Ready on the left

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Aug 27th 2008
From Economist.com

Daily dispatches from Denver


Tuesday | Wednesday


Tuesday
AMERICANS have a remarkable talent for creating transparently pointless political rituals. The most pointless of all is the “spin room”. The first thing that journalism’s finest do after every debate is rush off, notebooks in hand, to a special room where the candidate’s surrogates brief them about how well their man (or woman) did. Dennis Kucinich is building up unstoppable momentum! Tom Tancredo has the Republican nomination in the bag! The spinmeisters manage to impart all this nonsense not just with a straight face but with a look of complete sincerity.

The big question hanging over the next two weeks is whether the conventions are the most transparently pointless rituals of all. It has been decades since anything was actually decided at a convention. They have degenerated into little more than prolonged infomercials designed for prime-time television.

Every single one of the thousands of journalists here knows how the week will unfold already. Hillary Clinton will make a rousing speech about how wonderful Barack Obama is. Mr Obama will make a wonderful speech about how wonderful change and hope are. And the Democrats will pull ahead in the polls. Why endure the misery of a four-hour flight when you can just stay at home and watch the whole thing from the comfort of your La-Z-Boy recliner?

This complaint is not without merit. I have already passed a lot of time with journalists that I regularly pass a lot of time with in Washington, DC. I am preparing to go to seminars on how Mr Obama will govern that will be presented by policy wonks from the Brookings Institution, which is a few hundred yards from my office. Washington has arrived in the Rockies and is doing what Washington does best—talk to itself.

Even so, there remains something exciting, at least for people in the commentary business, about the sight of thousands of people gathered together to participate in a political ritual, however hollow. You get to stay up late and drink too much while discussing the minutiae of electoral maths—and people actually seem to be listening. And when you wake up in the morning there is a huge package of convention bumph waiting outside your hotel door.

The ever-industrious National Journal not only provides a glossy magazine containing everything from a poll of insiders to no fewer than three articles by the brilliant Ron Brownstein; it also produces a daily newspaper analysing what has gone on. There is even a political crossword for hard-core obsessives. “No hiccups so far”, reads one headline, which is all to the good, since, at the time when the story was filed, the convention had not even got underway.

The convention also gives you a chance to meet real live Democrats en masse—people who live far beyond the Beltway but nevertheless care enough about politics to devote a chunk of their lives to getting their candidate elected. One Denver-bound Democrat I met at Dulles airport was wearing a T-shirt that read “Kill ‘em all—let God sort ‘em out”. (The TSA officials waved him through security without raising an eyebrow.) Denver has also witnessed a minor riot involving professional malcontents such as Ward Churchill and Cindy Sheehan.

But for the most part everybody seems disturbingly nice. Nobody complained about the 90 minutes it took for United to offload our baggage (they blamed lightning). Nobody seemed in the least put out that there were no taxis around for another half an hour. Everybody seemed to be delighted to be here—and delighted to be taking part in a history-making event. I overheard three young people discussing whether they should meet up at the black-Jewish mixer, the Hispanic-Jewish mixer or the black-Jewish-Hispanic mixer. They decided, in the spirit of black-Jewish-Hispanic unity, to go to all three.

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Wednesday

THE watchword of the Democratic National Convention is “unity”. National unity (“There is no red or blue America” etc). Family unity. And above all party unity.

But the atmosphere in the Pepsi Centre in Denver is rather like that at a dinner party thrown by a couple who have just had a plate-throwing row: the superficial bonhomie cannot conceal the rage that seethes just below the surface.

Button sellers are doing a brisk business in “Hillary supporters for Obama” badges. One former Hillary supporter in a striking wool pantsuit sported a badge reading “Old white women for Obama”. And the party is doing its utmost to rally the faithful. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, kicked off Monday evening with a veritable Niagara Falls of clichés about the American dream.

AP

An intimate family momentThe party then played not just the Kennedy card, but the whole deck. Caroline Kennedy sang her uncle Ted’s praises. A slightly bizarre film showed Ted helping the poor and skippering his yacht. Then the man himself delivered a tub-thumping speech about Barack Obama. The crowd would have gone wild in any circumstances, but the fact that Mr Kennedy is suffering from serious health problems (and laboured over some of his words) added poignancy to the performance.

But even uncle Ted was outclassed by Michelle Obama. It’s not just that she is a poised and impressive woman and a fine speaker. She struck exactly the right notes to reach out to the “bitter” Hillary voters who have failed to warm to her husband.

She presented herself as the product not of the civil rights movement, but of the solid upwardly mobile working class. Her father worked for 30 years at a local plant before succumbing to multiple sclerosis. He raised his children to go to college and law school—but taught them never to forget their roots. This was a story that all Americans can embrace. It went down like a dream.

The Clintons will no doubt do everything that they need to do to boost Mr Obama. Mrs Clinton will urge “her” delegates to embrace her former rival. Her husband will rally the tribe for the struggle against the forces of evil. They will do it with the utmost sincerity.

But will anybody believe them? Everybody knows that we have just seen one of the most bitter quarrels in Democratic history. Everybody knows that Bill and Hill regard Mr Obama as an upstart who gamed the system and stole what rightly belonged to them. And everybody knows that Mrs Clinton would be, shall we say, ambivalent about a Democratic defeat in November: it would prove that she was right all along and hand control of the party back to her.

Many of her supporters on the floor are surprisingly open about all this. Chili Cilch, who was proudly wearing a “Hillary army” badge, told me that “With Hillary Clinton I was confident that she would do what was needed to be done. With Barack Obama I’m hopeful. I’d rather be confident”.

Other Hillary supporters were more combative. Many Hillary delegates sat on their hands and conspicuously failed to join in the general Obama-rama.

This is worrying news for the Democrats. The Obama team had assumed that Mrs Clinton’s supporters would return to the fold. How could they do anything but vote Democrat after eight years of George Bush? How could they continue to bear a grudge with the economy in the doldrums and house prices slumping? But so far the grudge remains tightly clenched.

Over the past two-and-a-half months Mr Obama’s support among Hillary voters has got worse rather than better, despite plenty of wooing. Roughly 30% of Clinton voters say that they will not vote for him. Since June Mr Obama has lost ten points among Clinton supporters and John McCain has picked up ten points. The presidential candidate for a party that has been out of the White House for eight years only enjoys the support of 80% of his party’s supporters.

This is partly because the Obama forces have been cack-handed in handling Mrs Clinton: they argued that they could not consider her for vice-president because she is a Washington insider who voted in favour of the Iraq War. Then they chose Joe Biden—a Washington insider who voted in favour of the Iraq War. But the deeper reasons are cultural: the white, working-class voters whom Hillary Clinton rallied are profoundly sceptical of Mr Obama’s coalition of black activists and liberal professionals.

The hosts at the Denver dinner party may be putting a brave face on it. But when the guests go home the seething family quarrel will burst back into life.