barack is enough to get people to do that. For a lot of Conservatives in particular, nominating McCain just isn’t going to be that great of an event and especially not, as Bob Schieffer suggested to our group yesterday, if he puts a pro-choice moderate on his ticket. We also heard from the Belgian Ambassador to the US yesterday who both had some interesting things to say about the US that showed that there is a wide gulf in perceptions between what people on this side of the Atlantic believe versus what’s going on on the other side. It was very much in the spirit of the point made by Robert Kagan in Of Paradise and Power. At no point was this more true than where he argued that the NATO failure to do anything about Georgia was everything but a lack of will to do what should have been done. The EU states didn’t want to do anything militarily about genocide in the Balkans and they don’t want to offend their gas man, Vladimir Putin now. On another note, he argued that the Lisbon Treaty result in in Ireland was a big problem for the whole European project because it opened the door to a renewed nationalism in Europe. This seemed very much on the mark as did his point that there is no backup plan because Lisbon was the backup plan.

Our schedule today is we’re off to Invesco Field starting for some people an hour ago, my impression is that we’re gone until very late and our bus leaves for the airport at 6 AM friday. Not everything about this trip is exciting and glamorous. A four am wake up call after a bedtime of 1 Am isn’t but is also a small price to pay to see all of this.

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Hillary Clinton was the star of the show at Tuesday’s DNC. People get the obvious part that she wasn’t Ted Kennedy in 1980, that is to say that she tried to unite the party instead of dividing it. She also did a nice job of stressing the contrasts between the Dems and Repubs as the Democrats see it. The entire evening was very effective in doing this because it hit McCain at a weak point (the economy), addressed one of the topics that the Democrats needed to deal with (energy policy) and drew a contrast between the party of the future (D’s) versus the party of the past (R’s). These are the kinds of contrasts that Republicans have successfully drawn for years in order to differentiate themselves from the Democrats. Deval Patrick was very good and did exactly what the Obama people probably wanted him to do. Talk about where he (and more recently) Obama was from and link that to the cultural idea of the American dream. Too bad for him he spoke too near to Governor Brian Schweitzer (MT) for anyone outside Massachusetts to remember him. The students, all of whom have had hall passes, and I, watching the DNC live feed elsewhere, have been able to piece together an understanding of what the differences are between the two. Several of the things that I thought worked really well were total flops inside the Hall. So, as with a lot else in American politics, the key things are fitting the message to the medium employed and figuring out what audience you are trying to hit then making the proper adjustments. The students are working long hours at their various jobs and all of them seem to be learning a great deal about how the institutions in which they are working function in pressure situations. The other big thing that was reiterated again yesterday was that, for the Obama Campaign, the whole election is probably going to come down to youth participation rates. We were briefed by the Rock the Vote group yesterday and they had data that indicated that youth voting was way up and that this was a direct product of the numerous registration drives launched by the various progressive groups. They used an interesting metaphore for their work: pushing people to vote for a candidate like Obama is akin to the one indie rock band that leads young people into the entire genre. The idea being that if they like one product, they will like others and purchase them regularly. So, the whole bet is that young people will turn out and start to vote regularly for Democrats. The Republicans did something like this in the 1980’s but it didn’t seem to be their core audience as it does seem to be in the Obama case and this is why this is such a high stakes bet. If Republicans in the 1980’s didn’t get a huge youth turnout it mattered slightly, if Obama doesn’t, he probably loses the election.

The other interesting thing was that I saw Michelle Obama’s motorcade leaving her hotel the other night. It is interesting seeing again how much more security presidential candidates and presidents get than does anyone else at the federal level. One has to wonder if people really understand what they’re signing up for when the run for this office and, more interestingly, what they think of once they get into that little bubble in which presidents live.

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