Hold the balloons: National conventions are past their prime

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David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics. He teaches at McGill’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.

Later this month, the few viewers who interrupt their midsummer activities to tune into the stripped-down American political conventions may be seeing the last acts of a colourless, meaningless and ultimately superfluous political ritual.

For generations, the American political convention, with its origins in the 1831 Baltimore gathering of the long-forgotten Anti-Masonic Party, has been one of the great spectacles of politics: halls festooned with bunting, delegates in flamboyant outfits, mesmerizing roll calls of the states. The outcomes were so unsure that in 1924, the Democrats spent 17 days of infighting and 103 ballots on selecting their contender, John W. Davis, a compromise candidate who was unable to beat the milquetoast presidential incumbent, Calvin Coolidge.

That year, the American iconoclast H.L. Mencken noted that a convention was “as fascinating as a revival or a hanging,” adding: “It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centres and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming.”

Every element of that remains true, except for the bit about the charm.

This year’s American political conventions, ahead of the November presidential election, will be especially charmless. No flags. No parades. No horrifying hats with plâtre de moulage birds. Then again, no interminable floor fights, no inscrutable platform battles, no meaningless rambling speeches (the audience actually burst into wild applause in 1988 when Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas began a sentence with, “In conclusion...”)

“It’s just a big, expensive party with a lot of bad speeches and terrible entertainment,” Mark McKinnon, who directed George W. Bush’s media in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, told me. “There’s not a lot of positive things about COVID we’ll look back on historically. Putting political conventions out of [their] misery may be one.‘'

The coronavirus has left no element of conventional contemporary life unaltered. Former American Airlines chief Robert Crandall said recently, “You are never going to see the volume of business travel that you’ve seen in the past.” The role of the office in North American culture has been so undermined that Kelly Reynolds, who heads the University of Arizona’s Environment, Exposure Science and Risk Assessment Center, told me that “we’ve found we can make business work without being there.”

American politics is often the last redoubt of traditionalism – it is hard to imagine the selection of a presidential nominee without the customary balloon drop, a festive mainstay of conventions since 1932 that grew to 100,000 balloons at the Democrats’ 2016 conclave – but a bad virus has done what good logic has been unable to do for years.

“Now the debates can be the centrepieces of the American political campaign,” said Scott Reed, the former executive director of the Republican National Committee.

In truth, there never was much to be said for American political conventions.

There were, to be sure, a handful of consequential convention speeches. William Jennings Bryan’s “cross of gold” exhortation and Hubert Humphrey’s demand that the Democrats “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” were perhaps the greatest. Those occurred in 1896 and 1948, respectively. Other notable ones – Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s introduction of the New Deal in 1932, and John F. Kennedy’s proclamation of the New Frontier in 1960, for example – easily could have been given elsewhere, and indeed were foreshadowed during the spring months of their campaigns.

And several convention speeches would have been better off not being given at all. The Republicans could have lived without Barry Goldwater’s “extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice” speech in 1964, George H.W. Bush’s “read my lips” tax vow in 1988, or Pat Buchanan’s “culture war” declaration in 1992. Walter Mondale’s acknowledgment that he would raise taxes doomed his campaign the night of the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

I took a look back at the 10 most contentious party platform fights over the years. In eight of them, the party that engaged in such battles went on to nominate a candidate who lost the general election that followed.

That’s in part because party conventions are not party reflections.

Only 7 per cent of Democratic convention delegates in 2004 supported U.S. military action against Iraq; three times that many Democrats were in support of military intervention. Four years later, 90 per cent of delegates of both parties believed conventions were necessary in order to get a full display of the nominees’ views. Only 56 per cent of the public felt that way.

And it’s been a long time since these events were the fulcrum of decision. The last convention that required more than one ballot occurred 68 years ago.

“In practice, it has become so horribly enmeshed in formulae that two-thirds of the ends that it was designed to achieve are defeated,” Mencken wrote 96 years ago. “The delegates spend nearly all their time and energies not in considering the business before them but at the hollow maneuvers of trained animals.” Time to move the animals off the stage.

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