The Last Convention?

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Some post-Tampa thoughts.

1. I think Charlotte is blending into Tampa and Tampa into Charlotte. The conventions were perversely scheduled—no time between them, no post-convention afterglow in which people could mull, consider, remember what was said, reflect upon a line, a gaffe, a revealing little stumble. The other day it was all Romney-speech-Romney-speech, soon it will be Clinton-speech-Clinton-speech and oh-yes-Obama-speech. I think normal Americans will experience it as One Week This Team Yells, the Next Week That Team Yells. And they will remember it as a yelling blur where nothing became clarified.

2. I never before came away from a convention thinking, “I have witnessed the end of the big four-day national convention,” but I did this time, and it added a layer of poignancy to everything because I wasn’t alone. There was a sense of an ending in Tampa. I left thinking: “No great party will ever tie up a great American city for a solid week again.” You know all the reasons conventions seem over—there’s no actual struggle on the floor, everything has already been decided, everything seems prefabricated, the speeches are timed and vetted within an inch of their life.
You’ve seen the evidence that conventions are over in the plummeting viewership, and the shrug-shouldered irony of the reporters and correspondents. Something poignant there too. The network and newspaper editors, producers and reporters who were sent to the convention are by and large at the top of their field, meaning they’re 40 and 50 and 60. They remember when conventions meant something—floor fights, gavels banging at 2 a.m., last-minute calls to the Michigan delegation to change the vote. “Ohio passes!” More or less spontaneous demonstrations. Drunken delegates—oh, how much more stilted America has become with its water swilling! In 1976, not all that long ago, no one really knew going in exactly who was going to be the Republican nominee, Ford or Reagan. And everyone misses that, the mystery and the struggle, and no one is satisfied with these three- or four-day re-enactments.

3. But members of a great political party have to meet every few years—they have to get to know each other, they have to meet their rising figures, and they have a right to show their stuff to America and the world. One wonders what the parties will do, how they’ll sort this out. Someone told me this week of a party elder’s comment as he reflected on Tampa. He said the convention cost about $100 million, and he could think of a lot of better ways to spend that money with an election coming. This will be an interesting story in the future, how it all evolves.

4. I am seeing the Romney speech as good enough, did no harm, rocked no boats, but I’m starting to see it as a bit of a missed opportunity, too. Romney did nothing to jar his support, to make those who think they’ll vote for him question their decision. But he didn’t do enough to make those leaning toward him make the jump. I think leaners wanted Romney to give them more reasons to vote for him. I ran into a lot of people the past few days who I could tell really wanted to say, “I gotta tell you, when Romney said that thing about such-and-such I started to really think I’ll vote for him.” But they never said it, not once. They talked about other people’s speeches. Marco Rubio made a big impression. Chris Christie is being put down a lot by members of both parties—selfish, shouldn’t have made it about him. When people like Christie, they call him burly, a big guy who looks like an American. When they don’t like him, they call him fat. The past few days they were using the f-word. And everyone of course had an opinion on Clint Eastwood.

5. A probably final thought on that. I liked his performance, for a number of reasons—it was wild, unscripted, surprising, fun. And not without meaning: He said some things in there. But what Eastwood’s appearance unleashed was even better. When Twitter blew up and the pushback began it made me laugh out loud. I liked the president’s tweet: “This chair is taken.” But the sheer joy and wit and sarcasm and pushback and defense that erupted was . . . well, it’s like what politics used to be like, full of fight and cleverness. Our politics now are superficial and grim. They used to be superficial and full of vim, and vigor too. It’s supposed to be fun. It’s kind of a sin not to enjoy life, and politics is part of life.

Republicans Join the Battle

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Tampa, Fla.

Two days in, I had no faith in this convention. The hurricane tore apart plans and affected everyone’s mood. Normal chaos became heightened anxiety. On the floor, the delegate seats had too much space between them, which removed the kind of animal density that speakers in big halls need. The weird, excessive security left the areas around the Forum and the Convention Center almost empty of people and traffic. It looked like the aftermath of a dirty bomb, when everyone had fled. A convention is supposed to be full of humans and hustle and bustle, and protesters, too, because this is America and protesters are part of the crazy zest of a great party convening.

America is always going over the top. We have gone over the top on security. Stop already. Life is risk. Be prudent, take precautions, but live.

Anyway, it took longer than usual for the gathering to find a rhythm. The first night’s addresses were fine but didn’t quite scour, as Abe Lincoln said of a speech that fell short. But the second night lifted everything up. Wednesday it became a real convention. All of a sudden there was joy, and fight.

*   *   *

It started with Mike Huckabee. He is a performer, he knows how to do this, and he made the audience listen. But he is also a policy person and a veteran campaigner who knows the base. He addressed the Mormon issue without ever saying “the Mormon issue,” and he hit hard on cultural issues. President Obama, he said, is the only “self-professed evangelical” in the race, yet “he tells people of faith that they have to bow their knees to the god of government and violate their faith and conscience in order to comply with what he calls health care. Friends . . . let me say it as clearly as possible, that the attack on my Catholic brothers and sisters is an attack on me.”

That was electric. Every speaker afterwards got to bounce off the energy Mr. Huckabee left in the room.

Condi Rice was a star. She took the role of accomplished and knowledgable public instructor, boiling down the conservative critique of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy. What are they upset about? That he’s not serious, that he doesn’t understand what America must be in the world. The great unanswered question now is where America stands. When the world doesn’t know, it becomes “a more chaotic and dangerous place.” Interestingly, she scored the president on international economic policy. We are “abandoning the playing field” on trade, “and it will come back to haunt us.”

In the media, her presence at the convention is seen as a comeback. But Ms. Rice is an iconic figure, and iconic figures don’t come back because they don’t leave. Her role at this convention was prominent. Good, she is an authentically inspiring figure.

New Mexico Gov. Susan Martinez was a revelation. I’d never seen her speak. She came across as tough, funny, able, smart. She’s like the prosecutor in a show with a name like “CSI: Child Victims Unit”—the no-nonsense Latina who tells the detectives to make the call and get the perp. She did something Republicans love, telling the story of how she once went to lunch to hear some political guys out and realized at the end, to her shock, that she was a Republican. It was like Arnold Schwarzenegger at the 2004 convention. He told of being new in America. He saw Richard Nixon talking about free enterprise and asked a friend, “What party is he?” On being told, he said, “Then I am a Republican.” The only line in 2004 that brought down the house.

Anyway, watch this woman. She’s a star, too.

*   *   *

The most important speech Wednesday was Paul Ryan’s. America was meeting him. I won’t quote at length, since it’s all over the Internet and you already know the lines that scored—the college kid and the Obama poster, the elevator music. Great stuff.

But here’s what was important. Mr. Ryan started awkward, got his sea legs, settled down, and by the time he was finished he’d made Mr. Obama look tired and old. He made the administration sound over. He made it sound so yesterday.

The speech was solidly done—three acts, humor, and it all sounded true of him. It was serious, an indictment of the way things are and a declaration of hope.

A commentator of the left told me, afterward, that he thought it the most “ideological” convention speech he’d heard in decades, all that stuff about “central planners.” I said it seemed to me not like ideology but philosophy, that while central planner is a 20th-century phrase, what it conveys—that an elite professional governing class far away is more likely to wreak havoc than be constructive—is not only basic conservative thinking but straight out of the Federalist Papers. Mr. Ryan was not ideological. He was conservative.

And yet. He seemed very young up there. And the teleprompter forced him to shift his eyes from screen to screen and deliver the good line, plonkingly, to the center screen. The crowd loved him and conservatives love him, but he is going to have to work very hard to break through to America.

*   *   *

Night three was good in different ways. The Friends of Mitt who showed up to speak for him painted a better picture of his personal virtues than has ever been painted. The Romney family film was beautiful and touching. Clint Eastwood was funny, endearing—”Oprah was crying”—and carries his own kind of cultural authority. “It’s time for somebody else to come along and solve the problem.” He was free-form, interesting—you didn’t quite know what was going to come next—strange and, in the end, kind of exhilarating. Talk about icons. The crowd yelling, “Make my day,” was one of the great convention moments, ever.

Mitt Romney’s speech? The success of the second night of the convention left people less nervous about the stakes. Nobody expected a great one. There was a broad feeling of, “Look, giving great speeches is not what Mitt does, he does other things.”

He had to achieve adequacy. He did.

It was a speech that seemed assembled by people who love pictures but not words. And that will limit a speech.

Coming down the aisle like a president at a State of the Union was meant to make you picture him as president. He began to speak at 10:36, a little late for some viewers in the East. It could not be accused of being an applause-line speech. He spoke compellingly of the centrality of faith in his life.

Mr. Romney always looks to me like a kindly, well-intentioned and intelligent man. That’s how he looked Thursday night. There are big policy differences between him and the president.

And so the battle is, on the Republican side, formally joined. Next week, the Democrats in Charlotte.

*   *   *

A very smart Republican, a veteran and unromantic surveyor of the political scene, told me we are about to find out whether this year is 1976 or 1980—if what we have just witnessed is a harbinger of change, or the change itself.

We’ll know in 9½ weeks. You’re bored with politics? Kid, right now is when it gets interesting.

Without Boundaries

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Something so poignant about the end of a convention, something touching in a way you can’t put your finger on.  Empty lobbies, empty cab lines, the long line at security at the airport, with people, especially cameramen, slackjawed with fatigue.  At Delta check-in a couple had two huge bags open on the floor, their personal contents spilling out as they tore through trying to remove items to make the airline weight limit.  What we saw in the bags:  wine bottles, magazines, newspapers from the convention, underwear, swag, swag swag.  The people on line made loud sighs.  A delegate with a wheely breezed by and said, “If you remove the newspapers you save, like, seven pounds.”  Everyone wanted to keep the history of where they were.

At security, in the magnetometer, the woman who told me to stand with my arms above my head said, when I got through, “You’re all tired.”  I said, “It’s true.”  She was sixty-ish, short reddish hair, hearty.  She said, “I know you.  You still writing?”

I said, “Still doing it after all these years,” and I touched her arm and we smiled.

“Well I watch you.  Doin’ good,” she said, encouragingly.

Now I’m in the Delta lounge, where an attractive and chicly dressed but loud young woman is holding conference calls.  Her tone is warm but…imperious.  She’s getting the people on the other end of the line to give her “the numbers.”  I wonder what I always wonder when I witness moments like this.  Should I tell her?

She doesn’t care that the dozen or so of us in the lounge all can hear her, that we all, in fact, are forced to listen to her.  And we don’t want to hear her conference call, nor witness how she manipulates the people on the other end of the conversation.  Should I tell her that, like so many in her generation, she has boundary problems?  She doesn’t understand that there is her and her body and her space, and then there is us and our bodies, and our space doesn’t really want to be invaded by her space.  I’m not sure I’m being clear, but people in their 20s and 30s now often don’t have a tidy sense of their space and your space, and how your space doesn’t wish to be violated by theirs. They think everyone wants to listen to them.  They think everyone is lucky to listen to them.  We might learn something.

She just vigorously snapped up her MacBook,  and strode away.  In a second I will make eye contact with the other people in the lounge and give them  the look we give.

The Secret to All Politics

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

I keep running into wonderful young people working their first convention, and they keep not asking me, “What is the secret to all politics?”  I am here to tell them anyway.  There is a secret theme song to all conventions, and it is in fact the secret theme song of all politics.  You listen to the old baseball manager:  “This game…is only one half skill.  The other half is something else, something bigger.”  What he says is incredibly corny and always true.  So onward tonight, and save this for when you’re having one of those days.  Also, dig the harmony.  You Gotta Have Heart!

Huckabee Hits a Homer

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Mike Huckabee’s speech is the best of the convention so far.  What a fabulous, old fashioned podium-thumper.  He has been the only speaker tonight with the size to fill the room, the only one who can read a teleprompter without looking shifty-eyed, the only one with the confidence to go there at length on the meaning of such issues as the president and the Catholic church, and the only one who captured the full attention of the crowd.  Just a wonderful speech about the meaning of things.  Out of the park.

A Quiet Convention

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

People are talking about how subdued the floor is.  Normally Republicans in convention are whomp-’em, stomp-em full of cheers.  They interrupt the speakers too much!  But last night Chris Christie said a few lines that you knew he knew would garner big applause, and he got what a young speechwriter this morning called “crickets.”  It happened to Ann Romney a few times too.  I asked a US senator from the midwest if he’d noticed and he said yes.  His staffers, standing with him, nodded and wondered aloud:  Is it the high number of Ron Paul supporters, who aren’t that enthused?  Maybe, said another, it’s in the nature of Mitt Romney’s supporters:  they’re not all that excitable.  Anyway the floor is dead.  The Romney campaign and the RNC should send out one of their alerts:  Everyone, wake up!

Ann Romney and Chris Christie

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

A read on the first night of the convention:

They lit the candle. They got past the ill luck of the storm and declared there’s a convention going on.

Ann Romney was stunning, sweet, full of enthusiasm, a little shy, a little game for the battle. Her speech was fine. I think the headline was that she and Mitt got married young, lived in modest circumstances and struggled a bit while he studied and tried to get a foothold in business. But it was scattered, full of declarations — “Tonight I want to talk to you about love” — that weren’t built upon but abandoned. Strong as the impression of personal beauty is, I think she missed an opportunity.

Here’s how I see it. I have just spent the past two and a half days talking to people who’ve known Mitt Romney well for ten, twenty and thirty years, even more. They love him, and in all their conversations they say either literally or between the lines, “If only you knew him like I do.” It is their mantra. They mean it, and they are so frustrated. They believe he is a person of unique and natural integrity, a kind man who will give you not only his money but his time, his energy. They see him as a leader. They know the public doesn’t see this. They don’t understand why. And, actually, I don’t blame them, because it really is a bit of a mystery. If he’s so good why can’t his goodness be communicated?

The opportunity Ann Romney missed was to provide first person testimony that is new, that hasn’t been spoken, that hasn’t been in the books and the magazine articles. She failed to make it new and so she failed to make it real.

I’m not sure her speech was a loss but it doesn’t feel like a gain. We’ll see. The real reaction to a highly publicized speech emerges not overnight on twitter but over days and weeks as people chat in the office and on the sidewalk in front of school. So we’ll see what they say, we’ll see how it bubbles up.

*   *   *

Chris Christie’s speech was big. It was hopeful. It said the American people can turn their country around, that they actually want candidates who speak the truth, that they will follow difficult prescriptions if they seem grounded in reality. Christie always reminds me a little of Jackie Gleason — “To the moon, Alice!” But he is one shrewd political mind, and he actually thinks about the meaning of things. He played the common man Tuesday night but he was high minded, and he beautifully skewered the hypocrites and reactionaries in the teachers’ unions, who have made it so clear to so many the past decade that really, they are all about pensions and bennies, not about students, and if you don’t like the longterm cost of the deals they make with pols you can just avoid the property taxes by selling your house and going to rent somewhere. They don’t care where because there will be a teacher’s union there, too.

So look, all of this was good, and right, and big. But.

Chris Christie is a politician and there’s nothing in it for him, as a New Jersey Republican, as a guy trying to survive and prosper in a Democratic state, in really bringing it to President Obama. He stuck to thoughts on governance. This was worthy.

But you know, this is how the Republican base feels: No one classy and admired like Chris Christie has ever taken it to Obama and been as tough a partisan as, say, Joe Biden, or as amusing and pointed as — well, actually, I can’t think at the moment of a truly pointed and funny Democrat, but whoever that person is would be is the person I mean.

Republicans aren’t really hungry for red meat, that’s not what this is about. They’re hungry for someone who is an elected official at a high level, and who is admired, to push back, to have fun, to stir the blood, to make the case, to get the troops going again.

I want to tell you they marched out of the hall Tuesday night on fire for their side. But I was there and they did not. They walked out like people who weren’t quite sure what to think or how to feel but were hoping for the best because they love their country. A lot.

Christie Preview

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

From a Chris Christie aide: The governor’s speech will be “positive” in tone, “Republicans and Democrats working together.” He’ll speak briefly about where he comes from, who he is, what his parents taught him. He will make the case that the American people hunger for honesty, that they want candor from their political leaders, that when given the facts of a situation they will back measures that will turn the problem around. He will speak of his experience in New Jersey and apply what he learned there to the nation. It is not an attack speech, he wants to deliver “a much bigger message” about “the future of the party.” He makes the case for Mitt Romney.

Humor, verve? “He’s Chris Christie.” Hint of what’s coming: he spoke to the Michigan delegation on Tuesday and got so wound up he threw in parts of tonight’s speech. He told an aide later he couldn’t help it, “It’s in my head!” How did it go over? “Very well.”

The Storm Before the Calm

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

The vibe of this convention has been weird. There has been a constant sense of something impending, some doom about to be delivered. What everyone is hungry for, hopeful for, will be so grateful for, is: a sparkling opening at 8 p.m. that will chase the clouds away. A great Christie speech, a line, a joke that lets the crowd let out its pent-up roar. An Ann Romney speech that leaves delegates saying, at 1 in the morning in the bar of the Hyatt, “We did the right thing. We picked the right one.”

We are in Florida, we are near the cape, Neil Armstrong left us this week, and TV has been full of old videotape of rockets lifting. Now more than ever delegates are saying, “Light this candle. Come on and light this thing.”

Bad (and Good) Advice for Speakers

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

A guy who’s speaking at the convention told me he has been talking to “the professionals.” They told him to speak to the person in the living room, then they told him to speak to the people in the hall. They told him to speak to businessmen, and then they told him no, speak to disaffected women. Speak to this demographic, speak to that one.

All the people who say these things, they are stupid and know nothing. They are mouthing the garbage-speak of received wisdom. People are people, at bottom they have souls, they have a brain, they can hear the sound of something honest, they hate artifice, they can smell it. When you speak to slices of the American people you are slicing America into pieces. Which means you are part of the problem.