The Convention Blog

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 spring. In a way, they might be well served by thinking that they are at the end or, more interestingly, only the end of the beginning if he wins and they go into government with him.

On monday, the group heard from former DNC Chair Donald Fowler who echoed his commentary in the Sunday NYT that what Obama had to do was explain more about who he was and what he was going to do in a way that would be accepted by the target audiences that he had to reach. He also reiterated an earlier theme that the primary system is broken and needs to be replaced but his idea was a rotating regional primary system more than it was a playoff system as we heard earlier in the week. Folwer also stated that he thinks the Obama campaign has a decent shot at winning Virginia and North Carolina because of demographic changes in tech corridors that favor Democrats. It is the inverse of the argument Nelson Polsby made in the book How Congress Evolves in which he said that one of things that helped the Republican Party in the South was the influx of white collar tech workers into the region. The second speakers were former Representatives Pat Williams and Majorie Margolies-Mezvinsky. I’ve always thought that Margolies-Mezvinsky was someone who showed a lot of loyalty to Bill Clinton during her time in Congress, more than some much more senior people did, and she paid for it at the ballot box a couple of years later.

Following that, I left because I got the idea that I would volunteer with one of the groups working here but, they were already so organized, they didn’t have time to talk to me about needing my help. It vaguely reminded me of something PJ O’ Rourke once wrote about a trip he took to the then Soviet Union in terms of the behavior and fashions of the participants. So, having been ignored into submission, I quickly figured out my alternate plan: meeting the protest groups surrounding the Colorado Convention Center and the Pepsi Center. This provided hours of entertainment and highlighted the diversity of issues in the country. I encountered everything from vegans to a cornucopia of pro-McCain marchers. Doubtlessly the highlight was visiting the Bush Legacy bus that is a rolling critique of all things Bush from the past eight years.

Probably the most difficult aspect of this is seeing the restrictions that are put on the ability of people to make their voices heard outside the Convention in a way that actually matters. We were told last week by the Secret Service that the law s understood as this: delegates and the buses carrying them have to pass within earshot of the protests. Some delegates walk through the gigantic security perimeter set up around the Pepsi Center but based on some things I later found on side streets away from the Pepsi Center, I am pretty sure that the Democratic bigwigs and a lot of the delegates come into the building through ways about which the general public has no knowledge. Even if the bus passes the protests, what difference does it make if all one sees in the mirror is a sign in passing ?

In addition, the idea that the Democrats don’t have big money backers can be thoroughly disproven by some of what I’ve seen here. There are an awful lot of limos, guys in thousand dollar suits with three figure haircuts and women in designer dresses that dispel any thought of that. Politics in this country, despite the actual populist in-roads made by the Obama campaign, remains very much a sport that is played by the wealthy.

As for the evening sessions of the convention, I was listening to some of the DNC live stream while I was working on this and other stuff. The bit at the end with the Obama family was a nod to something that had been done years ago with Reagan. I thought her speech was very thorough and lawyerly but I am not sure what audience she was aiming at. I do think that the idea was to present the voters with the Obama version of the Brady Bunch. “See, we’re not scary, we’re just like you.” I thought it was particularly telling that when they beamed Obama in, he was sitting with a white family with kids in their house in the middle of the country. That didn’t seem to really fit with Obama’s life story that had been talked about previously in the evening. On the other hand, it was a clearly nod that Barack understands you and your family. This he needs to show too because a lot of people don’t actually know him or his family and, as a result, will fill in the blanks in ways that might not serve his electoral interests. Jim Leach was probably the most effective speaker by making the pitch that even though he was a proud Republican, he was not proud of the Bush Administration. Something like this was done by the Bush campaign to Kerry in 2004 when it paraded out various Democrats making pitches for people to vote on security issues for Bush

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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 multi-agency intermodal task force. Walking back from the media party, we felt very safe last night because there were a dozen or so cops on bicycles to our immediate left, we saw four or five cops on motorcycles in a pack crossing just in front of us, and DHS vehicles and staff were scattered all around. And then there were the helicopters. This might be the most secure walk any of us will have in an American city late on a saturday night for the rest of our lives…..depending on what happens next week in St. Paul.

Being a big fan of public transit, I opted to take the public bus downtown last night. What was interesting about this was that 1) I met someone who had paid their own way to Denver to volunteer for the DNC. Not a delegate, just someone who was very dedicated to the cause and willing to put their money where their mouth was. The volunteer assignment involves helping to physically move a lot of the set from the Pepsi Center to Invesco Field overnight on wednesday. A long way to come and a lot of money to spend to do such work. The production people have already begun working to set up Invesco for the big finish on thursday and will be at that all week. 2) The second thing was seeing how proud the people of Denver are to host this event. Several of them asked what I was doing and where I was from, a couple commented on how much bigger their city was now than it had been a couple of decades ago, and both of the bus drivers ended up paying very close attention to the idea that I would be dropped off at the right stop. It was also obvious that the security disruptions were causing problems for them. So, if you live here and take the bus or know anyone who does, allow a little extra time and be ready to walk more than you normally would.

The students have begun their work assignments and they are representing us well. Several of them are working for a major news operation and it is interesting to now hear them speaking about major national media figures like they’ve known them all their lives. Several others are working assisting the DNC with its housing program for delegates and one is now a super volunteer for the DNC whatever that is. The students have been exactly what I’d hoped on this trip: they show up, they take care of their business, they deal well with the constantly changing schedule, and they don’t whine.

Saturday night was the media party at Elitch Gardens Amusement Park. The City of Denver, the local committee and the State of Colorado obviously wanted to make a good impression on the press. In addition to live entertainment and free amusement park rides/games, the press and various other hangers on were treated to free food (including the Rocky Mountain oysters that Peter Aiello actually ate), drink and a three pronged fireworks display at the end of the evening. No expense was spared and this was a telling reminder of the importance of generating favorable media coverage in our present age of instant electronic communication.

The actual Convention kicks off sunday with a variety of associated events and a DNC sponsored interfaith religious service. McCain is on the air today with two smart ads: the first uses Joe Biden’s words from the primary stating that Obama isn’t ready to be president and the second, entitled “Passed Over”, employs Hillary Clinton’s words in a similar fashion in an obvious effort to peel some of those unhappy Hillary voters off to McCain. Very smart and a way to mute some of the bounce Obama might get from picking Biden.

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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 were outstanding.

Dean was easily the speaker of the event to this point. I’ve long thought he was the one Dem who fully got how to campaign in the current era and nothing he said dissuaded me from that opinion. The key points that he made were that the Dems have run to a values based model in place of campaigning about issues and that they placed great emphasis on the votes of people under about age 35, a category with which they were doing quite well.

There was only one pollster he could find when he started with this that agreed with him and that pollster is, surprise, surprise, working for Barack Obama. They also seem to be placing a lot of emphasis on using real people to generate buzz about their candidates and to sign up their friends on behalf of their candidates. Call it a social networking meets branding campaign because that sounds about like what it is. The products that jumped into my mind were Apple Computer and Facebook because they very much do business in that way. If you know anyone working for Barack Obama’s campaign in any capacity expect multiple phone calls, visits and requests to get your friends to join up. That’s how this kind of marketing works. We also heard again from the Convention CEO Rev. Leah Daughtry who had a lot of fans in the audience because she had apparently given a couple of Washington Center students convention credentials but also got applause because she is a really good speaker.

Before the Dean event, we were given a tour of the Convention Hall. Based on what we saw, there won’t be any problem with Barack Obama fading against the background as he did last saturday night in California, the theme of the West will be well represented in the earth tones on the set and the emphasis on an open convention is there because there are steps from the audience onto the stage and that’s something hardly seen in large public events anymore. It was pretty interesting to see how much media is present for this event and how elaborate their sets are at this event. A lot of money is being spent, especially by cable news channels to add their own production values to the DNC show. There is a pool feed from within the Convention and that probably explains all of the emphasis on the outside sets.

The day started with a presentation by the Govenor of Colorado, Bill Ritter. The Democrats would be smart to put their numerous Western governors front and center in their party during the fall if they want to attract moderate voters. Ritter talked a lot about Colorado’s alternative energy plan and made the connections between environmental sustainability and economic development in a way that most moderate voters would probably like. The reason why he was such a good speaker was because he could present the Democratic ideas in a way that did show these connections between what the product being promoted is and what the benefits of it are to the voter. This is much of what a political party needs to do if it wants to win elections.

The day ended with the Reds-Rockies game at Coors Field. Nice place and a reminder that, while Fenway Park is a great experience, it is badly overpriced. For twenty bucks at Coors you get a seat in the upper deck behind home plate with a panorama of the field and some of the city. Not a bad deal even if the game was only so-so.

As for Biden being the VP nominee, I go back and forth about that but there’s little doubt it deals with the weaker parts of Obama’s resume.

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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 of the people who’ve spoken in our morning sessions are the people without which a convention wouldn’t run at all. The stuff that they do is only noticed if it doesn’t work and, if it does work, people take it for granted. What’s been impressive about all of the people that we’ve seen this week is the obvious passion that they have for the things that they are doing.

The last day and a half saw the group attend a briefing by Secret Service Agent David O’ Connor that explained all the work that goes into their jobs and, with as much as they could, an outline of what their jobs are like. Agent O’Connor was, as are many federal law enforcement officials, very much a product of the Boston area having grown up in and gone to school in New England. Always nice to hear people fail to pronounce the letter R after a few days of not hearing that. The President of the Denver Host Committee, Elbra Wedgeworth, spoke first this morning and explained exactly how we all came to be sitting in a city that hadn’t hosted the Democrats in exactly 100 years. The whole story can be reduced to two things: persistence and postive thinking. She made it clear that she and Denver had been working on landing this even for years and were so impressive in their efforts that they even trumped the much bigger and much more wealthier in corporate terms, New York City.

The students had the afternoon to work on their various assignments for our class and to get ready for their work assignments. Our students are either working for media organizations or for the Democratic Party’s housing division. Both of which will be good for them because they will get exposure to how the political party or the media function at the same time that they get to see some of the big names of our national political life up close and personal.

Yesterday ended with a trip to Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium for a reception sponsored by our overall hosts here in Denver, Regis University. This was a great reception but, from the perspective of a huge New England sports fan, probably the only worse place they could have held it would have been Yankee Stadium (good thing NYC didn’t get the DNC or it probably would have been there). Before that we were treated to a small group discussion with Bob Loevy of Colorado College about his plan to build a playoff like system to replace the current system because Iowa and New Hampshire are most overrepresented but so are a few other states who muscle their way to the front of the line. One could argue that pushing to the front of the line was the thing that built America and why shouldn’t that be reflected in the electoral system ? On the other hand, his point that this whole system is poorly thought out is well taken. His other point that the primaries have tended to produce candidates that are more extreme than the electorate is also well taken. As of this writing it appears that something like this has happened again in the case of the Democrats because Barack Obama clearly appears to be more to the left than does the remaining part of the electorate that he needs to win over. McCain, the bane of Conservatives, is an oddity in that he is more moderate than a lot of the party that he will lead this autumn. This is, in part, why McCain is doing so well. He is also doing well because he is winning the brand war as an article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle points out (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/21/MNAG12ES4B.DTL). McCain has connected with the audience that he needs to win in order to win the election, Obama has not but he has a shot to do that in the coming days. This convention is very important in educating people about the features and benefits of brand Obama, as well as, the man himself who is very much the product at bottom.

We also heard from two more of the people  making this work who will probably won’t get on tv very often: Travis Dredd and Cameron Moody of the DNCC. They coordinate Inside and Outside the Hall Operations for the DNCC. As with some of our other speakers, they’ve been living here for a year working daily on this event long before anyone knew who the candidate would be. One of the things that they pointed out was that the Denver set up was very conducive to holding this convention because the facilities are all close together and there is a new convention center here that gives them a ton of space to work with that they might not have had elsewhere. This is an easier set up as well because there is no train station under or highway next to the venue as there was in Boston. These two gentlemen are responsible for the way that these facilities work on a day to day basis during the event and for finding a lot of the people to put together a lot of the things that will happen during the event in the Pepsi Center and Invesco Field.

The weather has turned more hot, dry and sunny here in recent days. In a lot of ways this city reminds me of Lubbock, Texas where I once worked and Oklahoma City where I once studied. It is kind of strange to be back in this part of the country after a long while away.

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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 the party and its candidates as another type of consumer product. The Obama campaign has been very much oriented in this direction from the start but it seems to be having problems moving beyond its opening message of New!!, Hope and Change. This is a common problem with start up companies and, given the dramatic break that this campaign represents with the way Democrats have traditionally campaigned is to be fully expected. The one question that I wished we had asked the producer was about difference between shooting in HD versus analog in terms of what has to be done to make sure the building and the people speaking in it look their best. I would imagine his job is a lot more challenging in this area than it used to be. The other way that the infotainment aspect of these event was brought home was, every time the producer was asked about what the message was, his response essentially was that he wasn’t that into politics but that the DNC also has someone who was specifically charged with messaging.

The DNC CEO was an interesting study in how someone can go from being an collegiate intern to being in a position of significant leadership in the party because she had followed such a path with a few other stops along the way. Given that she was a Pentecostal Minister, she also showed the importance of social institutions in providing a party with its base. She had also founded the Dems faith based initiative, something that in and of itself, is a worthwhile effort if the goal is to win elections while proving that values are not the monopoly of one party. Our closing session involved a presention arguing that the current primaries should be scrapped in favor of a system that looked more like the NFL playoffs with the small states eliminating candidates in the early rounds but the big states having the deciding votes in the later rounds. The other point that came out of this was that the 2008 cycle was much more caucus than primary laden and that this benefitted the candidate of party activists who was, in this case, Obama. This too explains part of the problem that this campaign is currently having: the other candidate won most of the elections that were really open to the kinds of voters that have to be won in order to secure the presidency. When you add this to the kind of Democrats who have been surrounding Obama in terms of ideology, one has to wonder what message is being sent and, if it is as it seems, that the left wing of the Democratic party is in charge, then that would seem to portend trouble with an electorate that is somewhat to the right of that.

The afternoon was devoted to a bus tour of Denver and a trip to the Red Rocks Ampitheater. Anyone who has ever seen the U-2 Live At Red Rocks DVD would be instantly familiar with the place. Following that it was back downtown where I stumbled onto to the official DNC merchandise story where one could buy everything from t-shirts with a Warholesque design of Obama on them to a Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush vodoo doll (take your pick). I would imagine that having the former around will really go a long way toward producing party unity and making all the Hillary folks feel better.

It is easy to get sucked into a bubble at these things where you begin to think that the whole country is paying as much attention to this as are we. On the way home last night, some of us were slapped out of that because we took the wrong city bus and were dropped off at the connecting stop by a very concerned public bus driver who told us not to wait at the stop but to wait in the nearby supermarket because the neighborhood wasn’t the best. It pointed out that, even if our elections are about infotainment and marketing, there are real issues to be dealt with in this country by whoever wins that extend far beyond Constitution Avenue NW in DC in scope.

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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 it is everywhere.

The rest of our day was spent in our group session in which we began examining the strategic environment in which the current campaign is being contested. The big points that we discussed were 1) that much of the resistance Obama is now encountering has to do with the hangover from the primaries, the way in which his campaign microtargeted in the spring and the problems that it has having adding onto those sectors and the way in which the McCain campaign has adjusted to the situation facing it and has made extensive use of humor to get is message about Obama across. At this point, the campaign is mostly about Obama because as one McCain aide confessed somewhere earlier this summer, their more substantive appeals about McCain gained no traction. David Brooks has an article in this morning’s NYT that points out that McCain, once dismissive of the modern marketing of politics, is now adopting the techniques commonly used and they are (unsurprisingly) working. The other major point made to the students was that, if we look at Dick Fenno’s work on Congressional candidates and apply it to Obama we can see the following: A) Obama’s persona hasn’t been able to show the demographic groups that he needs to add onto in order to win the election that he is like them. This has been something of his own doing because he has refused to play some parts of the game candidates need to play in order to gain office in this country and B) his campaign has been wonderfully free of policy specifics. While they like to talk about their website, it is my opinion after reading it that it does not clearly explain to the average person what Obama will do and how he will do it if elected. As Fenno noted of Congressional campaigns, this is one of the basic things that a candidate needs to do.

Monday evening we were hosted by the Washington Center at a very nice dinner in downtown Denver. This was great except for the fact that the bus organized to get us downtown was totally unorganized.

Some observations of the city 1) Denver’s 16th Street Mall was a good idea when it was started and a good idea now. The Mall is a long pedestrian/bus route through the middle of the downtown that mimics a suburban shopping mall. Other cities have done this but not so many have done it as well as Denver has, 2) Coors Field looks like PNC or AT&T Park 3) Invesco Field looks like a spaceship and 4) as one of our group noted everything in this city looks new - that’s because a lot of it is and because there is almost no moisture here so things probably don’t age as quickly as they do in Boston.

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This blog deals with the trip by seven Suffolk graduate students in the MSPS program to the DNC and RNC. The students will be taking a class and at the same time working in field placements with a convention participant. Our partner in this venture is the Washington Center. They have arranged the program content on the ground to a large extent, as well as the field placements in which the students will be working. At Suffolk, we talk a lot about having a professional focus in our graduate programs, this is exactly the kind of thing that we are talking about. The great thing about this program is that the students will be exposed to professionally accomplished academics to whom they would not normally have access, in addition to the fieldwork.

Our group is one of two participating in both conventions, the remainder of the groups that we have met here and will meet in the Twins are attending one convention only. Last night, we had a two and a half hour long opening session that came with the usual icebreakers plus the basic rules of the road for being part of a high profile event like a political convention and as representatives of the two sponsoring institutions.

I arrived in Denver on friday, the students came yesterday and we will be here until the morning after Barack Obama speaks at Invesco Field. That day sees a 6 AM departure for the Denver airport and a flight to the Twin Cities where the Republican National Convention will begin on the following monday. We will be in the Twins until at least Friday 5th September but most of us don’t get back to Boston until sometime on saturday.

The students showed up just in time for the rain to stop. After the summer we’ve had in New England, it was disappointing to descend out of the clouds on friday onto a a runway and into a cold rainstorm. Saturday, during our faculty orientation, it poured most of the time and saturday night, during our trip to Colorado Springs for a dinner hosted by the noted political scientist Tom Cronin, it both rained and the cloud deck was low enough to put real limits on how much of the mountains we could see. Oh well, today’s a nicer day and it isn’t like we’re really here for the weather or the mountains anyway.

Tags: barack obama, john mccain, national political conventions, suffolk university, the washington center

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