Democratic leaders are converting their August national convention into a virtual gathering, and they’ve told all their delegates to stay home. Republican leaders are still planning an in-person confab to hail Caesar, but at least seven senators and eight House members have already bailed and a sizeable number of colleagues have yet to commit.
The award for funniest excuse goes to Senator Pat Roberts, who says he won’t attend because he has “some things to do in Kansas” – which is like the scene in the rock satire Spinal Tap, when a superstar’s manager tells the loser Tap band, “Listen, we’d love to stand around and chat, but we gotta sit down in the lobby and wait for the limo.”
But so what if the Democratic meetup in Milwaukee has imploded? And so what if the relocated Trumpfest in Jacksonville (in the midst of hurricane season, brilliant) turns out to be another Tulsa? If there’s remotely any upside to this pandemic, it’s the fresh reminder that we don’t even need national conventions anymore. They’re as archaic as the five-cent cigar and the VCR.
The conventions are merely infomercials; your local school board meeting generates more news. The conventions have long been staged for TV, choreographed down to the minutest detail – thanks to the ubiquitous presence of TV. The conventions have far less spontaneity than the Golden Globes. I’ve “covered” 10 of them, which basically means that much of the time I and my colleagues are confined to the press tents, where we watch the same TV show that you sit through at home. If you’re paying attention at all, which is doubtful, since you know the whole plot in advance.
When was the last time a convention broke any real news? I can list all kinds of ephemeral stuff: Trumpist delegates booing Ted Cruz in 2016, Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair in 2012, Clinton strategist Dick Morris getting fired in 1996 for trysting with a call girl and sucking on her toes, the Republicans fighting over an abortion plank in 1996, Jimmy Carter on stage in 1980 trying to get a congratulatory handshake from a recalcitrant Edward Kennedy…
But for real news, you probably need to conjure the GOP convention of 1976, when President Gerald Ford and upstart Ronald Reagan fought until the latter cried uncle; or maybe the Democratic debacle of 1968, when blood flowed in the streets of Chicago and a prominent senator compared the cops to the Gestapo; or maybe 1956, when Democrat Adlai Stevenson couldn’t settle on a running mate, and ceded the decision to the delegates.
And the presidential nomination is essentially decided by the voters; the primaries have been ubiquitous since 1972. Delegates have been reduced to rubber stamps, basically committed to ratifying the voters on the first ballot. Pop quiz: When was the last time a convention went to multiple ballots?
Try 1952.
That was so long ago, Philadelphia still had two big-league baseball teams in Connie Mack Stadium. That was so long ago, Elvis Presley was an usher at his high school’s dances. That was so long ago, Frank Sinatra was newly married to Ava Gardner. (If you’re blanking on Ava Gardner, that alone is proof that 1952 was long ago.)
Earlier this year – really? this year? – when it briefly appeared that Bernie Sanders might go to Milwaukee in first place but with insufficient delegates to clinch the win, a lot of journalists got very excited at the prospect of a “brokered convention” – a news-making scrum in real time. Every four years, speculative stories are written about the prospect of a brokered convention, but they never happen. If journalists – and all of us citizens – truly yearn for convention drama, we’ll need to rent The Best Man, a black-and-white flick that pits Henry Fonda against Cliff Robertson in a pitched battle down to the wire for a presidential nomination. If that sounds old, it is. It was released 56 years ago.
Four years ago, a Republican national committeeman named Curly Haugland offered a smart proposal at a rules meeting: Abolish the GOP convention altogether. He said that if delegates have no role except to sit there as pawns on a TV show, why bother to convene at all? That idea went nowhere. Granted, every once in a while there is a platform fight (which generates news that’s quickly forgotten), but this year, the GOP isn’t even bothering to update its 2016 platform. They’re just ratifying the old one.
The sole purpose of the 2020 Florida confab is to show the world that Trump’s maskless fans still love him. But who knows, after six more weeks of Covid cases in America’s hot spot, he may be compelled to deliver his renomination speech from his bunker. What difference would it make, really? Joe Biden will deliver his without the choreographed spontaneity of huzzahs and balloons, and that’s fine too.
Ron Johnson, a Republican senator, said it well the other day. He’s on the fence about the convention because he’s not sure “whether I’d really have any use or not.” Well, he won’t. Nobody will. Nobody has, for a very long time.