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.

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……

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…..

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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.