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 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.