DEMOCRATS AND THE ASHES OF LOVE

Democratic National Convention, 1960

Perhaps when I turned off the TV on August 14, 1980 I realized that an era was flickering away.  Or not.  But 1980 was the year that marked the end of that immensely treasured American institution, the entertaining political convention.  True enough, I came to the political convention in 1964, well past its truly prime years before World War II, those years of multiple, sometimes triple-digit ballots to select a nominee.  Though I do think the Democrats managed to squeeze out a second ballot sometime in the fifties, and certainly the television anchors managed to bring up that possibility occasionally (amazingly, and in the face of all reasonable possibility three-quarters of a century later, they still do), it never happened.

Although the Dog Days me and his search for entertainment whilst awaiting the uncertain joys of school’s reopening never got so far into conventions for more than a few lookins on the conventions which were held by the party with an incumbent standing for re-election, I was there morning, noon, and night for any such event which promised a floor fight, even over such barely relevant arcana such as platform planks or which delegate to seat from the such-and-such Congressional district of Texas.

The greatest year of all was 1968; the G.O.P. had three candidates. The centrist Dick Nixon, the liberal (this, of course, being a relative term in that party even then) Nelson Rockefeller, and the conservative up-and-comer Dutch Reagan.  A few reporters would traverse the floor, gaily tracking down rumors about delegates switching votes or fierce arguments in committee meeting rooms whilst high above anchormen pontificated on it all.  And then, of course, the Democrats fought it out in the convention hall and in the park in Chicago.

The spectacle diminished only gradually throughout the seventies, and come 1980 we did indeed have a potential floor fight, albeit one in the party with the incumbent, when Edward Kennedy challenged his party’s incumbent, Jimmy Carter.  If memory serves, there was little if any suspense by the time of the convention that this challenge had been beaten back, but I do recall a certain tension in the air about how many bones to throw the Kennedy delegates in terms of primetime speaking opportunities, platform planks, and the like.

And then it was gone.  Four years later, the Republican convention was just another infomercial, though, as I say, I had never had too much use for incumbent coronations anyway.  More worrisome was the Democrats’ trying as best they could to travel the same road when their primary process had basically been the same old grind with lots of candidates and two relatively competitive choices left standing.

That’s the background to this year when I faced the difficult decision on whether to watch the convention Monday night or repair to my usual evening pattern of listening to my new record and continuing my project of replaying the 1911 American League baseball season.  I picked baseball and, came the dawn, found that I had missed a real old-fashioned stemwinder by Michelle Obama, a maverick Republican or two, and even a few dissidents back in the studios (no, they didn’t send anybody out there this year, though in fairness, there’s ‘no there there’, to adapt Dorothy Parker’s reflection on Oakland, California) grumbling about letting Republicans speak at a Democratic convention.       

Even in these days of the Web, one still has to dig a little to find out what’s going to happen on a given night, but I decided I would forsake the pleasures of They Might Be Giants conjoined with the fascinations of matching up the St. Louis Browns with the New York Highlanders, and watch.  Two ex-presidents were to speak, as was the charismatic Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and there were hints dropped in passing that the rollcall vote to select a nominee might be in the cards.  Yes, I would do my civic duty and watch. 

But which channel to watch?  The broadcast networks, with their flimsy one-hour omnium-gatherums, were out of the question, as was Fox News, who, in addition to their irritating rightward tilt, as usual had managed to bring in a liberal I can barely tolerate as their token boat-rocker.  I decided to start with C-Span, since it started earlier than MSNBC and CNN and I thought it might yield up some of the pleasantly dull routine business I remembered so fondly from back in the day.  And sure enough, a Convention Chair called the convention to order, though there was nobody to be called to order or need to be, and introduced three committee reports, now telescoped into about two minutes apiece instead of the hours they used to take as the chairs droned on with reading the damn things, constantly interrupted by amendments from the floor.  This was a good thing.  Perhaps a couple of pundits I had read insisting that this was actually going to be better TV than in the good old days were correct.

Then, with a nod to the past in the form of a few snippets of past keynote speeches (I admit that I had forgotten the keynote address, and even if I had remembered it, I would have assumed that I had missed it—wasn’t it always on Monday?) we were on to what they were calling a keynote address, not that it was.  It was instead a Zoomy affair wherein various representatives of local constituencies and minor administrative offices from the rising generation traded sentences back and forth for a few minutes about this-n-that before giving way to a parade of speakers, each constrained to a couple of minutes.  There was Senate Majority Leader Chas. Schumer, a woman that The Donald had fired from the Justice Department, blast from the past Caroline Kennedy (no longer using her married name—did I miss something?) and her son, the ex-presidents (Grits heard but not seen, Flapjack in a comfy chair with an evening background visible through a window, he and Schumer among the few speakers who even pretended to be live).  None of this was great entertainment, but it was all at least snappy and brief.

Then came nominating speeches.  These used to last the better part of a night and day, and eventually led to the Democrats’ nominee accepting in the middle of the night in 1972 and their near-extinction thereafter.  The extinction process has indeed led to endangered status, as there was one nominating speech and one seconding speech, each limited to a minute or so—I believe that, in the institution’s pomp, there were three seconding speeches, each limited, if that’s the word, to twenty minutes.  There weren’t speeches for anybody but the two candidates left standing at the end—in the old days there would have been fourteen, most of them for favorite sons who had few if any delegates from outside their home state.

And, yes, by now I had figured out that there was going to be a rollcall.  It was, in its way, kind of fun, as they whipped around from state to state and somebody standing beside an old-school sign on a pole with the name of the state on it would give a little speech and read out their votes.  The kooky feel of this was charming—some couldn’t be bothered to speak in English (or even Spanish, come to that)-- but somewhat offset by the annoyance that clearly nobody was going to be allowed to vote for anybody but Biden and Sanders.  Such niceties as Tulsi Gabbard winning the delegates from some Pacific island and Amy Klobuchar running the table in her home state were overlooked entirely.  There were a few abstentions, but not even many of those.  Moreover, for the first time in the evening, I had to decide which channel to watch: CNN was showing commercials, so that was out, but C-Span wasn’t tallying the votes, and MSNBC wasn’t IDing the speakers.  This was a huge dilemma, at least to me.  I finally decided that knowing who was speaking, especially as both my home state and my adopted home state(s) were coming up, was more important.  Well, my home states ranged from half-decent ( a civil rights advocate from a civil rights landmark ) to extremely disappointing (a farmer, a man acting like a farmer, and a meatpacker).  And then, with a few reaction shots from the Bidens, it was over, at least for me.  When they launched into a video about Mr. Biden’s sparkling record on health care through the ages, I decided it wasn’t worth the time to wait around for Jno. Kerry and Jill Biden, and off I went to compose my thoughts, visit with the dog about what time he should have his walk, and work on my Christmas list.

 My day will be taken up with whether to watch again tonight. Barack H. Obama and Kamala Harris fight it out with Connie Mack, Shoeless Joe, and Sea Lion Hall.  And They Might Be Giants.