So here we are, two days into a hurricane-truncated Republican National Convention, and I haven't yet bothered to click on my television to watch. Not because of revulsion against Mitt and Paul, although I certainly feels some of that. ("No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate!") I probably won't be paying much more attention to the Democratic gathering, next week (I actually had to look it up just now to see exactly when the Democrats were holding theirs).
What a change over my lifetime. I was at the beach with my family -- a skinny little kid with glasses falling down my nose -- when I first learned about conventions. We didn't have a TV in our beach cabin, so my dad and I listened to it on the car radio. I was mesmerized. To me, it was as exciting as the World Series would be to more typical 12-year-olds.
Four years later, I virtually turned our basement TV room into Convention Control Central, with desk and chair, convention delegate forms and scorecards, various other written resources, and even an adding machine. I lived in that dim room for both weeks of the two conventions, yelling at the chairmen when their rulings displeased me, hanging breathlessly onto the reports of the Credentials and Platform committees, keeping track of simmering rebellions in various state delegations and negotiations between leading candidates and "favorite sons" -- governors or senators who largely controlled their state delegations -- about swinging their states' votes to one candidate or another.
I was a 16-year-old political nerd. It was so cool! When did it all start to go wrong?
Blame it on the rapidly increasing use of primary elections to choose bound delegates, making surprises at the conventions less and less likely. Blame TV announcers who found the long delays while politicians argued and bargained behind the scene -- with floor time occupied by prolonged noisy demonstrations, band music and long-winded speeches -- a waste of expensive TV time -- and thus intolerable. (I remember Walter Cronkite grumbling that the public (meaning himself) wasn't going to put up with this sort of nonsense much longer.) Blame the increasing idealogical polarization of the parties, wiping out the function of conventions as a gathering of a highly diverse party faithful from far-flung regions of the country, giving them a quadrennial opportunity to get together, talk shop, whoop it up, disagree good naturedly or bad naturedly, ultimately settle on a platform and a candidate, and go charging forth into the election, more or less united.
We don't live that way anymore. The primary system (supplemented by those bound delegates chosen in caucus states) pre-determines the winner. The whole process, after the primaries, could be done electronically. Except that the two major parties have learned to love the free publicity given them by the TV networks -- the free national platform from which they can solicit the affections of the electorate -- publicity freely given back when what happened at a national convention was truly news, truly a critical step in the election of the president.
And so what we have left is a few vitriolic political speeches, in addition to the "acceptance speeches" of the two nominees. All polished, pre-packaged, and plucked clean of any possibility of surprise.
This year, I find myself hardly bothering. I'd rather read about it all in the paper the next morning. And wallow, meanwhile, in nostalgia for a by-gone era of messy but meaningful national conventions.
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