It's Convention Time...!

“A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation” – James Freeman Clarke, American preacher and author 1810-1888

After an epic primary season that began on the chilly plains of Iowa in early January and concluded more than fifty contests later in the heart of the old Indian reservations of South Dakota; after more than twenty presidential debates and seventeen months of resume analysis and character assassination; after an unprecedented 36 million votes were cast for two juggernaut candidates and an election cycle that hasn’t captured the country’s imagination in such a way in more than a generation, freshman Senator Barack Obama will be officially nominated as his party’s nominee for President of the United States at the Democratic National Convention on August 28th next.

Neither the date of his nomination, nor the location from which he will deliver his acceptance speech is lost on historians or political junkies. On August 28th 1963, another black man, Martin Luther King, delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech to a quarter of a million people at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. Forty five years later, to the day, Obama will accept his party’s nomination not at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver where most of the week’s meetings and convention activity will take place, but rather at the INVESCO Field stadium (the home of the Denver Broncos football team), a venue that can house 76,000 people. For the first time in the history of the national conventions, the Democratic Party will throw open its doors to the general public and in the words of DNC Chairman Howard Dean “….we will be able to showcase Barack Obama’s positive, people-centered vision for our country in a big way”.

The decision to break with the 176 year convention tradition of closed door speeches and behind the scenes delegate brokering and bargaining that goes on in smoke filled rooms between egocentric and narcissistic politicians, delegates, surrogates, political hacks, wingmen and hangers on is a deliberate attempt by the Democratic party and the Obama campaign to include ordinary voters in every aspect of the election cycle.

Over the years, there have been some memorable conventions in the long history of the Democratic Party; in 1956 the presidential nominee and darling of the liberal intelligentsia Adlai Stevenson broke with tradition and threw the vice presidential nomination to a “free vote” on the convention floor, resulting in a narrow victory for Senator Estes Kefauver over a fresh faced Senator from Massachusetts named Jack Kennedy, and an emotionally charged 1964 convention when, in the difficult months after President Kennedy’s assassination, Democrats nominated Lyndon Johnson as their candidate.

Television ratings for both the Democratic (and Republican) nominating conventions have plummeted however over the last 40 years, partly because regular voters see these events as self aggrandizing ego trips for the nominated candidates and partly because the ugly side of Democratic politics in particular has been played out in all its gory detail on national television.

In a tumultuous year that had already seen the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy and widespread protests across America against the Vietnam War, the 1968 Democratic convention became a battleground between rioting protesters and police. Inside, a nasty and chaotic atmosphere permeated the convention with the incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey beating anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy. Humphrey was far from a popular choice, an example of which can be witnessed from television footage of the event that shows Major Richard Daley of Chicago (where the convention was staged and who was a lifelong Kennedy supporter) openly mocking and jeering one of the speakers from the floor.

In 1980, Ted Kennedy snubbed then incumbent President and about to be re-nominated candidate Jimmy Carter, before delivering one of the best speeches of his career. Earlier, Kennedy had tried unsuccessfully to get delegates who had committed themselves to Carter, to change their mind at the convention and vote for him (Kennedy) instead. In 1982, partly in an attempt to ensure that similar shenanigans didn’t happen in the future and in an effort to afford some level of control to party elders and elected officials, the Democrats introduced a new voting block at the convention called “super-delegates”. After working in a vacuum through six consecutive elections, the super-delegates came front and centre this year in the battle between Obama and Clinton for their party’s nomination.

As I write, the vice-presidential vetting process is still underway. The consensus among political commentators is that Obama has narrowed down his VP choice to three possible candidates, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia. We will know for sure by mid August. For the first time in a generation, Americans are truly energized by the prospect of what promises to be a memorable national convention.