My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #9, August, 1996

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

We are just finishing our quadrennial dog-and-pony shows known as the Democratic and Republican conventions. Well, Ross Perot's Reform Party convention, too, but that hardly had enough balloons and speeches to count.

I don't believe the political conventions you in Britain have bear much resemblance to ours, so I feel a need to explain a little about what's going on, and why it may never happen just this way again.

You could think of our political conventions as being one-third sales meeting, one-third campground revival, and one-third backroom manouevering by the people who actually run things. Like a sales meeting, the purpose is to determine what the product is, convince the sales people that it's the best product earth has to offer, tell them what the message is, and send them off, fired up and enthusiastic, to go out and make the sale. Like a campground revival, the convention has to give a sense of urgent mission to the faithful.

There is nothing representative about the people who are at the conventions. They are active party members, people who not only voted in the primaries or in the caucuses, but who worked hard on behalf of a candidate or a plank in the platform. Most delegates are people who vociferously want to change things-as-they-are. They may want to get rid of the Department of Urban Affairs, or pass a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution or wipe out all forms of gun control (these are Republicans I'm talking about). Or they may want to protect a woman's right to choose, or reinstitute strong protection of the rights of workers, or pass stricter gun control (these are Democrats).

Whatever their articles of faith, these are the people who, like it or despise it, understand that government matters--it changes people's lives. The more power government has to do good things, the more power it also has to do bad things, whether on purpose or as the result of the law of unintended consequences.

The first part of the convention is the behind-the-scenes part, in closed rooms where no video cameras or snoopy television correspondents are allowed. This is where the message is manufactured. (In the old days, it also used to be where the candidates were selected for consideration by the delegates at large, but since the widespread use of primaries began, we already know the candidate well in advance.) Party members duke it out in private about the things the party should stand for. It's where the party says "This is who we are, and this is what we will do if you give us the power to do it."

The next week is the public part. On Monday and Tuesday, unless one faction of the party has enough numerical strength to make a challenge on the floor to any part of the platform, the platform is approved. Then there is a mindnumbing succession of speeches.

You may wonder why anyone would put on such a show on for their delegates. It's a lot to ask of the sitzfleisch, after all. And the answers are: 1) this is a holdover from the origin of the conventions in the 19th century, when people routinely listened to speeches and political debates because they were not only important, but a good free show in a time when free public entertainment was hard to come by; and 2) remember, this is a sales meeting. The basic principle of sales is repetition of the message.

The series of speeches also serves the function of identifying future stars of the party. They try out their stuff when hardly anybody but the delegates is watching, and work their way up toward becoming the keynote speaker, or even a major candidate, the kind of speaker television is forced to cover. Television is almost forced to show the speeches Wednesday and Thursday, by the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates.

Which brings us to another oddity about the convention in the television era--how it is presented by the party, and covered, or more precisely, NOT covered, by television cameras. Party leaders understand that television is a powerful tool for conveying the party message. But it is also a powerful medium for conveying that a party is unfit to govern because it can't even keep it's own troops under control.

You know the old Will Rogers line, "I don't belong to any organized political party. I am a Democrat." Now, there's God's own truth for you, because a more motley collection of people, with a more diverse set of ideas about what government should be doing, has rarely in history gotten together and declared themselves to be one single party--the Democrats. Republicans are good at saying "Do this because I say so" and having everybody fall into line in lockstep--no matter what they actually think about the proposed plan. Democrats, on the other hand, are some of the orneriest, stubbornest, most argumentative people who ever lived. I should know, because I'm one of them.

They don't mind quarreling in public, either. That's why their conventions tend to be a LOT more interesting. Of course, they have also lost a whole lot of presidential elections in recent years.

There are those who think there is a causal relationship here.

So members of the Republican party were told this year, often and loudly, "Thou shalt commit no news." The more boring, the better. Give the cameras nothing but sweet harmony and pretty balloons and syrupy films about the candidates.

This explains why the television coverage of the conventions is even more bizarre than the conventions themselves. Consider this--15,000 anchormen, reporters, pollsters, camerapersons, soundpersons and support personnel, gather at a convention to report on the doings of 2,000 people. And then THEY REFUSE TO LET YOU SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING!

You say an up-and-coming star of the party is speaking? Not as far as anyone at home can tell, because what they are seeing is news anchors, political correspondents, pollsters, and political analysts, TALKING TO EACH OTHER about the meaning of a speech that neither they, nor we, are actually watching.

Excuse me for thinking this is more than a little strange.

Because the reporters feel that it is not their job to let us know what any of these people are saying. That would be allowing themselves to become "transcribers," rather than reporters, and to be "manipulated" by the political parties into helping them sell their message. Instead, they sit there, chatting with each other, lamenting that there is no "news" at the convention.

This is, for one thing, an extraordinary failure to understand that words ARE news, and that those words matter. If a party tells you over and over again what it wants to accomplish, and the news media fail to report it, or allow those words on television, how can reporters possibly say that they are helping voters make an informed decision? Somehow, the television news people have come to believe that THEY are the event, and the convention merely an unusually decorative backdrop. (Perhaps they think the flags and bunting are there to welcome Dan Rather.)

This style of political convention is a uniquely American, art form, but probably a dying one. It has to compete with other free entertainment that is lots more interesting and requires far less in terms of attention span. What once was the primary point of the convention, the choice of a candidate, has already been accomplished. The firing up of the delegates--the salesmen--can perhaps be as readily done by talk radio hosts and poisonous direct mail attacks. And as for the chance at a big hunk of free television time, well, the news media clearly aren't going to allow that to happen.

There's not much left for a political convention to do, then, except give a lot of folks an opportunity to go to a big city at someone else's expense, drink an impressive amount of booze, wear silly hats and buttons, wave signs, release balloons, and consort with people who think exactly like they do. In short, just another sales convention, fun, but not necessarily important.

If you want to see the real thing before it vanishes, though, you'll have to catch it on C-SPAN. That's that wonderful cable channel whose motto could well be "Dare to be boring!". The channel that is devoted to covering important public events in full, without commentary. The channel, in fact, that news people believe relieves them of any responsibility to report what happened. (And so what if 50% of the population does not have cable.)

The conventions remind me of one of my favorite rock music quotes, by Dar Williams--"Well, sometimes life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging." That's why, when the conventions die, I for one am going to miss them. They're such a splendid combination of the things America does best--selling and show biz, soundbyte-size ideas and gigabyte size production values. Not to mention occasional profundity mixed with hefty portions of silliness.

My Word's Worth Archive

Current column

Marylaine.com/ home to all my other writing

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.