Amidst this week’s veep-o-mania, and preparations for the Democratic National Convention, an item of potentially long-term significance slipped into the Washington Post today, in Dan Balz’s report that the Obama campaign will ask the convention to create a Democratic Change Commission to review the presidential nominating process.
According to Obama campaign chief David Plouffe, this commission (to be appointed by DNC Chair Howard Dean) would be instructed to propose ways to reduce the power of superdelegates; to come up with a primary/cacusus calendar that reduces “front-loading” and eliminates Super Tuesday-style megaprimaries; and to set conditions on the power of state parties to hold caucuses rather than primaries.
The first item on this agenda, of course, reflects the sudden rediscovery and potentially awesome power of superdelegates this year. The second and third involves longstanding demands of reformers who think the current state-driven nominating calendar is crazy and capricious, and too distorted by low-turnout caucuses.
Maybe I’m being Machivellian here, but I suspect Team Obama is interested in introducing these reforms on their merits, but is quietly establishing the means for accomplishing them in the guise of accomodations made to Hillary Clinton supporters to keep them quiet and happy in Denver. The forces supporting the current chaotic system (well-positioned state parties generally, and “gatekeepers” like Iowa and New Hampshire in particular) may well have their guards down at this particular moment. If Obama wins in November, he will be in an excellent position to ram through truly significant changes in the nominating process. And now he will have the vehicle for them.

Speculation continues that John McCain is seriously considering Joe Lieberman and/or Tom Ridge for his running-mate, fueling panic and anger on the Right, particularly among anti-abortion activists.
The Politico has a lengthy story on the possibility of a “Lieberman surprise,” including assessment of possible conservative “blowback,” up to and including a floor challenge to his nomination. The internal campaign argument for risking conservative fury and going with Lieberman is said to be the usefulness of a theoretically “bipartisan” ticket in reinforcing McCain’s “putting country first” message. Ross Douthat (who generally thinks the “McLieberman” ticket’s a terrible idea) suggests that Lieberman should actually be less offensive to right-to-lifers than Ridge, since he’s not a plausible 2012 or 2016 candidate.
All of the talk about Lieberman, of course, could be a head-fake designed to make conservatives more amenable to a Ridge choice, or to stimulate the Right to paroxyms of joy if the Veep is a conventional conservative like Pawlenty.
One thing is for sure: if the McCain-Lieberman ticket somehow does materialize, the happiest camper in the world will be Lieberman Communications Director Marshall Wittmann, the longtime McCain disciple who’s wandered all over the political spectrum over the course of his career, landing with Lieberman as sort of a port of last resort.

Well, here we are a few days at most before Barack Obama’s running-mate announcement, and exactly ten days before McCain’s, and nobody much knows what’s going to happen.
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire provides an assortment of confident predictions that Obama will choose Kaine, Biden, Reed or Sebelius. Several somebodies are obviously wrong.
And on the Republican side, conservatives went into crisis mode today over reports that the McCain campaign was sounding out GOP officials around the country about the potential repurcussions of a pro-choice Veep (presumably Ridge or Lieberman). Meanwhile, the news that McCain was going to announce his decision in Dayton, Ohio, on August 29, led to speculation that the Bush White House’s favorite, Ohioan Rob Portman, was the choice. But Portman indicated less than a month ago that he hadn’t been vetted.
We’ll all know soon enough, but those who are bored or annoyed with the endless veep speculation should understand that it’s provided a public vetting of potential heartbeat-from-the-presidency prospects to complement the private vetting. And that’s a good thing.
Until quite recently, this potentially momentous decision was often made casually, and with little or no vetting. Nixon picked Spiro Agnew during the 1968 Republican Convention, mainly because he was one of only two “moderate” candidates not vetoed by Strom Thurmond, whose championship of Nixon in the South headed off a lethal delegate stampede to Ronald Reagan. Nobody knew enough about Agnew to figure out that he was taking sacks of cash from highway contractors, and would continue to do so until the revelation of his corruption forced him to resign. The politically disastrous choice of Tom Eagleton by George McGovern in 1972 was a panicky last-minute decision made after more desirable running-mates had turned down the position, and without the benefit of the minimal vetting that might have exposed his serial drunk-driving charges, if not his electro-shock therapy sessions. (As Hunter Thompson later said: “There were any number of political reporters who could have told them that Tom Eagleton was a man who didn’t mind taking thirteen or fourteen tall drinks now and then.”). Another highly significant Veep choice, according to most accounts, was a sheer accident: the Kennedys offered the vice-presidential nomination to Lyndon Johnson in 1960 because they assumed LBJ would turn it down.
Hasty and fortuitous running-mate decisions are now a thing of the past. Given the political and meta-political implications of an unwise choice (aside from the more recent examples, cf. John Tyler and Andrew Johnson in the 18th century), enduring endless Veep speculation is a small price to pay for that.

The fascinating thing about New York Times columnist David Brooks is his ability to faithfully serve the interests of the Republican Party while maintaining a stance of ironic detachment and independence. His column today is a small masterpiece of the genre. Entitled “The Education of McCain,” it is devoted to the story-line that the GOP candidate is deep down the same unconventional and wholly admirable man he’s always been, but who has been forced by contemporary political realities to slavishly follow the party line and personally attack Barack Obama.
Touting McCain’s “long-running rebellion against the stupidity of modern partisanship,” Brooks says there’s just no question that McCain’s current campaign rubs against his very nature:

In a thousand ways, he has tried to preserve some sense of self-respect in a sea of pandering pomposity. He’s done it through self-mockery, by talking endlessly about his own embarrassing lapses and by keeping up a running patter on the absurdity all around. He’s done it by breaking frequently from his own party to cut serious deals with people like Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold. He’s done it with his own frantic and freewheeling style, which was unpredictable, untamed and, at some level, unprofessional.

But alas, alackaday, McCain had to abandon the Straight-Talk Express because of “too many 25-year-old reporters and producers seizing on every odd comment to set off little blog scandals.” And he had to run a nasty, negative campaign because “McCain and his advisers realized the only way they could get TV attention was by talking about the subject that interested reporters most: Barack Obama.”
Poor, poor John McCain, forced to behave like a regular politician, even though he’s not.
This story-line is of inestimable value to the McCain campaign, which is engaged in a high-stakes gamble that its candidate can talk out of both sides of his mouth to conservatives, who must be convinced that McCain is if anything a more principled right-winger than Bush, and to swing voters, to whom he is being marketed as a reforming centrist with no loyalty to anyone other than his country. McCain has taken this game to a new level of duplicity in recent weeks. The man who relentlessly channeled the conservative message at Saddleback Church over the weekend is hard to reconcile with the subject of his current network ad, which describes him as the “original maverick” always ready to reach across party lines to battle drug and tobacco companies and Big Oil. (This last assertion must have spawned some head-scratching or cynical belly-laughs among the oil executives who have been showering McCain with campaign contributions after his flip-flop on offshore oil drilling.)
Brooks would have us believe that all the glaring contradictions and vicious tactics characterizing the McCain campaign are just the unfortunate byproduct of our benighted political system–which, presumably, the Real McCain will deal with in office, when he’s not defeating evil somewhere overseas.
One way or another, Democrats need to take on the “Original Maverick” story-line and expose it as a deceptive and hypocritical stunt.

As Barack Obama prepares to announce his running-mate (insisting, characteristically, on a “no-leaks” policy until the decision is revealed to supporters via text-message, probably tomorrow), one name has dropped out of contention: former Sen. Sam Nunn of GA. Indeed, in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway yesterday, Nunn said the Obama campaign had not vetted his finances, which means he’s definitely not on the final short-list.
But in that same interview, Nunn shared some thoughts on the Georgia-Russia crisis that Obama and others should listen to carefully. In the bipartisan rush to identify with beleagured Georgia, support for expanding NATO to include Georgia and other eastern European nations has become reflexive. That’s a bad idea, Nunn suggests:

[C]learly the United States need to pause, look and listen before we rush into making Georgia and Ukraine part of NATO. If we’re going to do that, we have to understand that this is a military commitment. And we have to back it up militarily.
Right now, we’re not doing well in Afghanistan. Our NATO allies seem to be reluctant to put in more forces. NATO’s got a lot of credibility at stake in Afghanistan. And the defense spending by most of our European allies is way down.
And if you look at the map, you can see pretty quickly that defending Georgia will require enormous expenditures unless we’re going to go back to a Berlin sort of situation, where we threaten to use nuclear weapons in response to conventional progression by the Soviet Union….
A wounded bear is going to defend itself. I think Russia’s made a profound mistake, and they’ve got to correct it. [But] we have a real reason to avoid compounding the problem.

With John McCain running around the country demanding immediate NATO expansion in combination with promises to “defeat evil” wherever it arises, consequences be damned, it’s good to know that someone with Nunn’s credibility is willing to talk about those consequences. It was the failure to do so that led to the invasion of Iraq, which McCain continues to champion as a model for U.S. foreign policy in the future.

The New Republic is doing a colloquoy this week on its blog site The Plank about how to improve party conventions.
TDS Co-Editor Bill Galston was the first up with some typically lucid thoughts focused on how to make conventions not only more interesting but more substantive.
I was asked to contribute as well, and below is a cross-post from The Plank of my own submission:
This year’s Republican and (especially) Democratic conventions are likely to have some novel touches, particularly in the deployment of new technologies to make it easier for citizens to follow and gain a sense of participation in the proceedings. Indeed, between streaming video and social media like YouTube, the number of people who watch, live or nearly-live, significant portions of the Democratic convention is likely to increase substantially for the first time in years, despite very limited network television coverage. And it’s worth noting that Barack Obama’s acceptance speech will likely be one of the most widely watched, read and generally observed political speeches in history.
But looking forward to future conventions, it’s now obvious that significant changes will require a long-overdue and fundamental rethinking of the form and function of the national party convention.
With the virtual extinction of the original deliberative function of conventions (this year’s controversy over unpledged Democratic “superdelegates” will probably produce “reforms” reducing the probability of an “open convention” to near zero), these events really have just two major functions: strengthening party unity and enthusiasm, and framing the message (including the candidate’s personal “story”) for the presidential campaign. These remain important responsibilities, despite the quadrennial grousing among journalists and many activists that conventions no longer make news or offer “excitement” or “spontaneity.”
But if you were going to develop from the ground up an event to achieve these two objectives, would anyone conclude that the best available vehicle was four days mainly characterized by hundreds of politicians making speeches from a podium? Okay, a few “real people” or non-political celebrities now get stage-time, and the occasional politician gets to do a podium-free “stroll,” and there are even videos shown now and then. But the basic model for conventions remains the annual state party fundraising dinner, those Jefferson-Jackson and Lincoln Day marathons featuring a couple of big speeches and many short remarks by a lot of politicians, to burnish the Cause’s unity and diversity while paying some bills.
There’s nothing wrong with speechifying, though the message discipline associated with today’s conventions wrings a lot of the color and all of the unpredictability out of hearing from a wide array of candidates and elected officials from Maine to Alaska. But if speeches were the best or only way to convey a political message, campaign ads would consist of nothing else; candidates would never do another town hall meeting or photo op; and debates would end with the opening statements.
It’s worth noting that successful political and non-political conferences typically include panel discussions, sessions on specialized topics, and workshops that provide opportunities for more customized presentations. Sacrificing a hundred or so set speeches on the same general party and campaign message to provide for diverse voices on diverse topics would be a small price to pay.
Moreover, even if conventions could be staged to provide the perfect message delivery system, American politics is—thank God—rapidly becoming more interactive, just like the technologies that are changing media coverage, advertising, fundraising, and organizing. If the Obama campaign’s many innovations are truly the wave of the future, there’s no reason future conventions should follow the pattern of giving citizens constant opportunities to become participants in, not simply consumers of, these party-defining and candidate-defining events. A small straw in the wind is the plan to enlist many of the 75,000 people standing in line for Obama’s acceptance speech next week to make cellphone calls to unregistered or undecided voters. Integrating grassroots party-building and voter persuasion efforts—long an ancillary activity at conventions—into the convention itself could be far more fruitful than redundant message delivery via speeches. And once the mould is broken, there’s almost no limit to the interactivity that could be introduced to convention proceedings through online forums, Q&A sessions, state and local “virtual” mini-conventions, and other techniques. It’s all about rethinking the basic form and function of these events.
As I write these words, I am preparing to work in the speech/script operation for my sixth consecutive Democratic Convention. After each of the last five, convention professionals invariably said to each other: “Well, that’s the last time we’ll do this kind of convention!” But this time, I think that may finally be true.

The unusual event Saturday night wherein Rick Warren of the Saddleback megachurch quizzed Barack Obama and John McCain on a variety of “values” issues has generally been rated as a win for McCain. That may turn out to be a premature assessment.
Yes, in terms of the event itself, McCain did very well, wowing the largely conservative audience with clear expressions of very conservative positions nicely complemented with anecdotes. But in doing so, he staked out positions that are less than ideal in terms of the broader audience of undecided general election voters.
There’s no question that McCain’s objective Saturday night was to solidify his conservative base and remove any doubt about his hard-line commitment to the agenda of the Christian Right. Indeed, if there was a secondary audience he had in mind, it was conservatives generally, as witnessed by his very revealing insistence on sneaking in a reference to “the secret ballot in union elections” while rambling through an answer to a question about privacy rights. This is code for conservative opposition to “card-check” legislation that would allow unions to be certified on submission of statements of support from a majority of employees in a given workplace.
Obama certainly could have been crisper and less defensive in some of his answers. But with the immediate audience, and perhaps with other voters who have heard that he’s a hard-core lefty, he earned a lot of brownie points simply by showing up on “enemy turf.” And his issue-positioning was a lot closer to national opinion than McCain’s.
Moreover, McCain will never again obtain a format and issue-landscape so favorable to him. Aside from the conservative framing of many questions (e.g., “When does a baby become entitled to human rights?”), the “character” questions teed him up for his favorite anecdotes about his POW experience. There were virtually no questions about the economy, and McCain was able to say some preposterous things, particularly about Iraq, without being challenged.
The bottom line is that McCain may have won the battle of Saddleback, but the war’s another matter.

To the surprise of most observers, Barack Obama pushed his announcement of his running-mate into the supposedly sancrosanct Olympics period, and may now push it into the Democratic Convention (the Olympics end Sunday, and the convention begins the next day). Apparently determined to “go second,” John McCain may now be forced to unveil his running-mate relatively late as well.
Alexander Burns of The Politico has a nice summary today of the timing of recent veep announcements. Dan Quayle in 1988 was the last running-mate in either party to be announced during the convention itself.
As is reflected in a separate Politico article this morning which wanders all over the place in speculating about Obama’s choice, his campaign has done a masterful job of maintaining suspense on the Veepship. A long list of potential candidates have taken turns as supposed front-runners, giving Team Obama a good sense of the likely reaction if any of them is actually chosen. In the end, no one really knows what Obama has decided on any of the key variables surrounding this decision: “outsider” versus “insider;” national security street cred versus fellow-war-opponent; “reinforcing” his message or complementing his weaknesses; newsgrabbing “controversial” choice or reassuring conventional choice. That’s why a relatively large number of people are stiill considered possibillities.
There’s less suspense on the Republican side, particularly after McCain emphasized the hard-line pro-life nature of his candidacy and future administration in the Rick Warren event over the weekend. Speculation increasingly revolves around Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney.

Since I seem to be writing about the history and contemporary nature of national party conventions today, I wanted to point you to two separate pieces over at the New Republic site.
The first, by Eric Zimmerman (who earlier wrote a very useful analysis of the behind-the-scenes struggle over the Democratic platform’s abortion plank), provides an affirmative answer to my own question as to whether the platform drafters had indeed pulled off an amazing feat of wordsmithing on abortion.
According to Zimmerman, both pro-choice activists and “abortion reduction” advocates signed off on the language understanding completely the tradeoffs involved (staff from the centrist group Third Way, he reports, provided some key intermediary services). Sure, Democrats wanting “room” for anti-abortion advocates didn’t get the “conscience clause” they wanted, respecting dissenters from the party’s fundamental pro-choice commitment. But perhaps the agreement to give notable pro-life Democrat Bob Casey, Jr., a convention speaking slot will take care of that particular concern.
Speaking of platforms, Seyward Darby has a brief, amusing piece describing platforms as an anachronistic “corncob pipe” at conventions, and reviewing some famous platform fights of the past.
As it happens, he didn’t mention my all-time favorite platform fight: the struggle at the 1924 Democratic convention over a plank specifically condemning the Ku Klux Klan (“three little words,” as Willliam Jennings Bryan dismissed them in opposing the plank as divisive), which failed by one-half-of-one-vote after a delegate from my home state of Georgia was physically intimidating into changing her vote by Klansmen in her delegation. This fight epitomized the party divisions that led to the longest convention deadlock of all time (taking 103 ballots to nominate John W. Davis) and a disastrous general election. [Note: I am very happy to report that used copies of Robert K. Murray’s brilliant but out-of-print book on this convention, The 103d Ballot, can now be bought for peanuts via Amazon].
While some political people complain about the lack of drama at modern party conventions, there are worse things than unity and quiet.

As a student of, and frequent worker-bee at, national party conventions, I’m a bit amused by the small controversy aroused by Mark Warner’s selection as “keynote speaker” for the upcoming Democratic gathering in Denver. In part, I suppose, because of the deserved fame of Barack Obama’s “keynote address” in 2004, Warner’s selection to deliver a featured Tuesday night speech is being kicked around as a sign of Warner’s presidential future, or as a good or a bad thing depending on your opinion of the Virginian’s oratorical skills and messaging.
That’s all well and good, but does the “keynote” designation really mean as much as it used to?
Traditionally, when conventions were actually deliberative in nature, the “keynote” address, invariably held on the first night of the event, was a brief, guaranteed moment of rousing party unity before delegates moved on to more potentially divisive discussions revolving around rules, platform planks, and candidates. It was the one time you could be sure that the convention was focused outward, towards the hated partisan enemy, rather than inward, toward the party’s own issues.
Nowadays, there can be multiple keynote addresses (there were officially three at the 1992 Democratic convention) or none at all (as in the 2000 GOP convention). They can occur at almost any juncture, and the tone of the keynote isn’t necessarily different from that of any other convention speech. Obama’s 2004 effort, for example, certainly wasn’t the slash-and-burn partisan diatribe of keynotes past.
“Keynote addresses” aren’t the only anachronistic features of contemporary party conventions, of course. The central moment in every convention, the presidential “acceptance speech,” was once (prior to 1932, when FDR became the first major-party nominee to actually appear at the convention) delivered offsite, weeks and even months after the formal nomination was made. Going back even further, the “acceptance” was traditionally a published letter rather than a speech, which sometimes made “acceptance” conditional on rejection of certain planks in the party platform (most famously George B. McClellan’s rejection of the Civil War “peace plank” in the 1864 Democratic platform).
None of this history matters a great deal, other than to remind us that the structure and terminology of national party conventions remain haunted by the ghosts of conventions long past. That’s even true of the central organizing principle of conventions: the idea that they should primarily consist of speeches–increasingly redundant in this era of message discipline and centralized vetting–by hundreds of politicians.
I’ll have more to say about that in an upcoming New Republic piece on the future of conventions. But no no one should hyperventilate over the selection of a particular speaker to deliver a particular “address.”