The unconventional 2020 Conventions
Our major party conventions aren’t what they used to be. That much was evident at last week’s covid-19-shaped virtual gathering of Democrats.
From the goose-bump-raising presentation of the Star Spangled Banner at its opening and the travel-wishful roll call of the states on Tuesday to vivid and bracing star turns by Michelle and Barack Obama and a quiet moment (actually five) with Bill Clinton, the Dems may well have ushered in something new: conventions that look nothing at all like past gatherings, which could be, and often were, loud, gaudy, raucous, untended.
This week Republicans will have a go. The highlight promises to be a troubling, precedent-shattering event: President Trump’s acceptance speech from the White House.
Ringed by acres of fencing, the White House, one might surmise, will be invaded by mask-less legions summoned by special invitation. The proud, placard-carrying few (relatively-speaking) will snake through gate after gate after gate before reaching the White House South Lawn.
In order to get an even fleeting, congested glimpse of the brazenly partisan debasement of government property, the curious will be banished to fencing on Constitution Avenue, a quarter-mile away.
Of course, there is always television, live-streaming, radio.
To review: party conventions were once decision-making affairs. 1968 changed all that. To explain the watershed, one example from many should suffice: Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, running on a platform that the war in Vietnam was going nowhere, collected 428,259 votes in that year’s Pennsylvania nonbinding Democratic Party primary. His chief opponent and fellow Minnesotan, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, bagged a paltry 72,263.
Yet, at the 1968 Democratic convention, Humphrey (the eventual nominee) got the lion’s share of Pennsylvania delegate votes, 135 to McCarthy’s 25. No wonder there were riots in the streets of Chicago.
Binding primaries and caucuses subsequently proliferated in both parties. The result is that party standard-bearers are selected by regular voters, not delegates. Nowadays, convention delegates are little more than stage-dressing. Until this year, when there were no delegates (or very few).
Old Davey Lawrence, the “boss” of Pennsylvania Democrats back in the day, would have been beside himself. Lawrence was one of the party chieftains who helped Humphrey secure the Democratic nomination in 1968.
Convention-attendees could be an outrageous lot. At the Dems’ ’68 affair, Fayette County’s Fred Lebder donned a funny-looking hat. Fred’s photograph, snapped by one of the wire service boys, appeared in newspapers across the country.
More than one convention produced surprising results. In 1940, Republicans chose a former Democrat as their nominee. Stirred to action by his thousands of supporters squeezed into the convention hall, delegates selected businessman Wendell Willkie, who went on to lose the election to the Democratic incumbent of the White House.
Republican delegates had a happier outcome in 1980 with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Elsie Hillman of Pittsburgh, a titan of nice and one of most influential Republicans of the 20th century, almost singlehandedly engineered Bush’s nomination as vice president in 1980, setting into motion a complex chain of events which culminated in the two-term presidency of George W. Bush.
Years before, in 1964, Hillman tried to guide Republican delegates to the presidential banner of Pennsylvania’s stylish young governor at the time, William Scranton.
Scranton, of Scranton, issued a scathing indictment of the conservative darling, Barry Goldwater, even as delegates were on the cusp of selecting the Arizona senator as the party’s nominee for president.
Not even Hillman could help dig Scranton out of the hole he had dug for himself. The Scranton candidacy was futile. It was written in the stars: The party’s conservative stampede was on. Scranton was one of the last great Republican moderates.
Moderation, modesty, sobriety are not hallmarks of today’s QAnon -blighted GOP. The three years plus of the Trump administration have been one long radical departure; a series of departures, really. Neither Bill Scranton nor Barry Goldwater would recognize the party, the country or the world Donald Trump has been trying to shape for the rest of us to live in.
American “exceptionalism” is a sad joke at this point.
Maybe instead of outside on the lawn, Donald Trump will accept the nomination of his party for another term as president inside the White House – in the East Room or at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. Perhaps he will stand in the Rose Garden.
The 2020 Republican national convention will be different. You can count on it.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His new book, JFK Rising, is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.