So, we need to attend centrally to these two strategic views, which gain additional curiosity value because the two parties do not see the necessities of the fall campaign in the same way. Instead, they find themselves in very different (and impressively asymmetric) situations. Yet the final night of the Democratic convention also leads us to return to a topic that has garnered surprising attention throughout, namely the weather, and one that, at least to these eyes, seems rather strikingly new, namely ‘the battle of the wives’.

The World According to the Political Parties

Both sides recognize the absolute basics in looking toward the fall campaign, and in this, they actually do see the world in the same way. To wit: this one is a re-election—or not—of a sitting President. Not all re-elections are the same, but this one captures a certain generic structure, one that sharply constrains the available strategies. For the Republicans, as we noted last week, there are basically two of these:

• They can concentrate on turning the election into a ‘referendum’. You like the way things are now, you vote for their side. You dislike the way things are now, you vote for ours. Simple to describe, but not always simple—or even possible—to execute.
• Alternatively, they can turn to pulling apart the Obama coalition, to its ‘deconstruction’. This requires isolating a small set of vulnerable pieces and going after them in a focused fashion, to the exclusion of everything except rallying the base.

It might seem that there is a third strategy, summarized as ‘some of each’. But in a world of limited resources, limited attention, and limited time, ‘some of each’ collapses quickly into a muddle, in which no one can tell what the point is. In any case, the Republicans made their choice last week, and they made it definitively. This campaign is to be a referendum. In order for it to have a fighting chance, the party must banish all other concerns beyond the economy and jobs. For the Republicans, this meant banishing social issues in particular, and the Republican Convention was remarkably bereft of same. Even efforts to rally the activists via these issues by way of off-hours speeches were as limited as they have been in a very long time.

For the Democrats, there are also two fudnamental possibilities. The in-party might seem to have more: they hold the Presidency, after all, that ostensible ‘bully pulpit’. Yet there are again really just two:

• One is simply to join the referendum. This requires listing—and then repetition—of the main accomplishments of the Administration. The goal is to be sure that you have not forgotten. In short, bring it on. This is a confident strategy, dangerously so for an apparently close year, but it has the advantage that it is easy to execute.
• The other available strategy might be summarized as ‘demonization’. However you may feel about the current situation, both the opposition candidate and opposition programs are reprehensible. You must remember that you do not want either going forward. And anyhow, you know that they created the current mess.

Here, too, there might seem to be a third alternative: bring forth a fresh set of comprehensive promises. Yet presidential administrations, for good and practical reasons, tend to begin with their big ideas. So no one has ever found this alternative to be useful in practice. Administrations with a comfortable lead merely go for the referendum: George W. Bush in 2004, Bill Clinton in 1996, Ronald Reagan in 1984. Administrations without a comfortable lead are drawn instead toward demonization: George H.W. Bush on the compulsively dishonest Bill Clinton in 1992, Jimmy Carter on the evidently wild-eyed Ronald Reagan in 1980.

In any case, the Democrats, too, made their choice this week, the one that appears likely to govern the full fall campaign. There were certainly champions of the referendum within the delegations, and some from the podium (at off hours!) as well. But the main speeches clearly went for demonization, from both the Vice President and the President—not to mention former President Clinton, who invested this theme with limitless detail. This was a convention dedicated to telling you that whatever you judge to have been reasonable over the last four years, and however good or bad you may feel as a result, the other side will undeniably prove to be worse.

The Democratic convention, summarized from the podium, was clearly more varied than its Republican counterpart. The Republicans did need to ‘humanize’ their nominee during prime time, and they did devote extensive extra attention to small business in their off-hours. But they remained, overall, remarkably focused on the referendum theme. By contrast, the Democrats did use aspects of their record to fire up those in the hall. In particular, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, promising women equal pay for equal work, plus the abolition of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the change in the President’s view of gay marriage, got special repetitive attention. Yet environmentalism, and most especially climate change, got short shrift even in these off-hours presentations, and the leadership was careful to let little of this bleed over into prime time.

In those same off-hours, the party developed the argument that they had indeed accomplished as much, even on jobs and the economy, as the underlying situation permitted, and they did allow the argument that the Republicans had essentially caused this situation to move over into prime time. Still and all, far more time was spent painting Mitt Romney as a man who could not possibly understand you and yours—off-shore accounts, out-sourcing, and obliviousness—in a party that would benefit only the very rich and wreck social protections for everybody else.

Weather and Wives

Are these wise choices? Will one or the other require a late course-correction as the election campaign unfolds? How will their interaction play out? With only eight-plus weeks left, we shall quickly find out. In the meantime, it may be worth looking back at the repeatedly intrusive topic that shaped both conventions this year, namely the weather, and at an innovation that just might become an institutionalized feature of the convention going forward, namely the role of the wives.

Having decided to go with the giant-arena approach to the acceptance speech once again, the Democrats discovered that they had exposed themselves to the vagaries of summer weather in an apparently unforeseen fashion. Hurricane Isaac could not have been specifically foreseen by the Republicans, but it was hurricane season and they were planning to be on the Gulf Coast. The result looked somehow inevitable in retrospect. Quite apart from the weather, the Democrats were taking a mild but calculated gamble on repeating their ‘people’s acceptance speech’ of 2008. Could they generate an approximation of the same enthusiasm by opening the crowning event of the convention to all and sundry?

In theoretical terms, this moved the convention back toward being a mass rally, part of its original charm. Though in very concrete terms, it also forced convention planners to begin arranging fleets of buses to bring college students to Charlotte for the event, so that the lessened enthusiasm of the 2012 (as opposed to the 2008) Obama campaign did not show up physically and symbolically by way of a partially empty hall. Then came forecasts of a row of strong thunderstorms at convention time on Thursday, forcing a further strategic decision. From one side, the President could still speak as planned; he could be under roof. But from the other side, if this thinned out the audience, the potential visuals of a shrunken and drenched crowd seemed particularly unattractive.

So the decision was made to move things out of Bank of America Stadium and back into Time Warner Cable Arena. Yet the fall-out from this was much larger than most reports indicated. Many delegations had urged interested Democrats from their home state to come down to Charlotte. While they could not be credentialed for the hall, they could be guaranteed a seat in the stadium. So they were in Charlotte specifically to go to Bank of American Stadium, a prospect that was now withdrawn. There must have been others who merely planned to come on their own, getting to Charlotte in plenty of time to be toward the head of the line for admission to the stadium.

I was staying with New Jersey, for example, and New Jersey was sufficiently close to Charlotte—not close, just sufficiently close—that individuals could in fact drive down for a road trip on their own. One has to feel real sympathy for John Wisniewski, Democratic State Chairman, for having to alert his members to the change. Had you driven down to Charlotte but been otherwise uncredentialed except for the final night, the prospect of a hotel ‘watch party’ must have seemed very small compensation:

Very different in its implications was the strategic decision, taken by the Republicans and amplified by the Democrats, to make extensive use of the ‘political wives’, in this case the spouse of the Republican nominee and the spouses of both the presidential and the vice-presidential nominee for the Democrats. The mandate for Ann Romney was substantively clear. Her job was to paint ‘Mitt the man’ so that the general public could come to appreciate his private virtues. The mandate for Michelle Obama was more diffuse, in arguing that he was the same man he had always been. Though substance for her was largely beside the point. Showcasing an attractive and skilled speak was the main point. And the Democrats then offered equal opportunity to Jill Biden, to paint Joe as stereotypical of the middle class at which the Democrats were aiming much of their argument.

Long-time fans of country music—the NASCAR Museum immediately adjoining the Charlotte Convention Center only reinforced this theme—can be excused for hearing one of the truly iconic songs of country music playing in their heads as they listened to these speeches. The song was, of course, Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man”, and it got only louder and louder among the cognoscenti in 2012 as they speeches moved from Ann to Michelle to Jill. (“Stand by your man; and show the world you love him; keep giving all the love you can; stand by your man.”) Regardless (perhaps you cannot hear the electrified slide guitar in your head?), the testimony of the wives had all the earmarks of a new convention event that stood a great chance of becoming institutionalized.

And at this point, which moves the convention as an institution off into its next incarnation, we should probably just stop. Commentators may argue that the two conventions, put together, moved the popularity lines for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in a remarkably limited fashion. It says here that that is not the point. The country was closely divided in partisan terms, and this was a generic re-election within a close context. The challenger could focus on pulling a small number of voters across the middle, and he could be happy leaving the two conventions as an effective equal. The incumbent could know that his support was solid but harder to expand, so that the key (and quite different) task was to see that all potential supporters actually turned out.

In that environment, the conventions clarified the views of both parties about the central focus of the election campaign and how it should be pursued. In off-hours and in the delegations, they set out, as they always do, the themes of 2012 that resonated with the activists for the two parties. From the podium and thus for the network television audience, they allowed the Republicans to focus on their intended referendum and the Democrats to focus on the demonization of those Republicans. A mass electorate will ultimately decide which one was wiser.

Living in New Jersey

Just as I was fortunate to be able to stay with Wisconsin in both 2008 and 2012, I have been fortunate to stay with New Jersey in both years as well. The New Jersey delegation last time had some curious fault lines, courtesy of the 2008 nominating struggle. New Jersey then had (as it still does) a presidential primary. In 2008, this had been won by Hilary Clinton, though by the time the delegation had assembled in Denver, Barack Obama was of course the nominee. This trajectory had a number of internal delegation effects.

New Jersey has a large black population, which is well represented within the active Democratic Party. But Clinton had been the obvious frontrunner for a nomination at the time when delegate slates had to be assembled, so most of the major black political figures in the state had gone with her. That decision did not hurt them—she won comfortably—but it did mean that the black Obama delegates were both younger and less well established in state party circles. New Jersey was also well supplied with established white women in party ranks, and many of these went very actively with Clinton, envisioning the first female nominee from a major party. By the time of the convention, the black Clinton delegates had shifted comfortably to Obama; indeed, most were delighted to do so. Those established white female delegates had made the transition as well—they certainly wanted to see the Democratic nominee win. But, in private conversations, many remained wistful, as well as slightly nettled by the ease with which other Clinton delegates had transferred their loyalties.

Flash forward to 2012, and none of these fault lines were really any longer in evidence. If anything, the previous Clinton delegates, black and white, were the most demonstrably desirous of seeing Obama capture a second term. Though in truth, the presence of a close national race, coupled with what was perceived as a basically successful Republican Convention the week before—New Jersey Democrats regarded it as successful but fraudulent—snuffed out any residual disappointments among those who had wanted someone else last time or, especially, among those who wanted more from the President than he had delivered this time. In direct conversations and in snippets overheard, there were a few white liberals who wished Obama had indeed sought more, but this was a deep undertone and not even an explicit argument.

By contrast, the difference between the 2008 and 2012 Republican delegations in Wisconsin appeared to be entirely contextual—though this was certainly context in the grand sense. Wisconsin in 2008, while it was once again a modest partisan temptation, was not an indisputable battleground state, and the result ultimately provided support for those who argued that it would not even be close. Beyond that, it had a Democratic Governor and two Democratic Senators. Wisconsin in 2012, on the other hand, had the Republican National Chairman; it had one Republican Senator plus an open seat with a very promising Republican candidate; it had a Republican Governor, one who had achieved rock-star status within the party nationwide; and when it acquired the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee as well, polls moved it into the battleground column. So the main difference in four years’ time was not so much along candidate, ethnic, or even ideological lines, but just in having nothing—and then everything—to play for.

Breakfast in New Jersey

For New Jersey, as for most states, the main event of the day which features political commentary focused on the national party convention is the delegation breakfast. Oddly enough, New Jersey Democrats are like Wisconsin Republicans this year, and unlike many other delegations in their own party, in having almost all the speakers at these breakfasts be in-state politicians. On Monday, these featured John Wisniewski, Democratic State Chairman; Steve Sweeney, President of the State Senate; and Sheila Oliver, Speaker of the State House; leavened by only one out-stater, David Simas, Director of Polling for the Obama Campaign. On Tuesday, they featured James Florio and Brendan Byrne, former Governors, along with incumbent Congressmen Frank Pallone, Rob Andrews, and Bill Pascrell, leavened only by Governor Daniel Malloy of Connecticut.

While debate rages in press stories about the appropriate strategy for the Obama campaign at the general election of 2012, and as we wait to see how convention strategists envision the answer, the New Jersey delegation, from the podium and, in truth, at the breakfast table, had relatively little doubt. The Republicans had spent last week trying to frame the contest as a referendum on the last four years, and New Jersey Democrats were prepared to accommodate them. ‘Bring it on’ might have been the collective theme. Wisniewski argued that Democrats progressed by growing the middle class, Republicans by trickling down. Sweeney enumerated the putative successes of the Obama Administration, and urged others to do the same. Oliver, the most rousing of the first day’s speakers, called the Democrats the party of the disadvantaged, saluted the public education system, and attacked “this nonsense about entitlement”. Simas, the Obama pollster, argued for playing offense, not playing defense, although, somewhat surprisingly, he offered no poll data with his argument.

The next morning, the two emeritus Governors, Florio and Byrne, each harked back to 1980 for the analogies in their arguments. For Florio, this was a means to highlight ostensible difference in values for the two candidates in 2012. For Byrne, it was more a matter of highlighting the importance of unity, and the costs of dissension. Governor Malloy of Connecticut then argued that what was really shaping up was not the Democratic Party versus the Republican Party, but rather the Democratic Party versus the Tea Party. Congressman Pallone hit the issues of healthcare and the environment (the latter in the form of the Jersey Shore), and Congressman Andrews hammered healthcare again, while warning against voter registration reforms like those in neighboring states. All of these individuals, on both days, were further united by their hostility to Chris Christie, incumbent Republican Governor, and the last New Jersey Democratic State Committee newsletter before the convention actually featured a further play on the Olympic meme of “McKayla is Not Impressed”, which is attached at the end of this morning’s blog.

Each of the New Jersey breakfasts has had a specific sponsor, Novartis on Monday and Johnson & Johnson on Tuesday, reflecting a self-conception as ‘the pharmaceutical state’. New Jersey has also been distinguished, in my experience, by running its own bus system. The delegation leadership keeps underlining the fact that official buses from the Democratic National Convention Committee require DNCC credentials for their use, but that the state has its own system requiring only state credentials. This is true, though the drivers for this state system have my condolences: police and traffic wardens in Charlotte yesterday morning were not allowing these buses to park—or to discharge passengers without parking. Tuesday also reminds us that, quite apart from the delegation receptions/parties that normally follow every day’s events, there are also events specialized to the individual delegations. Thus New Jersey Democrats were able to leave for Golf at Piper Glen at 8:30 or for the Botanical Garden Tour at 10:30.

States in the Nation

Paying attention in these blogs to the state delegations and the convention hall does have an inescapable opportunity cost: the affiliated group meetings that are occurring every day inevitably get slighted. Talking with Wisconsin Republicans and New Jersey Democrats does not yield the impression that either was hugely cathected by this widespread group menu, though such talk does suggest (for whatever the suggestion is worth) that they mattered more to the NJ Dems than to the WI Reps. Be that as it may, the actual menu shows a striking difference between the two parties. The Republican version featured many individualized organizations that were pushing a targeted cause or seeking to establish a particular voluntary organization. By contrast, much of the entire Democratic day could be organized around established demographic caucuses.

Monday from 10:00 AM until Noon was reserved for the African American Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the Ethnic Council, the Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus, and the Native American Council. Noon until 2:00 PM was reserved for the Faith Council, the Youth Council, and the Disability Caucus. And 2:00 to 4:00 PM was reserved for the Veterans and Military Affairs Council. Tuesday from 10:00 AM to Noon belonged to the Women’s Caucus. Noon to 2:00 PM was for the LGBT Caucus and the Senior Council. And 2:00 to 4:00 PM belonged to the Rural Council and the Small Business Owners Council. Wednesday repeats the Monday schedule. Thursday repeats the Tuesday schedule. New Jersey breakfasts also make a point of saluting the main demographic groups within this roster, all of which have recognized representatives within the state delegation: African Americans, Hispanics, Asian and Pacific Islanders, Women, the Disabled, and the LGBT group.

The two national party conventions, on the other hand, are united in having their very own ‘daily newspaper’. Since about 1980—I am unsure of the precise starting date—the magazine National Journal has put out a convention daily, arriving at delegation hotels in the wee hours before each day’s events. The main national newspapers do of course publish every day during national party conventions, and they always have an up-weighted amount of convention news. But National Journal really did long ago become ‘the convention daily’. It was challenged for one election, in 1988, by Congressional Quarterly which also mounted a daily paper, but that was the lone (and lonely) counterpart.

So, National Journal did (and does) feature news articles on nearly every facet of convention activity, along with a detailed schedule of group events and at least highlights of the podium schedule, supplemented in our time with electronic updates for all who register. A collection of these daily issues is the one essential resource for following national party conventions across time. That said, even this long-established convention daily may be showing signs of suffering the same vicissitudes as the institution that it covers, and/or of the news media of which it is inevitably a part. For what exists in 2012 is clearly smaller than what previously existed: 32 pages rather than 48, if memory serves. It has also shed Sunday, where it was previously the best available device for organizing convention research, and it shed Friday in Tampa (and is expected to shed it in Charlottee) as well. One-time convention attendees may lament none of this. I do.

Because I will be traveling tomorrow—it is not possible to fly back to Madison on a red-eye after the acceptance speech Thursday night in time to meet my Friday morning class—the final blog in this series will have to wait for Friday, perhaps even Saturday. Apologies for that, though a modest compensation is that we shall all know how various convention developments came out, at least in the middle run.

McKayla is not impressed with Christie keynote

The evolution of these relationships—“elite-mass linkages” to a social scientist, “parties and voters” to the man in the street—is reasonably well-understood territory and constitutes the deep background to most of what will be observed at the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 2012. Accordingly, we ought to visit it today, the day that the Democratic Convention moves into the hall and up to the podium. The year 2012 has, however, presented a nasty problem in this regard. For all the years that I have been attending national party conventions, one of both of the newspapers that would be the ‘national press’ in a European nation, the New York Times or Washington Post or both together, have been supplementing the resources of formal social scientists through extensive delegate surveys, which informed the Sunday editions of these papers at convention time.

Unless I have truly been asleep at the switch, there have been no such surveys in 2012. I am aware of some counterparts involving state delegations, and these are consistent with much of what has already been observed here. But for 2012, we need to set out the world leading up to this year, and then invite observers to bring their own impressions to bear. I shall do the same with mine, starting tonight. Before that, however, it seems worth setting out the world as we have come to know it, the deep background to modern convention politics, in the belief that while it can change—indeed, looking back, we know key points when it did—it qualifies the real backdrop to all that we observe.

Partisan Activists, Their Rank and File, and the General Public

It was Herbert McClosky, political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who taught us all—including those much-later generators of delegate surveys at the Times and the Post—how to track these relationships, and why they matter. Beginning with the 1956 conventions, McClosky et al. unearthed a world in which rank and file Democrats were moderately to the left of the general public as a whole; rank and file Republicans were moderately to the right of that same general public; Democratic delegates were moderately to the left of the Democratic rank and file, and hence farther off from the general public; and Republican delegates were sharply off to her right of the Republican rank and file, and thereby wildly off to the right of the general public.

In the immediate postwar period, it was not clear whether this reflected damage inflicted by the Great Depression and the New Deal, where the Republicans had remained in a pre-New Deal condition while the Democrats had moved on, or whether it reflected just one clear majority and one clear minority party, where the minority was condemned to ideological isolation. But it was a recurrent pattern into the 1960s. Not all subsequent research was as geographically far-reaching and as intellectually rich as that from McClosky and colleagues, but most came to similar conclusions.

Ideological Representation at National Party Conventions

The topic received renewed attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the institutional arrangements for selecting delegates to national party conventions (and hence for nominating presidents) received intensive, self-conscious, root-and-branch reform. Almost everyone who watches contemporary nominating politics is aware of the biggest single piece of this. Old-fashioned state party conventions were replaced by modern presidential primaries. But in fact, both conventions and primaries were further reformed. Conventions were no longer closed gatherings of the official party to select its delegates to the national convention. Instead, they began with open meetings at the grass roots, attended by anyone who claimed to be a Democrat or a Republican. Likewise, many existing primaries had featured the direct election of delegates to the national convention, but without any connection to presidential aspirants. Reformed primaries emphasized precisely this link, often putting the names of presidential contenders but not of delegates on the primary ballot.

A New World of Activists, Identifiers, and the General Public?

Because these reforms were directly associated with catastrophic upheavals inside the Democratic Party, with an inescapable backwash for Republicans, it was not always clear what was chicken and what was egg in the new relationships that emerged between party activists and their rank and file. Did new relationships drive reform, or did reform give rise to new relationships? But a return to systematic study in 1972—1968 had been the upheaval; 1972 was the first available test of the combined effect of upheaval and reform—suggested an actual upending and reversal of the old world. Democratic identifiers were still modestly to the left of the general public; Republican identifiers were still modestly to the right of that same public. But now, it was Republican delegates who were modestly farther to their right of their rank and file, and Democratic delegates who were wildly off to the left of theirs. It looked, for one election, like a world turned upside down.

Yet within one further election—and note that 1976 is itself a long time ago—the shape of what would be the obvious progenitor of the modern world had come sharply into view. The oldest part of the picture did not change. Rank and file Democrats were still modestly off to the left of the general public as a whole. Rank and file Republicans were still modestly off to the right. But Democratic delegates were again wildly off to the left of their rank and file, and hence even farther away from the collective general public. While Republican delegates returned to being wildly off to the right of their rank and file, and hence likewise even farther away from that collective general public.

Lest observers be allowed to believe that the world had simply become more volatile overall, the same surveys in 1976 told the same story. Even with Jimmy Carter as their nominee, surely the most conservative Democratic nominee in the entire postwar period on the basic issues of social welfare that had formed the party system of the New Deal, Democratic delegates remained wildly off to the left. Even with Gerald Ford as their nominee, probably the most moderate Republican nominee in all the years since his nomination, Republican delegates remained wildly off to the right.

There was to be one major, further twist to this alignment as it reached the modern era, though there are two possible ways to talk about its coming. One way is to say that those increasingly polarized convention delegates, as representatives of the active political parties in general, pulled their rank and file farther left for the Democrats and farther right for the Republicans. The other way is to say that as active Democrats and active Republicans drew sharper and sharper lines between the two parties, more and more of the rank and file sorted itself into the party whose preferences were closer to their own. The point here is that either explanation leads on to the modern alignment.

In this, rank and file Democrats were now clearly and distinctively left of the general public, comparatively farther off to the left than their delegates had been in the 1950s. Likewise, rank and file Republicans were now clearly and distinctively right of the general public, to an apparently greater degree than rank and file Democrats were to the left but certainly farther to the right than their convention delegates had been in 1972. Democratic delegates remained farther to the left of their rank and file, while Republican delegates remained farther to the right of theirs.

What about 2012?

To the best of my knowledge (and that of the colleagues whom I have queried), there are no systematic surveys of this sort for the Republican and Democratic delegates of 2012.
There is, however, one focused but still substantial survey which suggests that nothing major has changed: these contours remain the basic story of 2012. There are also two single-state surveys that qualify the implications of these results in a major way: the same basic story may not always conduce toward the same strategic outcome. And there is, of course, the convention behavior that we are about to observe, this evening, tomorrow evening, and Thursday evening. One side of this behavior comes from the podium, as shaped by the convention leadership. The other side comes from the delegations, in what the delegates would do if they were shaping podium presentations. I shall attend to both of these latter forms of evidence in my next two posts.

In the meantime, note that the issue of Bloomberg Insider for yesterday reports a survey of delegates from what are classified as the battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Partisan differences of opinion are remarkably stark: 99% of Democratic delegates see rescue of the auto industry as a success, while 90% of Republican delegates call it a mistake. 67% of Democratic delegates point to insufficient tax revenues as the main cause of the federal deficit, while just 1% of Republican delegates make that choice. Conversely, 90% of Republican delegates make the growth of entitlements to be the biggest deficit driver, while only 5% of Democratic delegates do so.

Given its focus on business, Bloomberg does not ask about social issues: abortion policy, gay rights, immigration policy, and so on. But there have been two other, individual-state surveys—of Illinois and Pennsylvania, which are at least large states—and each reinforces a different, further implication from these surveys in 2012. In these states, both Republican and Democratic delegates agreed overwhelmingly that the great issue of the 2012 contest is the economy. No doubt, as with the Bloomberg story, they perceive both the fundamental problem and its appropriate solution differently, once they have agreed on this central concern. But these two state surveys do suggest that there is less surprising about the success of the Republican Convention in having economics move to center-stage and social issues recede than might otherwise appear to be the case. Though whether the Democratic Convention will follow suit, or whether it will upweight social issues to deal with perceived economic weakness, is something to be observed over the next three convention sessions.

On the other hand, this is the first ‘real’ day of Democratic Convention. Though for those of us who have been here before, it does not feel much like opening day at all. This is the cancelled Monday, redubbed the ‘day of service’. All delegations are in town, almost all having come in yesterday. All interested parties can go downtown to the Convention Center, which contains the various locations for group meetings of the day, along with most working space for the press, plus the approved stalls for convention merchandise. Where the Convention Center in Tampa required press credentials for access and had heavy security, the Convention Center in Charlotte is open to everyone wearing something around their neck that looks ‘official’: my badge and lanyard for “New Jersey Democrats, Charlotte” proved perfectly adequate.

Not so the entrée into the hall, the Time Warner Cable Arena, which required press credentials (by then around my neck as well). I shall say some things about the hall below. Though one thing I learned very painfully (in 90+ degree weather) is that, unlike Tampa, one cannot easily walk out of the Arena and back to other convention facilities. Forty-five minutes later, I was still walking, trying to get outside the security perimeter in fashion providing some hope of a cab. Each party gives with one hand and takes with the other! Be that as it may, today is devoted to wrapping up the Republican Convention, prying open the Democratic Convention, and setting up some of the comparisons between the two that should organize the next three or four days.

On Site and At Home, Revisited

It is neither surprising nor interesting that much of the truly formalistic business of the convention—confirmation of the membership of the Committee on Permanent Organization, for example—does not leave any trace in televised home coverage. Yet even the best oratorical moments of the Republican Convention, as with the speech by Condaleeza Rice, or the most widely argued presentations, as with the ‘skit’ by Clint Eastwood, can be used to make the point. Rice made the listener feel that it was possible to speak simply and intelligently to the general public. Her speech was clearly the rhetorical height of the convention, but it received only ‘look-ins’ from the networks, and it was too long to be YouTube sensation. Eastwood was not profound in the way that Rice was, but he just as clearly generated the most debate among aficionados, and this time YouTube could do what the networks did not, and show his presentation in its entirety to a huge audience. Romney was not ultimately in either class, as rhetoric or as entertainment. What he did do was touch all the bases, with a strong crescendo toward the end.

Yet even as this observer listened to these three, and more than forty others over three days—one is reminded of the old adage that the mind can only absorb what the hindquarters can stand—he had to wonder whether others were seeing a) all the oratory that I am dubbing prize-winning, b) Romney’s full speech and excerpts from the other two, or c) Romney’s address and references to the others. In the hall, it was easy to see that all three were major crowd-pleasers. Rice visited the Wisconsin breakfast the morning after her speech, and her arrival brought members instantly to their feet, in the big response of the morning. The mere mention of her name had a reliably strong effect on the audience in the hall that evening. Eastwood was a late addition to the program, a fact that helped fuel the situation whereby he rivaled Mitt Romney in crowd anticipation.

In the hall, the Romney’s triumph was substantial, though this is another dramatic case where the on-site/off-site division is critical: Did you see what I am about to discuss? Ann Romney had begun the ‘softening up process’ very successfully on Tuesday evening. From the age of sixteen, Mitt had made her laugh. He was staggered but did not falter through her diagnosis of MS, then breast cancer. Yet Thursday night went far beyond softening up, and over into pulverizing.

• We heard from fellow church members about Mitt’s personal humanitarian service, wherein not just his resources but also his time were invested—and we heard, very movingly from the beneficiaries as well. They were not professional speakers.

• We heard, really for the first time, about the creation (and hence the rehabilitation) of Bain Capital Management. The Romney version was that they had taken faltering companies, lots of them, and saved many. Those that were not salvageable constitute the examples for the Democratic interpretation of Bain—and of Romney’s alleged lack of compassion. But the delegates heard from those that had been salvaged. They were earnest and thankful, and their stories reinforced the contrary narrative, of an incumbent President who had never created any jobs, while deriding the success of those who had.

• We heard about the Olympic debacle and turnaround, despite the fact that the disaster was far greater than Mitt Romney expected when he accepted the job, and we heard the human side from the Olympians themselves, crystalized most movingly in their concern for the World Trade Center banner commemorating 9-11. The hall began to rock with those “USA, USA” chants, and they were brought back spontaneously at every opportunity thereafter.

• And we heard, of course, how Romney had turned around not just the Olympics but the state of Massachusetts, from a three billion dollar deficit to a one billion dollar rainy day fund. In the process, we heard how he was devoted to moving more women into senior positions in state government.

I walk through that enumeration because I suspect that you will not have heard any of it. Almost surely, you did not. Yet for the hall, two points are relevant. In the first and lesser point, the acceptance speech was easily sufficient to bring all of this together for those in the hall. But in the second and larger point, look what had thereby occurred. At the beginning of the week, Mitt Romney was the winner of the nominating contest, the man who had outlasted all those temporary spikes in public preference: for Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum. He was the good, gray, plastic inheritor. The delegates surely wanted to win and unhorse the President, and Mitt Romney was the vehicle for doing so. But that was all.

By the end of the week, the delegates had not just been sold the fighting theme. They were spoiling for a fight. The President had failed, and he had failed in an evil way: he attacked success and derided hard work—“you didn’t build it”. But it was now much more than that. Those in the hall had, by and large, also bought the Romney portrait. He was no longer an ‘adequate vehicle’. He was now the man who really could take down the President. He was compassionate, but he was also hard-working and successful. He loved Americans, and he knew how to let America get back to getting on with their lives.

In the process, of course, he had closed the deal on the referendum. The contest, in the Republican frame, was about whether you wanted four more years of the same, or not. It was about jobs and growth. It was not about social issues; they were truly absent. It was a one-dimensional presentation: the referendum was on economic management, pure and simple. To the extent that other matters were worth even a mention, they were melded into this. “President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans, and begin to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”

This was a triumph inside the hall. All well and good. The question was how much of it had reached—and resonated—outside. In their specifics, the answer is surely ‘little or none’. Romney the humanitarian, Bain the salvager, grateful Olympians, and women in public office: these cannot have gotten more than a passing reference from network commentators, at best. C-SPAN viewers could have seen it all. No viewer of the major television networks could have seen, I suspect, any. So even committed Republicans on the outside could not have been fired up in the way of those on the scene. This is the disjunction between on-site and off-site, between hall and home, at some of its most stark. It is, however, not quite the full story.

The possibility remains that actual snippets from the convention—of personal beneficiaries or grateful Olympians, for example—may reappear in campaign ads over the On the other hand, if these same themes appear in ads that do not use convention snippets, though these can hardly be argued to be ‘convention fallout’. The same motivation that produced them for the convention would likely have produced them for the campaign, even if Hurricane Isaac had killed off the whole gathering and not just one day. Regardless, even truncated by a whole day, with each existing day further truncated by coverage patterns from the major television networks, this was the biggest and richest introduction to Mitt Romney to the general public so far. For many of them, it was an introduction from square one.

Polls afterward suggested two things. First, the ‘bump’ or ‘bounce’ from the convention, that is, the change in Romney’s public standing from before to after, was modest, and only modestly varied from pollster to pollster. But second, one reason that it was modest—not a reason why supporters should not hope for more, but a reason why the potential was limited—was that almost all of these polls now showed the two candidates in a dead heat. A tour of Real Clear Politics this morning does not show a single major before-and-after poll with the lead outside the technical margin of polling error. Which in some ways only ups the ante for the Democratic Convention to follow.

The Beginning of Comparison

The beginning of actual comparisons arrives with ‘the incredible shrinking convention’, revisited. We looked at this last week, when the Republicans deliberately cut their convention to three days. Recall that they had done so in 2008 as well, and both conventions were putatively truncated because of hurricanes. Moreover, both hurricanes, Gustav in 2008 and Isaac in 2012, were in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet while the Republican Convention of 2012 was on the Gulf, the Republican Convention of 2008 was actually in Minneapolis-St. Paul. So it was public relations (and associated, potential, opposition theatrics) that really deep-sixed the first day last time. In a sense—Which I regard as institutionally consequential but you may not?—the Democrats had already terminated their final day last time by moving it to a vast outdoor arena, having nothing to do with the convention hall and completely marginalizing the official delegates. They have done the same thing in 2012, though the morning news says that they are now scrambling to bring in busloads of college students, out of fear that Bank of America Stadium will not fill (with consequent, unfortunate, opposition theatrics).

Yet the Democrats have also deep-sixed Monday, today, as an official session. The surface rationale is that this would become a day of service, with Democratic delegates and alternates directly (as well as symbolically!) serving their publics. The main event for this, at least in New Jersey where I am headquartered, was an event organized by Craftsman Tools, which involved the building of a house for a returning veteran. Heroes at Home, Rebuilding Together, and Next Gen Home/Champion Builders are teamed up with Craftsman, and Ty Pennington, former host of Extreme Makeover Home Edition, led the crews. A bus left the New Jersey Hotel (the Renaissance Suites) at 10:00 this morning, for a forty-five-minute New Jersey contribution at 11:00. I ran into the returning crew from New Jersey in Charlotte, just as I ran into the returning crew from Wisconsin in Tampa.

But the point with relevance to the convention as an institution is that the two activities were precisely the same. Yet they served as (partial) justification for cancelling Monday in Charlotte, while they were just another activity that delegates were urged to consider in Tampa, especially since this particular activity did not interfere with delegate participation in the formal session of the convention that same evening. Did the Democrats see no need for the Monday session? Had the networks already said that they would no longer cover Monday, so that the Democrats (therefore) had no need? Did the cancelling of the Monday session by the Democrats lead the networks to refuse to cover Monday for the Republicans? I have no inside information to sort that one out. What I can repeat is that the Democratic Convention of 2012 was effectively down to two days, with no apparent complaint from anyone.

Then comes a reprise on what appeared last week as the very first of observations that any analyst can have on the convention hall itself, namely a distinction between ‘imperial’ and ‘folksy’ podium choice. But where I judged that the Republicans had moved away from the folksy approach of 2008, with its candidate runway down the center of the hall, and thus back toward the imperial set-up, a visit to Time Warner Cable Arena this morning demonstrates that the Democrats remain far more imperial. The podium for the Democratic Convention of 2012, even apart from the arrangements in Bank of America Stadium (which are almost inescapably imperial), moves far over in that direction. The speakers platform is much farther off the floor of the hall than were the Republicans in Tampa. And unlike the Republicans, who softened this design by having cascading steps down to the floor on three sides, the Democrats will feature—every reader can see this tomorrow—no such softening. All three sides are far above the convention floor.

The other thing that was easily recognizable from a visit to the hall this morning, and which may not be as easily visualized by those watching at home, is the strategy of locating the state delegations on the floor. The Time Warner Cable Arena is a small hall, which itself presents multiple difficulties for the Democratic Convention. These are then exaggerated by the fact that the number of delegates and alternates is much, much larger for the Democrats than the Republicans. One immediate result is that the floor, the first level, and the second level must all be reserved for official delegate seating, leaving only the fourth level for guests. A second result is that the siting of delegations within these confines acquires even more strategic bite than it might otherwise have.

The New Jersey delegates with whom I had breakfast were well aware of this, wondering explicitly where they would be seated and expressing pessimistic views about their probable location. When they get to the hall tomorrow, they will likely feel that their pessimism was justified. There are two very predictable delegation seatings, in the first and second slots to the right of the podium as you look out from it: Delaware, home of the Vice President, and Illinois, home of the President. Otherwise, the floor at the Democratic Convention is pretty close to a tour of battleground states. Colorado, Iowa Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia are all there. (And Florida has a good vantage on the second level.) Conversely, the far reaches of delegate seating, that third level, contains safe Democratic states (Maryland, New York, and—yes—New Jersey), plus states that are safe for the other side (Alabama, Idaho, North Dakota).

In any case, there is a mini-introduction to the Democratic Convention, before any speaker has addressed the hall and before any delegation has set foot on it, to listen to said speakers. I shall return tomorrow, with the grand—if tricky—framework for thinking about the relationship between the general public, the active party, and the convention leadership. Tomorrow evening will then begin to tell us what is being poured into that framework by the 2012 Democrats.

The Hall

There are two grand and gross ways for the convention leadership to organize the podium at a convention, the central physical focus for its substantive output.  For lack of an established vocabulary, I shall call these “imperial” and “folksy”.  In the imperial setup, the podium towers above the convention floor, signifying leadership, and focuses attention on the leader.  In the folksy setup, by contrast, every effort is made to integrate the podium with the floor so as to project a kind of ‘common man’ or ‘one of us’ persona—though there are some inherent limits on this, given constraints of both visibility and security.

The distinction is rarely as stark as it was in 2008, especially if we use the setup for the acceptance speech as a focus.  The Republicans tried to move the podium toward the floor, while providing a walkway down the middle of the hall, on which speakers could ‘casually’ stroll.  This is folksy, if you will.  The Democrats, most especially when using that outdoor arena, were physically biased toward the imperial mode instead—made only more stereotypical by those styrofoam pillars in the backdrop.  My highly impressionistic observation—I find that I recall only a few, particularly distinctive podium arrangements—is that this has little to do with party per se.  Republicans do one approach  in one year, another approach in another.  So do Democrats.

This impression is only reinforced by the fact that the podium arrangement for this year’s Republican convention reverts, in my view, to the imperial.  This podium did get some advance attention in its own right—its designer became a political mini-celebrity—for its ostensible twenty-first-century character: the multiple interactive frames, the constantly changing support screens around the central speaker.  Be that as it may, this podium is also what might be described as neo-ziggurat, with its multiple ascending stairs leading the eye high above the convention floor.  It will be harder to take the Democratic podium in the other direction, especially with regard to the key substantive presentation, the acceptance speech, since one sees few arena concerts, for example, where the performers are on the floor.  Still, this is very much available to observe next week, and everyone can have a personal judgment.

On the other hand, one major area in which presentation of the hall has moved in regular and interpretable directions involves the mass media of information, and here, most especially the television networks.  The earliest conventions of my personal experience, in the early 1980s, already testified to a certain primacy for the three major networks.  Each had towering platforms rising from the floor of the hall directly opposite to the podium—I recall them as three stories tall—with a long, gradually declining set of platform steps running downward toward that podium.  At their top, the towers held the main anchor booth for each network; I remember the final part of the climb toward these as moderately adventurous.  And the declining platform steps ordinarily held a live orchestra plus multiple camera locations for rich and close podium coverage.

Among other things, this altered the hierarchy of delegation seating in noticeable ways.  The prime spots on the floor are always those which form an inner arc directly opposite the podium.  The farther back you are, and the farther off to the side you are, the less desirable is your location.  In that regard, even televised observers will (or can) have noticed that Wisconsin was one of the three delegations holding a prime position this time, being left-center front when observed from the podium.  In the era of gargantuan network platforms, however, these platforms added a major twist to the basic status calculation.  For being in the center of the hall yet butted up against the network platforms was relatively undesirable.  A delegation could actually be in shadow while on the floor of the convention hall.

For a time, this became even more true.  The platforms grew in breadth but especially depth.  And then the whole setup shifted in the opposite direction, where it remains today.  It may be tempting to hypothesize that this reflected the reduced dominance of the three major networks, first as new and consequential competitors arose in the world of television, then as other media of information began to challenge the television world as prime news sources.  In truth, however, this is probably best seen as a simple reflection of changing (and much-improved) technology.  Cameras just became simultaneously far less bulky and far more powerful.

One of the central vignettes in the Theodore H. White series on the politics of presidential selection—his The Making of the President 1960 usually gets pride of place, but this, my favorite vignette, comes from The Making of the President 1968—involves Hubert Humphrey being nominated “in a sea of blood”.  Television cameras of the time produced videotape, which then had to be edited before it could move onto the home screen.  Videotape on the violence outside the convention hall was being edited as Humphrey was being nominated, and it finally arrived—to be put immediately on the home screen—just at the point when his nomination was culminating.  Twenty years later, cameras could avoid this edited-videotape stage if they had advantageous and appropriate positioning. This avoidance was one justification of the gargantuan platform era.  Twenty years further on, those cameras were lighter, easier, and more dispersed—and the central platforms had shrunk radically.

This still says nothing about the truly new, electronic media, which clearly have a growing but still far from dominating news presence.  There is a burgeoning presence for the main institutional embodiments among these media over the last three conventions, and they require far less physical support.  More striking (at least to me) is the explosion of what can be roughly collected as ‘the blogosphere’.  If I have my dates right, their possible existence was first acknowledged as physically worth recognizing at the 2004 conventions, with small and mean blog stations that were hard to reach.   By 2008, both conventions instead allocated a very large ‘blog bullpen’, with many small tables and many plug-in points of access. 

The rise of the electronic media had one other main implication, major for me through probably minor for convention operatives.  When I began going to conventions and up until 2004—but really, up until 2008—one of my main mantras was “Take the paper”.  This implied two related things.  The main one was that much of what was produced at national party conventions, by the official party and by all sorts of other individuals and groups who wanted to use the convention for their own purposes, had a shelf-life quite literally of hours.  It was produced once, and it never appeared again.

While they did not regard this fact as so explicitly noteworthy as I did, the major news media clearly recognized it, in that they often had a person who was specifically assigned to tour regularly through the media information center and pick up speaker bios and podium texts.  This is an aspect of convention coverage that has nearly disappeared.  The parties now produce almost all such material online.  The media press center, such as it is, is mainly concerned with supporting foreign media, with those convention materials that do not have a one-day shelf life but can be used as reference throughout the week.                    

The Program

Implicit in all that has gone before is a further distinction within the national party convention, one with powerful implications for the substance of its program.  In this, there is a convention on site and a convention at home, and they have surprisingly limited overlap.  As network coverage has declined and declined, the convention leadership can now hope to have at most two, but normally one, of the speeches in each evening’s session covered live and extensively.  This is a half-hour to forty-five minutes of national television coverage, yet the convention is in session for four hours each evening.  (Not to mention the morning session that usually opens a Republican Convention, and never gets any coverage.)  A bit of this is musical entertainment, video presentations, and accidental dead time, but the difference is still huge.  Somewhere between seventy-five and eighty-seven percent of podium presentations cannot be expected to appear before the national viewing audience at all.

Inescapably, then, there are always two nested conventions, the one observable within the hall and the one observable in living rooms across America.  Convention leaderships would always prefer to increase the size of the latter.  Yet they have learned to think strategically about which speeches belong in which part, and to schedule accordingly. Some of this thinking is guided by the choices that we reviewed yesterday, between organizing the convention program to foster a referendum on the incumbent administration versus organizing it to deconstruct the incumbent coalition and pick off specified pieces.  Much of this division is also tied to the use of the convention for a national message versus its use for firing up the troops or for fostering state and local messages—which may of course help with the construction of national majorities.  The two choices are inevitably related.

The program from Tuesday evening was in fact an excellent example of both sets of strategic choices.  Convention planners desperately hoped that the addresses by Ann Romney, wife of the nominee, and Chris Christie, the traditional keynoter, would be broadcast nationally in whole or in large part.  And in this, they were in fact successful.  But that still left more than three hours of podium time which the networks left essentially untouched and for which, in truth, the program planners had never had any serious aspirations, even as they thought seriously about how best to use this time.  One such use was to fire up the delegates, alternates, and guests who were in the hall.   Another was to showcase individuals who might be able to use podium time (and the saved record thereof) in targeted electoral campaigns back in the states and localities.

In the process of developing the specifics of these choices, convention planners were also inevitably choosing between a referendum versus a deconstruction in their overall approach to campaign strategy.  Tuesday night was overwhelmingly in accord with the ‘referendum’ approach.  The theme was that the administration had failed at the single great issue of the campaign, growing the economy and putting people back to work, and that the Republicans knew how to succeed at precisely this.  The overarching theme was supported by the theme of the day, “We Built It”, responding to a frequently played clip from  President Obama to the effect that if you had created a small business, “You Didn’t Build It”.  This was the hammer for Chris Christie, and indeed for most non-televised speakers of the evening.

The sole exception even within the hall, of a speech with a heavy dose of social conservatism, came from former Senator and nomination aspirant Rick Santorum, and that received no extended national coverage.  Otherwise, while Ann Romney provided some reinforcement to this theme as well, her assignment was the real exception to the referendum argument, for it was her job to make the nominee, her husband, a ‘real person’, and thus to counter personal attacks from the Obama campaign. 

On the other hand, in the incarnations of the main referendum argument among the many speeches achieving no national notice, there were two further recurrent themes, one major and one minor.  The major one was the problems of small business in the current environment, the virtues of small business in generating jobs, and the difficulty that the alleged failure of the Administration created in these regards.  The small-business theme was apparently considered to be especially powerful for those who would be present in the hall, and within the hall, it appeared to work well.  The minor theme was the special place of recent immigrants in this small-business story, and thus the harm being done to these immigrants by the failure of the economy to grow.

A different aspect of this on-site versus off-site focus of podium presentations involves national versus state or local appeal.  Many of those who amplified either this small-business or this immigrant sub-theme were in fact candidates for Senator, Governor, Congressman, or state line office.  They might not—in fact they did not—get extended national coverage, and the vast majority got none at all, even fleeting.  But they were speaking to the Republican National Convention, they would have complete clips of their podium performance, and these would include flashes of an adoring audience from their specific states on the floor.   All of this would have been carefully and consciously prepared by convention-based and state- or local-based staffers.

Looking Forward

 The complete thematic focus of the Republican Convention will not come into full contextual context until we can see the same things for the Democratic Convention.  In this regard, conventions can differ in an explicit and ongoing partisan way, when Republicans talk about one set of themes while Democrats talk about another.  Or conventions can ‘differ’ by talking about the same set of themes, the main issues of the day, but in a fashion that is sharply distinguished by party.  They can even differ at the grand strategic level, by having one party take the referendum approach, the other opt for deconstruction.  Until we have seen the Democratic Convention at least in large part, it is not possible to know how this plays out.  So this blog will return on Monday—perhaps even not until Tuesday—when it can establish the full framework for watching the Democratic Convention, while simultaneously evaluating the mass impact of the Republican Convention, what is known as the ‘bump or the ‘bounce’.  See you then.

Yet the most frequent—and this year, in many ways, the most interesting—have been the Wisconsin Republicans. I may never have seen a happier delegation. They have the Republican National Chairman in Reince Priebus. They have a Governor with a truly national profile in Scott Walker. They have an incumbent Republican Senator in Ron Johnson. They have a Republican senatorial candidate with even more impeccable Wisconsin credentials in Tommy Thompson. They have one of the Convention Co-Chairs, in long-serving national committeewoman Mary Buestrin. And last but not least, they have the Republican nominee for Vice President in Paul Ryan. All this in a state that last went Republican for President in 1984, when it was nearly impossible not to do so.

A Day in the Life of a Delegate

What I do, of course, is write about national party conventions, courtesy of these connections. (Though being an international authority on American conventions often feels like nothing so much as being the author of “Great Guide Dogs of the Spanish-American War”.) But what do Delegates, along with the Alternates and Guests who collectively make up a state delegation, actually do? Let me set out the minimal calendar for the Wisconsin Republican delegation, the set of events to which everyone is invited because they are officially part of the delegation. Remember that there are many other convention-based events to which delegation members are welcome, and which they individually choose to attend. Delegation breakfasts with their associated speakers, along with official sessions of the full convention in the hall, are the main substantive part of this, and I shall attend to this substance at greater length below. But first, let me try to round up full set of delegation-focused invitations so far:

• Saturday PM, Joint Wisconsin/Mississippi Reception in honor of National Chair Reince Priebus
• Sunday AM, Champagne Brunch at Avila Country Club in Honor of the full Wisconsin Delegation
• Sunday PM, Welcome Event at Tropicana Field from Tampa Bay Host Committee for all state delegations—sort of the RNC version of the Olympics opening ceremonies
• Monday AM, Wisconsin Delegation Breakfast, with speakers
• Monday AM, Scheduled first session of the full convention—cancelled by tropical storm Isaac
• Monday PM, Scheduled second session of the full convention—gaveled to order at 2:00 PM but then directly adjourned
• Monday PM, Joint Reception at Cha-Cha Coconuts at St. Petersburg Pier for Wisconsin, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and New York
• Monday PM, RNC Late-Night Reception in honor of National Chairman Reince Priebus
• Tuesday AM, Wisconsin Delegation Breakfast, with speakers
• Tuesday AM, Wisconsin session of Craftsman House United project, Heroes at Home, building modular homes for veterans
• Tuesday PM, Actual first (afternoon) session of the full convention
• Tuesday PM, Joint Wisconsin/Louisiana Boat Cruise
• Tuesday PM, Actual second (evening) session of the full convention
• Wednesday AM, Wisconsin Delegation Breakfast at the home of Ron and Joyce Wanek, Celebrating Wisconsin and Honoring Governor Scott Walker
• Wednesday PM, Beer & Brats Bash at Liberty Plaza celebrating Wisconsin delegates and benefitting “Citizens Helping Heroes”
• Wednesday PM, Meet & Greet with Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin Senate candidate, at the Starship II on Tampa Bay
• Wednesday PM, Third session of the full convention

The Politics of the Day

The number of other invitations to members of the delegation, those invitations which come by way of the state delegation but are not specifically ‘Wisconsin events’, is nearly limitless. And there is of course a raft of politicking at the convention which involves candidates from other states, candidates who may attract some support within the Wisconsin delegation. But what can we say about the explicitly political content of the key calendar event regularly and specifically aimed at the whole delegation, namely, the daily breakfasts? In part, these have a logistical purpose, reviewing the day’s events and instructing delegates on how—mechanically—to support and take advantage of them. Two people at my table for breakfast this morning remarked that the speaker to whom they most looked forward was Colleen Coyle, central staff coordinator for the delegation. (In deference to the ostensibly major speakers, these two can remain nameless.)

Yet these breakfasts also feature an explicit politics that is completely distinct from, say, the Welcome Event at Tropicana Field or the Cha-Cha Coconuts at the St. Petersburg Pier. So what does this ‘real politics’ look like? The liveliest incarnation so far came at the champagne brunch on Sunday. Perhaps this was because everyone was still at peak energy level. Or perhaps it was because this gathering was delegates, alternates, and guests only—us by ourselves. In any event, Brad Courtney, Republican State Chairman, presided and opened with an anecdote about agreeing to take the Chairmanship when his predecessor, Reince Priebus, became Republican National Chairman—just weeks before Governor Scott Walker introduced the budget that set off a year of rancorous protest and produced a recall election, one that was ultimately unsuccessful. Courtney noted proudly that, as a result, Wisconsin had become “a blueprint for the nation”.

He thanked Phil Prange, organizer of many of the events for Wisconsin and a dozen other states, who said a few words and then turned the floor over to Mary Buestrin, long-serving Republican National Committeewoman from Wisconsin and one of the
CoChairs of the full convention. (She and I share the experience of having done our first convention in 1980, though the delegation was said, at a subsequent breakfast, to have a member whose first convention was 1952!) Buestrin spoke a bit about her role as National Committeewoman (“taking care of Wisconsin”), then underlined the two absolutely fundamental tasks of the full convention: to make official the nominations of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates, and to do so in a way that maximized the ‘bump’ in public support for this ticket that followed from its official nomination.

Buestrin reminded members of the delegation that their job, in this regard, was to stay ‘on message’, and she introduced Nathan Conrad, press liaison for the state Republican Party, as the source for consultation if questions arose about this process. Conrad, in common with most individuals who hold that post in most state parties for both Democrats and Republicans, would be producing concise sheets of ‘talking points’ for the day to help with this process. Buestrin was then followed by the clear ‘star’ of the brunch, Governor Scott Walker, the man who had imposed sweeping budget reform, survived the resultant recall, and was an evident favorite of the delegation.

Walker, in forceful mode, made two main points. He began by repeating the argument from Mary Buestrin, about the need to stay ‘on message’ no matter what, and he elaborated this by reminding delegation members that this concern arose most commonly when journalists asked about specific other things. If the main theme was the economy and its travails, then all such other themes were at best diversions, at worst precise embodiments of going ‘off message’. Walker then interpreted the main theme, again forcefully. The president had failed; in his failure, he was saddling the future—our children and our grandchildren—with mounting debt and declining opportunities. The Republican ticket knew what had to be done in response. Given the opportunity, they would do it.

Walker was to reappear as a featured speaker at the first delegation breakfast on Monday—a true bow to his home delegation, since he is widely in demand as a speaker for others as well. Courtney again presided; Prange was again saluted for his work on national convention events; and Courtney added salutes to various state committee members and county chairs. The first of two main speakers (Walker being the second) was Reince Priebus, previous Republican State Chair and now National Chair. This, too, was an obvious salute to the home delegation, since Priebus was in some sense now ‘chairman of all the states’. His members were duly and demonstrably appreciative.

Priebus quoted Isaiah, “Send me, Lord”, arguing that what Scott Walker had done in Wisconsin—and by extension what Mitt Romney must do in the nation—was to make his policy commitments explicit and then honor them in office. Announce your goals, work hard on them, and accept the result. He described the policies of the president, conversely, as representing an assault on the American Dream, and argued that this election had to represent a turning point, away from those policies. He was followed by Governor Walker who, this particular morning, was losing his voice. Walker began with several personal stories, including proposing to his wife Tonette after the acceptance speech of George H.W. Bush at the Republican Convention of 1992. He saluted Priebus, Romney, and Paul Ryan, and he again argued that this election was about having a better life for the children and the grandchildren.

Tuesday’s breakfast brought a different cast of characters. This time, Courtney saluted the state representatives and state senators in attendance, with a few further words for Phil Prange, the event organizer, and especially for Colleen Coyle, the staffer charged with making the whole show run. The lead speaker of the day was then Ron Johnson, incumbent Republican Senator from Wisconsin. Johnson excoriated the president for sending Congress a sequence of budgets that went nowhere, and that he described as evincing no seriousness about addressing the problems of fiscal imbalance and a growing deficit.

Johnson was followed by Stephen Hayes, long-time correspondent for The Weekly Standard and biographer of Dick Cheney, former Vice-President. Hayes largely spoke about his Wisconsin roots, and about the early partisan staff work that had chased him into journalism. The final speaker was then John Fund, conservative analyst and author, who made the strongest pitch yet for the distinctive place of Wisconsin in national politics. In his narrative, Wisconsin had been the seedbed of many of the central programs of the New Deal as well as being the founding influence on the creation of AFSCME (the union for governmental employees) but was now providing “the correction”. He also spoke on behalf of his new book about voting rules and vote fraud.

What makes these presentations as a collectivity quite different from most of those that were occurring before other state delegations—or indeed, from those that occurred before Wisconsin in 2008—was their remarkably ‘Wisconsin-centric’ character. For purposes of these breakfast presentations, most states would be hearing from a sample of the rotating speaker teams that are organized specifically for this purpose. At a good example of these from the Wisconsin delegation in 2008, Wisconsin Republicans heard from Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana, and from Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, candidates for Senator and Governor in California. In 2012, by contrast, at least as this is posted, no one has mounted the Wisconsin breakfast podium without clear roots or current attachments to the state.

As a minor note, one of the things that also distinguishes the delegation is that an impressive minority of delegates and alternates had found their way to the convention hall on Monday afternoon, for that ten-minute session in which the convention was convened and adjourned. Some of these attended out of a sense of duty, and some attended in order to get a sense of convention organization for future days. But all would have spent an hour or so of round trip in order to be witnesses to ten-minus minutes of official business. By this time tomorrow, there ought to be a lot more real business to use in comparing this convention to other Republican Conventions and to their Democratic counterparts.

A simple three-way comparison—re-elections, successions, and open contests—empties much of the strategy out of this comparison. By these lights, ten of the sixteen postwar elections, from 1948 onward, have been re-elections. Four have been successions. Only two have been truly open, lacking either a sitting president seeking another term or a sitting vice-president hoping to succeed his president. At this crude level, open contests allow the most strategic variation, for each individual candidate and for the two major-party candidates together. Just as re-elections offer the most constrained options: they are all variants of a referenda on the first term. But in fact, if we are to watch the 2012 Republican and Democratic Conventions in some larger strategic light, this tripartite classification is much too simple. It elides most of the differences that the campaigns will attempt—and astute observers can notice—in what will transpire this week and next.

Re-elections, being the most common in these initial (and crude) terms, also mask the greatest amount of further contextual variety. There are indeed classic re-elections, in which a sitting president, in good standing with the general public, who had been elected in his own right, seeks a second term. Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996, and George W. Bush in 2004 are the examples. Though even then, recall that the Eisenhower campaign had a major negative to counteract—his prospective health—before it could truly fall into the category of classic re-election, while many Democratic strategists in 1984 believed that they lived in some other context, at least if they could bring the proper evidence to bear.

Yet there are likewise re-elections where a sitting president who was not elected in his own right nevertheless seeks a successor term. Indeed, no such ‘accidental president’ in the postwar years has been able to resist the attempt. Harry Truman in 1948, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Gerald Ford in 1976 are the examples here. These three differed strikingly in their standing at the start, with Johnson a presumptive winner and both Truman and Ford prospective losers, a distinction only exaggerated by the fact that Truman surmounted this presumption while Ford did not. Especially noteworthy within this category, though never affecting convention strategy, is the fact that the two winners, Truman and Johnson, then failed to be classic re-electors, eschewing a second contest after their first elective win.

But there are also, of course, re-election efforts where strategists for a sitting president, who had already secured an elective first term on his own, nevertheless stood for re-election knowing full well that this was far from assured. Jimmy Carter in 1976 and George H.W. Bush are the easy examples. But how many of the others had serious strategic splits within their circle of advisors, if only we could have sampled that circle, whereby some advisors were confident that they needed only to behave as if this was indeed a class re-election while others were much less sure that this was the proper strategic category.

Then come the efforts at direct succession by a sitting vice-president who aspired to follow his incumbent president into higher office. It might seem that these individuals could aspire to fall into the strategic category of classic re-elections, in effect generating a second re-election. Yet history suggests that if this was their strategic framework, they were deluded. Among Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, George H.W. Bush in 1988, and Al Gore in 2000, only Bush succeeded. From one side, many analysts believe that Gore, too, could have succeeded with a different strategy. From the other side, George H.W. succeeded only to become a failed re-election at his next opportunity.

Yet there were also two of what might be called ‘delayed successions’, with Richard Nixon trying again in 1968 and Walter Mondale trying for the first time in 1984, after his president, Jimmy Carter, had been defeated in 1980. Last but not least were those two open contests, lacking an incumbent president or an aspiring vice-president, which pitted Dwight Eisenhower against Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and John McCain versus Barack Obamas in 2008. Though events, especially a looming financial meltdown, were to reshape the 2008 contest in a manner ultimately beyond the control of either candidate.

Flash forward to the Republican Convention of 2012. There is a sitting president, elected in his own right. So this cannot be the re-election effort of an unelected incumbent, nor a direct succession, a delayed succession, or an open contest. But is it a classic re-election? Barack Obama would surely like history to cast its ballot there. Or is it instead a re-election effort where even Obama strategists should know that the contest is hardly a sure thing? Mitt Romney must surely prefer this view, and Obama himself would be foolish to assume anything else at this point.

So, what are the choices facing Romney and—even more consequentially for us as observers—what would we see from the Romney convention that showed us how his electoral strategists were interpreting this largest of political contexts? In effect, there are two general ways to approach this kind of campaign:

• The grand and gross way is to treat the entire contest as a referendum on the first term of the incumbent. Under this scenario, the main thing that the out-party must do is to nominate someone who can be widely perceived as a ‘safe pair of hands’. When such a challenger is produced, the public can then proceed with its referendum. Satisfied? Vote for the incumbent. Unsatisfied? Vote for the challenger. Under this scenario, too many distinguishing characteristics are actively harmful in a challenger. Bland is good. In these circumstances, the incumbent can be expected to begin ahead. His downside is that he has already reached his maximum. Conversely, the challenger can be expected to begin behind Yet he has a much larger potential upside. Whether he reaches it—but really, whether the public ultimately flows there in its referendum—determines the outcome.

• The more specific and complex way to treat the entire contest is to look for specific pieces of the previously successful electoral coalition, the one that originally produced the incumbent president, and offer specific enticements to dislodge them. Under this scenario, the main thing that the out-party must do is to make clear to the watching public that the challenger is supported by a coalition featuring all the potentially missing pieces. When disaffected pieces of the previous coalition notice, the election can take an altered course. If members of these potentially missing pieces then find the new connection convincing, they vote the challenger. If they remain unconvinced, they stay with the incumbent.

It will surprise no one to hear that many campaigns would prefer, in effect, to choose ‘some of each’. Yet the convention is not an easy vehicle through which to oblige, and ‘muddling’ has disadvantages all its own. Even in the abstract, ‘some of each’ may just blunt both. More to the practical point, we are really talking about one address on each of three evenings—the acceptance speech of the nominee plus two other speeches—in order to operationalize this strategy with a national audience. The national networks no longer assign enough coverage to hope/plan to have two speeches in one evening covered in their entirety, though campaigns do think long and hard about ways to pry these strictures open a little.

The point here is that one can watch an entire convention asking which strategy is in force and how the campaign is operationalizing it. When push comes to shove, are they doing ‘referendum’ or ‘deconstruction’? Look for the overview. Specify the details. For the Republican Convention of 2012, the answer cannot be known until after the acceptance speech by Mitt Romney on Thursday evening. For our purposes, I shall return to the question of how both sides see this largest strategic context after the Obama acceptance speech next Thursday, when both efforts can be seen and compared.

Tomorrow, we shall instead have an extended visit to Wisconsin. The Wisconsin delegation to the Republican Convention of 2012 has the Vice-Presidential nominee, the Republican National Chairman, one of the Convention Co-Chairs, and a Senate nominee who will help determine whether partisan control of the Senate changes hands or not. This does not make the state a ‘sample’ of anything. It does make it a particularly rich way to give concrete detail to the things we have discussed yesterday and today.

The Shrinking Convention

The main opening story of the Republican National Convention of 2012 involved, not its politics, but its weather. Monday, its opening day and previously slated to be the longest single day of the convention, had to be cancelled, courtesy of tropical storm (and then hurricane) Isaac. The Democrats had already cancelled the Monday of their 2012 convention, absent any incentive from the weather. The Republicans had now done the same. This was a lead story for most major media. But they had little reason to see it as another station-stop in the evolution of the convention as an institution, and secondarily as another instance of the way that political parties and news media interact in the modern world to shape that evolution. Knowledgeable observers are, however, entitled to see it as precisely that.

So, a bit of historical background. Students of the politics of presidential selection know that the actual making of the nomination had departed the convention by the late 1950s. The last convention truly to assemble a nominating majority inside its confines was the Democratic Convention of 1952, the one which produced Adlai Stevenson as its nominee. This was joined by the Republican Convention of 1952, where Dwight Eisenhower came close to losing his potential majority inside the hall, as the last two conventions to require so much as a second ballot before their nominee became official. Note that both of these predate, by an entire generation, the sweeping reforms of delegate selection from 1972 onward that we to lock the nomination outside the convention. Yet those reforms were so sweepingly successful that there are fewer and fewer living Americans who can remember ever having watched a national party convention while wondering who the nominee might be.

The disappearance of the nomination was also nearly coterminous with the rise of television as the main mass medium of information for covering conventions. In fact, covering the 1952 conventions was a milestone event in the conscious efforts of television to establish its credibility as a source of political news for the American public. Which begins to move us back toward the Republican Convention—and Hurricane Isaac—of 2012. Part of this proof of the newsworthy powers of television involved gavel-to-gavel coverage. This was still a far cry from the task of newspaper reporters in the days when conventions might actually create their nominees on site. (The record is still held by the Democratic Convention of 1924, at seventeen days.) Yet gavel-to-gavel was the initial—intended—standard for televised news coverage.

Within another generation, however, this standard began to bump up against the effects of the disappearance of actual nominations from convention confines. In this, an interplay (the politicking) between party leaders and news executives began to be the second major track to convention politics, often the dominant track. While the construction of presidential nominations had departed the conventions by 1956, residual conflicts associated with the nomination lasted into the 1980s. In some years—the Republicans in 1976, the Democrats in 1980—there were still major fights over convention rules on the floor of the national party convention, fights which, had they come out differently, might have produced a different nominee. For even more years, there were platform insurgencies. Supporters of losing candidates could still try for the consolation prize of seeing some of their principles placed in the platform. The delegates themselves might discover, at the convention site, that they shared some preferences which differed from those of their nominee, either because the latter genuinely differed or because, having secured the nomination, he wanted to move in a different direction for the election campaign.

Yet the convention leadership, most especially from the perspective of the successful nominating campaign, saw that the rise of television offered them an unparalleled means of promoting their message: the ‘true’ identity of their nominee, the ‘real’ themes of the general election. Simultaneously, they saw that rules, credentials, and platform fights were the main vehicle for undermining this message, blurring its substantive clarity while painting the nominee as weak and not in control. Convention leaderships then proved impressively adept at defusing these threats, at best with alterations in convention rules that might stop insurgencies from forming, at worst from just giving platform insurgents what they wanted and then burying the substantive content of party platforms outside of televised media coverage.

All of this was, however, not occurring in a vacuum. Television news executives inevitably noticed that conventions were becoming less and less overtly conflictual, morphing more and more obviously into infomercials. Indeed, if these executives could somehow have managed not to notice, they were forcefully reminded of this same development by the way that Nielsen ratings for convention coverage moved ever and ever lower. There were occasional upticks: the Republicans of 1976 and the Democrats of 1980 generated sufficient internal conflict—even a certain incipient suspense—as to haul their ratings temporarily upward. The conventions of 1992 for both parties had a weaker version of the same effect. Yet the overall line of effect was clear enough, and the response of the television networks, by hindsight, was unavoidable. They began to cut back sharply on the total amount of the national party conventions which they offered; they restructured the content of what remained.

Flash forward to the Republican Convention of 2012. As delegates, alternates, and guests, along with reporters and interest group representatives of all sorts, began to head to Tampa—many on Saturday, most of the rest on Sunday—tropical storm Isaac was moving through the Caribbean and becoming hurricane Isaac, with some vague potential for coming ashore in the Tampa area itself but a clear prospect for generating high winds, high seas, and heavy rain. Convention officials had no choice but to make their bets about the impact of those developments on their convention, and on their plans for it. The actual geographic structure of the Tampa/St. Petersburg area played into this, in a manner that might by itself have been decisive. Because many delegations were housed where they would have to cross bodies of water that might roil (even close) the relevant bridges, it might become impossible to move delegates.

But the interplay of television coverage and convention strategy was there in the background as well, and it constituted another twist in the long-running saga by which the convention as an institution was increasingly stripped of its functions and its consequences. The original plan for the convention had, in effect, five sessions in four days. Monday would have had two: a long procedural session in the afternoon, in which most mechanical business of the convention would transpire, and a second substantive session in the evening, in which the major address was to be from Ann Romney, sketching the portrait of her husband as a person.

No one ever had any illusion that the television networks would cover the first session, and hence procedural matters: credentials, rules, resolutions, and roll-call. But convention planners certainly hoped/expected that the networks would cover the evening session, and that within that coverage, the speech from the nominee’s wife would be covered live in an extended fashion. When the networks revealed that they were not going to give the Republican convention extended Monday coverage at all, they took away any remaining incentive for convention strategists to risk the weather and its disruptive potential. Better to save Ann Romney for another night. No reason to risk severe convention disruption in order to guarantee that she was not covered.

But note what is happening along the way in an institutional sense. The Republicans had reluctantly but deliberately surrendered the Monday of their convention in 2008. They were safely ensconced in the unlikely hurricane venue of Minneapolis-St. Paul, but when Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast in a fearsome fashion, they surrendered their Monday session while the affected delegations flew home and members of many other delegations turned to fund-raising for relief efforts. When the Republicans reassembled in Tampa four years later, nature was again forcing this result, this time prospectively.

Yet there had been what I am going to call a Democratic ‘echo’ in 2008, one that was much more than an echo by 2012. The great structural innovation of the Democratic Convention of 2008 was to take the acceptance speech by their nominee out of the convention hall entirely and into a major open-air amphitheater, where tens of thousands of ‘ordinary Americans’ could join the process. This, too, was an institutional shrinkage of the convention, in the sense that it had little to do with events in the hall or with their official institutional members. The Democrats will reprise the same development in 2012. But for their convention this time, they have also consciously cancelled their Monday session, unprompted by any incipient hurricane, in favor of a ‘day of service’ to the local area.

What had been four days of serious convention activity as recently as 2004 for both parties had fallen to three days for the Republicans in 2008 and three days for the Democrats as well—once you grant that an acceptance speech having nothing to do with the convention hall no longer required the convention. This was again three days for the Republicans in 2012, and two days (by that same standard) for the Democrats. Those of us who have wondered just how far a shrinking institution could shrink before convention strategists and news executives hammered out some new consensus—perhaps on extended coverage over a long weekend?—are wondering as never before. The two conventions of 2012 look very much as if they will take us farther down the road some such reform. How much farther is a guess fully available to observers watching at home.

What Else to Watch?

In light of that argument about the shrinking convention, it is probably worth setting out what had been the intended strategic plan for the Republican Convention of 2012. Observers watching at home will be able to judge for themselves what that plan became:

Monday: “We Can Do Better”, featuring Ann Romney

Tuesday: “We Built It”, featuring Chris Christie

Wednesday: “We Can Change It”, with Paul Ryan

Thursday: “We Believe in America”, with Mitt Romney

By the end of the Republican Convention of 2012, observers at home will also be able to judge for themselves—really to see with their own eyes—how convention strategists conceive of the general election contest of 2012, and what they judge to be their best approach to it. This electoral strategy coming out of the convention does not always last until election day. The art of politics is being sure that it is applied long enough to have a chance of working, yet aborted rapidly enough if it is not going to work. Barring dramatic developments during the day on Monday, I shall blog about this strategic context tomorrow.

What observers at home are less able to judge for themselves is the vast array of other politics, that is, electoral politicking not directly involving the presidential candidates, along with the vast array of interest group argument and intended policy innovation that are also normally part and parcel of national party conventions. With tens of thousands of politically interested and politically active individuals concentrated in a small space, political careers are inevitably fostered (or not) and policy proposals inevitably furthered (or not) in a manner largely independent of what central convention strategists are doing.

John Coleman
Chair, UW Madison Political Science Department

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