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.

As last week drew to a close, when most of America was still buzzing about Michael Phelps, each campaign released its fundraising totals for the month of July.
John McCain’s numbers appeared first — he raised $27 million, making July his biggest month since clinching the Republican nomination. Heading into August, his campaign reported having $21 million on hand and told reporters that, so far, around 600,000 people had contributed to the Arizona senator’s presidential bid. The Republican National Committee reportedly raised around $26 million and has $75 million cash on hand for the election.
Barack Obama’s numbers for the month were solid — he raised more than $51 million in July and closed out the month with $65.8 million on hand. Earlier in the week, we also found out that he crossed yet another financial threshold: 2 million donors have given to his campaign. The Democratic National Committee actually outraised the RNC for the month, pulling in $27.7 million, but the DNC continues to lag behind the Republicans in cash on hand, heading into August with $28.5 million in the bank.
The combined fundraising totals between the two camps are roughly equal. The Republicans have around $96 million while the Democrats have $94.3 million. But my guess is that this situation will begin to change as soon as each candidate accepts his party’s nomination.
As Marc Ambinder notes here, Barack Obama will get an immediate boost when high-dollar donors who had previously maxed out to his primary campaign can write new checks for the general.
On September 4th, the fundraising rules will change for McCain, when he receives $84 million in federal matching funds. He’ll need to spend all his primary funds before then, so don’t be surprised to see blanket television advertising from his campaign as August draws to a close.
As this NYT piece notes, Obama’s fundraising strategy shifted a bit in July and August. He began to attend more high-dollar events, meetings designed to attract major contributions from the party’s traditional wealthy donors.
That was by necessity.
The summer months by and large slipped away without the major, landmark events that were so beneficial to Obama’s small donor fundraising program in the winter and spring. The primaries were over; there were no debates; and no opportunities for significant televised speeches (like the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner or the Philadelphia address on race). Clearly, the Obama machine continues to operate and raise amazing amounts of money every time the campaign sends out an email, but these events provide extraordinary and crucial spikes in terms of dollars.
That all changes soon (my guess is this week). I believe that we’ll see an Internet dollar surge with the vice presidential announcement, and so long as the campaign can keeps its servers from melting down, Obama’s acceptance speech will net millions of dollars. In September and October, each of the debates will be a mega-event, with an accompanying big dollar return.
In the fall, even with McCain taking public money, Republicans will have plenty of cash to be competitive if the map is limited to traditional swing states like Ohio and Florida. But Obama’s gamble seems likely to pay off — he should not only have an edge in dollars, but one that proves significant. That in turn should allow him to keep ads up and staff deployed in states like North Carolina and Georgia (to say nothing of Colorado and New Mexico). Then McCain will be forced to decide how it wants to allocate its resources. Will the Republicans undermine operations in a place like Michigan to shore up the campaign in Indiana?
Folks in Chicago will attempt to force McCain’s hand. The election could ultimately hinge on whether or not that attempt proves successful.

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.

U.S Senator Ken Salazar has an interesting op-ed in today’s L.A. Times, “How Democrats can mine the West.” The Colorado senator explains how the priorities of voters in the mountain west favor Dems in this cycle:

The demographic trends are factors, but to find the real story of Western Democrats’ success, you have to get beyond Denver, Albuquerque and Las Vegas to the farms, fields and rural communities that have been ignored by the White House for the last seven years. These Democrats have found their voice in these areas, developing common-sense solutions to bridge the gap dividing the parties….people are eager for someone who will support family farms, lead a renewable-energy renaissance in rural areas, fight for the middle class and deliver on healthcare reform. They want energetic, responsive, pragmatic leadership…Westerners are turning to Democrats to stand up for their land, water and way of life.
…Our tradition of independence leads us to choose our leaders based on the person rather than the party. We admire independent thinkers, not go-it-alone mavericks. We prefer consensus and compromise to posturing and partisanship. We like outsiders, newcomers and bold thinkers who are able to adjust to the pace of our time and the complexity of its challenges.

Salazar’s words provide a pretty good psychological template for Dem ads in the region. And as Salazar describes the hopes of mountain west voters, it looks like a very tough sell for McCain.

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.”

At Politico today, Jonathan Martin has a good roundup of the very unhappy reactions of cultural conservatives in key battleground states to John McCain’s suggestion earlier this week that he might choose a pro-choice running-mate (see J.P. Green’s analysis from yesterday).
McCain was specifically speaking of former PA Gov. Tom Ridge as a man who was still on his short-list, but the comment was interpreted as possibly referring as well to Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has a consistent pro-choice voting record that includes opposition to the so-called partial-birth-abortion ban.
Here’s a sample of the reaction:

“It absolutely floored me,” said Phil Burress, head of the Ohio-based Citizens for Community Values. “It would doom him in Ohio.”
Burress emailed about a dozen “pro-family leaders” he knows outside Ohio and forwarded it to three McCain aides tasked with Christian conservative outreach.
“That choice will end his bid for the presidency and spell defeat for other Republican candidates,” Burress wrote in the message.
He and other Ohio conservatives met privately with McCain in June, and while the nominee didn’t promise them an anti-abortion rights running mate, his staff said they could “almost guarantee” that would be the case, Burress recalled.
Now, Burress said, “he’s not even sure [Christian conservatives] would vote for him let alone work for him if he picked a pro-abortion running mate.”

Meanwhile, over at National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez refers to a potential Ridge pick as “bad news,” but to the choice of Lieberman as “a disaster” that might even spark a floor revolt at the Republican National Convention. And also at NR, Rich Lowry has a column referring to the choice of Lieberman as a “desperate move” that could touch off a “Republican civil war.” His suggestion to McCain? If he’s going to choose Lieberman, both candidates should take a one-term pledge, taking Lieberman off the table for the 2012 presidential nomination.
Now that would be an inspiring message: a ticket offered to the public with an early expiration date.

ABC News Senior Correspondent Jake Tapper has some interesting revelations about swift-boater Jerome Corsi, author of the latest conservative “it” book, “The Obama Nation.” Tapper quotes from Corsi’s blog, where he dispenses bigoted diatribes bashing Catholics and Arabs, as well as gays. Says Tapper:

Writing as “jrlc,” Corsi wrote that maybe the Pope “can tell the UN what he’s going to do about the sexual crimes committed by ‘priests’ in his ‘Church’ during his tenure. Or, maybe that’s the connection — boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.”
He also wrote that “this is what the last days of the Catholic Church are going to look like. Buggering boys undermines the moral base and the lawyers rip the gold off the Vatican altars. We may get one more Pope, when this senile one dies, but that’s probably about it.”
He wrote of the Democratic Party that it’s “the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA” and of Arabs he wrote “RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters — it all goes together.” At another time he wrote “why it isn’t the case that Islam is a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion? Where’s the proof to the contrary?”

Asked to account for his bigoted drivel, Corsi explained lamely to Politico:

“I wrote those to be provocative and I said I would not use that kind of politically incorrect language again, and I don’t believe I have.”

Tapper notes that Corsi also lends cred to one of the loonier 9-11 conspiracy theories, that the twin towers were leveled by explosives placed inside the building. (Who you gonna believe, bile-crazed reactionaries, or your lying eyes?).
No doubt Republican strategists are counting on Corsi’s book to win them some votes. Ed Kilgore’s TDS post yesterday, however, explained why Corsi’s book is not likely to have as much impact as his previous swift boat screed. Indeed, it may have the opposite of the intended effect with informed Catholic and Arab-American voters.

In his new perch at ThinkProgress, Matt Yglesias is back to his prodigious blogging, and today offers a good reminder (in the contest of a new AFL-CIO direct mail piece) that Social Security could be a big problem for John McCain in the stretch-drive of the campaign.
I can’t recall a competitive major-party presidential candidate who was as dependent on the votes of older voters as John McCain is today. His past and prospective support for Social Security privatization (in the context of an overall fiscal plan that guarantees perpetual raids on Social Security revenues), and his recent attacks on the basic pay-go structure of the program as “disgraceful,” expose him to some very real problems with seniors.
But the time bombs ticking away in the substructure of McCain’s campaign go far beyond Social Security, and extend to issues that currently may be working in his favor. Sure, the present Russia-Georgia conflict may be giving him a good opportunity to talk tough. But it also will increasingly draw attention to his overall foreign policy posture of wanting to fight in Iraq until “victory,” while increasing troop levels in Afghanistan and rattling sabers against Iran, and now Russia. The unsettling reality about John McCain is that his foreign policy thinking combines the pre-9/11 conservative obsession with a new cold war against superpower rivals (then China, now Russia and China) with the post-9/11 neocon obsession to fight a new world war against “Islamofascism.” How many wars, cold or hot, regional or global, are Americans really ready to undertake?
Similarly, McCain is getting some traction from his flip-flop favoring offshore oil drilling. But that’s about all he has to say about the economy, other than the same cut-taxes-and-deregulate-and-promote-free-trade message Republicans have offered for eons. At some point, the fact that his health care plan is even worse than the status quo will get noticed, along with regressive and pro-corporation tax policies that blow up his credibility as a fiscal hawk, and an unconditional pro-trade-liberalization commitment that should represent a deep political problem for him in battleground states like Ohio and Michigan.
And for those of you who may believe policy really doesn’t matter to voters because it’s all about “character” and “trust” and “likeability” and so forth, McCain’s vulnerabilities go beyond wonky subjects like the fate of the country domestically and internationally. His much-vaunted “maverick” persona continues to be threatened by a vast track record of solidarity with George W. Bush and the GOP, and his reputation for a positive, transpartisan approach to politics may not survive his campaign’s steady descent into negative attacks on Barack Obama. And if his past behavior is any indication, there’s also a good chance that McCain will do or say something on the campaign trail, or in the debates, that makes him a lot less “likable.”
It’s always possible that McCain will successfully navigate all these potentially lethal problems, or that Obama and Democrats will fail to fully exploit his many vulnerabilities. But he’s got a tougher path to victory than a lot of nervous Democrats seem to realize.