David Shribman
David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Boring. Pointless. No drama. Terrible television. No raison d'être any more. The major networks hated them, viewers by the tens of millions abandoned them. U.S. political conventions were on oxygen four years ago. They were about to be pronounced dead.
No longer. The conventions – the Republicans begin theirs July 18 in Cleveland, the Democrats follow with theirs a week later in Philadelphia – suddenly have real meaning. With Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton about to be nominated, and with pundits and protesters aghast at a U.S. presidential contest with two candidates drowning in negative ratings, these conventions suddenly are must-see TV.
Will Mr. Trump give a set-piece speech from a Teleprompter that sets out themes instead of memes? Will Ms. Clinton invite her husband, who has been the star of three Democratic conventions, to share the limelight – and the podium? What will be the chemistry between the nominees and their running mates?
There is more: Will Mr. Trump, who believes he is at his most powerful when unscripted, proceed with a convention that thus far promises to be less choreographed than any in the past half century? What role will Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who captured the chemistry of the campaign but not the mathematics, play? Will the action outside the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland and the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia overshadow the proceedings inside the convention halls?
And, most of all, will the observation of the great American commentator H.L. Mencken prove true once again? "For there is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging," the sage of Baltimore wrote in 1924. "One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates were dead and in hell – and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour."
Actually, the 1924 Democratic convention dragged on so long it felt as if it took a year, though there was nothing gorgeous about it. The sessions included state-by-state ballots on the League of Nations, which the United States had spurned, and on the Ku Klux Klan, which spawned a vicious floor fight. And it wasn't until the 103rd ballot that the party nominated the colourless John W. Davis, a colourless figure who had been the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James in London. In all, the convention lasted 17 days. Months later, in November, Mr. Davis won slightly more than a quarter of the popular vote, losing decisively to president Calvin Coolidge, himself not exactly bathed in Technicolor.
It was at political conventions that Franklin Roosevelt introduced the phrase "New Deal" and that John F. Kennedy spoke of a "New Frontier." But in recent years, the drama faded, though an unknown Senate candidate from Illinois did electrify the Democratic convention in 2004. His name was Barack Obama, and the two conventions that nominated him for president in 2008 and 2012 were forgettable, but for a speech Bill Clinton delivered that shook the rafters.
Gradually, it became apparent that an American institution that was nearly two centuries old had run out of steam. A tradition that began in 1831, when both the Anti-Masonic Party and the National Republicans held political conventions, was in eclipse. That's because the real reason for conventions – to nominate a candidate for the White House – had disappeared. The growth of presidential primaries and the reliable emergence of presumptive nominees in late spring ended the drama that once was the province of these midsummer quadrennial gatherings.
It was as long ago as 1976, when President Gerald Ford was challenged by former governor Ronald Reagan of California for the Republican presidential nomination, that convention delegates assembled without knowing for sure whom they would nominate. The drama then was short-lived; Mr. Ford was nominated on the first ballot.
Indeed, the last time a convention went to more than one ballot was 1952, when Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois was nominated on the third ballot; he trailed Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee by 67 votes at the conclusion of the first ballot. The networks telecast more than 61 hours of that convention, with the average household watching more than 10 hours. This time, the networks will televise four hours of each convention – unless real news breaks out, which is more likely this year than in any time in the last five decades.
Now, at the conclusion of a GOP nomination battle that for a time seemed destined to produce a brokered convention, there are manifold reasons to tune in – and there is fresh reason to think that the American political convention is on the rebound, especially since one of the parties, the once-staid Republicans, seem to be at war with themselves.
Four years ago, there appeared in this very spot an essay that began, "American political conventions aren't what they used to be." Perhaps not. But the author of that essay has changed his mind. Maybe I never should have typed that piece.
David Shribman