The Convention Blog

 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The students went off to work on sunday and all of them had brushes with celebrity. The most interesting thing learned was that the Obama people are very tired as they should be. It must take quite a toll on anyone to have to go through a normal primary/general election season nevermind what happened this [...]

At some point during the last 24 hours the cops showed up. Big time. Yesterday one could walk into the Pepsi Center and the buses followed their scheduled routes. Today….forget about it.
Black fencing appeared overnight around the convention hall along with a series of checkpoints and a large number of law enforcement officials. A true [...]

The highlight of friday was…… well, it could have been being the stadium where the Red Sox won the World Series last year or in the Pepsi Center where the DNC takes place next week or listening to Howard Dean speak about the Dems overall strategy. Hard to say but all of them [...]

A hectic couple of days in Denver. The blog has begun having pictures added to it thanks to Peter Aiello who put them on it. The rest of the posts should have a bunch more images take by all of the members of our group.
Probably the most interesting thing about this week is that many [...]

The tuesday academic sessions featured the producer of the DNC and its CEO. The producer was most interesting because he continually compared his experiences with the DNC to the Super Bowl and the Tony Awards. This showed exactly the extent to which these conventions have become a very slick form of infotainment designed to sell [...]

Monday the students were treated to a presentation by Tom Cronin and Michael Genovese. Personally, I was impressed by the idea that one of them spoke about the power of brand McCain. Four years ago, few political scientists would speak in this way and fewer still seemed to understand the importance of the concept. Now [...]