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.

‘That Was Smart’

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

A U.S. senator from the West talking about Paul Ryan: “I think Romney was challenging himself.” Romney knew he had to become a better candidate, knew he needed someone who played a higher policy game, knew he needed someone who prompted him. “It was a self-challenge. And that was smart.”

‘Reagan!’ ‘Olé!’

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

On the floor of the convention, I was introduced to a guy who’ll be speaking later this week. He isn’t in politics, he has never spoken to a convention, and what he is afraid of is this: He’ll be up there trying to speak, and the crowd will be bopping a big beach ball back and forth. I told him that’s OK if it happens, it sort of takes pressure off him in a way, some people will see his predicament and root for him, and he can sort of calm the crowd down by just being . . . calm, and telling them things it will be helpful for them to hear. I forgot to say: They won’t be bopping a big beach ball across the floor, they’ve done that in the past but between speakers, or before the show begins.

Afterward, a memory. The 1976 GOP convention, the Republican Party torn in two over Ford and Reagan. Before the speaking began, the California delegation was feeling frisky. Hundreds of delegates started to chant: “RAY-GUNNN!” And the New Mexico delegation would pause a beat and then answer: “Olé!” They kept it up—“Reagan!” “Olé!” Across the floor the New York delegation steamed. They were for Ford. So the next time the Californians bellowed “Reagan,” the New Yorkers, hundreds of them, bellowed back, “Oy vey!” And that went on for a while, too.

That story was told to me by Dick Rosenbaum, head then of the New York GOP. Thinking of it made me remember: the Republican Party has weathered a lot of storms. It has been broken in two and forced, over years, to reheal.

The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Ground Zero, the floor of the convention, Monday afternoon, 3 p.m.  A thousand people mill about and interview each other. Local TV crews interviewing delegates, network stars doing standups in bright lights.   Camera flashes.  Politicians standing at the podium to see where the prompters have been placed.  Scanning the room from left to right:  Diane Sawyer and Jon Karl, Romney best friend Bob White, woman in red glittery cowboy hat, more cowboy hats, golf cap, Romney adviser Peter Flaherty, Michael Barone, SKY TV crew, Virginia House of Delegates member Barbara Comstock, Jim Pinkerton.  Man in Uncle Sam hat, woman in red-white-and-blue fool’s cap with horns.  Delegates:  If you want to be interviewed, wear a funny hat.   A sea of khaki—the men from the campaign in khaki slacks and blue blazers and scuffed black shoes.  You pass from cluster to cluster and hear the interview phrases: “The tough decisions that we need to make,” and “The key is to grow the economy.”

On the floor and in the lobbies, in the shuttle buses, on the sidewalk, this is what you hear:  “So what’s going on?” “So whatta ya hear?”

The secret of the convention on its putative first day:  Nobody knows anything.  Everyone is convinced the convention is happening someplace else, at some secret meeting of important people, at some great lunch.  The truth:  the convention is 5,000 people in 5,000 rooms watching TV, surfing the Net and texting each other.  That’s what it is, 5,000 people in 5,000 pods.  You know why they were all on the floor at 3 p.m. Monday?  To get out of the room.

The mood of the Republicans?  Waiting.  What’s going to be the impact of the storm?   And, with an edge of bitterness:  why exactly did the GOP schedule this thing for hurricane season in Florida?  Because they think they’re lucky with hurricanes?  And why is there no time for convention afterglow?  It used to be one party met in July and the other in August, and there was time enough between the two conventions that people could sort of think about what they’d heard and seen, mull it.  The way it is now, the Republicans disband on Friday and the Democrats arrive in Charlotte Sunday.  It’s all too close and squished together.  Will that make it one big blur?

Dancing Logos

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

This isn’t a good sign. I have seen the set.  It is handsome and spacious.  But programmers are going to manipulate images on 13 LED screens “looming over the floor”?  LED “ribbons” will carry tweets and Facebook posts?  Running clouds?

1.  It sounds Orwellian.

2.  Too much slickness gives an air of . . . slickness.

3.  The production values used by networks should not necessarily be the production values adopted by conventions.  National political conventions happen in America only once every four years.  They’re supposed to have stature, and a certain calm.

4.  Network producers assume America is ADD-addled and needs lots of beeps and bops and scrolls and dancing logos.  They’re giving us ADD.  The Republicans better not be too clever.  Americans aren’t in search of clever.

1980 to 2012

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

So, Tampa.

Last weekend I walked onto the floor of the convention for the first time, and it was beautiful—all the lights and the dazzle and the sound checks, all the bustle.  We forget how exciting it is, some of us, because we’ve been here before, we’ve seen the huge cavernous stadium dressed up in red, white and blue, and the standards of the states: Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Tennessee.  But: it is beautiful.

I attended my first national convention in 1980, for CBS News, as a producer on the radio side.  I had all the credentials and wore them proudly on a thick chain around my neck.  I was so eager to get in and see it all that I went in on Sunday morning before everything began.  In the middle of the floor, standing alone, was a tall and august figure—Eric Sevareid, the great commentator.  He turned, we nodded, I introduced myself and told him it was my first convention for CBS.  He said his first had been in 1948, and the first time he walked on the floor he saw a guy standing by himself, and it was H.L. Mencken.  Sevareid said he introduced himself.  I asked if Mencken said anything.  No, said Sevareid, “He just shook my hand.”

Then Sevareid smiled and shook my hand, and we laughed.

I told that story to the young “Face the Nation” producer who guided me to the floor.  He was Walt Cronkite, grandson of Walter.  We smiled and shook hands.

America Meets Mr. Romney

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

It is good that Joe Biden is going to the Republican National Convention to hold high the flag of his party. People make fun of his gaffes, of his embarrassing verbal forays, but he’s no fool and he knows how to take it to the other guy. The speech he is working on, to be given in the heart of downtown, just across from the convention site, will be stirring and stentorian: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Tampa, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Tampon.'”

*   *   *

I wish that were mine. It came in the mail from a Hollywood screenwriter, one of the gifted conservatives who quietly toil there.

This, amazingly enough, is how the campaign feels at the moment: both neck and neck and wide open. A week ago a longtime elected official, who’s been making the rounds in his swing state, told me he thought the national polls were correct and yet wrong. Americans aretelling pollsters they’ve already made up their minds, they know who they’re for. But, he said, he’s seeing a number of people who don’t feel fully satisfied with their decision, who aren’t certain they’ve made the right choice. They may change their minds. “Ten or 15%”, he guessed, “are still persuadable,” still open to argument.

If he is right, that’s big. It would be in line with the singular nature of this election year, and would explain what has been, so far, a fervor deficit.

*   *   *

So, Tampa. No one can guess the highlights in advance, but some hopes:

That Gov. Chris Christie brings his Garden State brio, that he is bodacious, funny and pointed, and that people say, the next day, “Man, Obama—Christie really opened up a can of Jersey on him.”

That Sen. Rob Portman, whom many thought would, like Mr. Christie, have been a very solid vice presidential nominee, will get the best kind of revenge, which is constructive revenge. He is well placed to do for Mitt Romney what Ronald Reagan did for Barry Goldwater in 1964, which was make the case better than the nominee ever did.

It would be good to see Sen. Marco Rubio and talk about the meaning of things, the meaning of politics. He’s a young man in the big game. Why?

Paul Ryan will be exciting, somehow you know that in advance. But he should perhaps keep in the back of his mind something that hasn’t been mentioned much. People are saying—not as a criticism, not as a compliment, but musingly—two words: “He’s young.”

They’ve just had a bad experience with young, with President Obama. Mr. Ryan stands for big change in terms of programs, and people will be inclined to want some years in such a person. So he and his people should consider that 42 can be a plus or a minus, and think about how to enhance the former and lessen the latter.

*   *   *

How will voters judge Mr. Romney’s speech? The answer comes in some questions:

Is it fresh? Is it true? Does it substantiate—add substance to—what we think we know of Mitt Romney? Does it deepen and broaden our understanding of him? Does it make us, as we listen, begin to see him as a possible president? Presidents are in our face 24 hours a day now. Is this someone we’d let in our living rooms for four years? Can he inspire?

Free advice is worth the price, and here goes:

If you want to lead America, you have to speak to the fix we’re in, and that means addressing spending. But economic probity has a friend called economic growth, and that is what people care so much about—jobs, opportunity, the competitive advantage conferred by good policies. Are we a vital nation able to grow, to take on our true size again?

Emphasis is everything. Emphasize dynamism.

Mr. Romney shouldn’t just repeat what he thinks but tell people why he thinks it, what life has taught him that formed his views.

He shouldn’t shy away from religion. Why should he? This is America. It was in the practice of his faith that Mr. Romney came, as a bishop of the Mormon church, to become involved in helping those with lives very different from his own. In an interview Thursday night on the Catholic network EWTN, he told anchor Raymond Arroyo that as a “small-p pastor” he learned a great deal about those who feel under siege, lonely, left out. What did he learn? How did his church help him learn it?

He must use humor, for three reasons. One is that wit breaks through and sharpens all points. Another is that it is natural to him. Before the voting in Iowa, he wryly told a friend that the caucuses were like the LaBrea Tar Pits: “No one comes out the way they went in.” On a conference call recently, he asked a question of his staff. No one answered. Mr. Romney waited. “Bueller? Bueller?” he said, in a perfect imitation of Ben Stein.

Third, President Obama can’t stand to be made fun of. His pride won’t allow it, hisamour propre cannot countenance a joke at his own expense. If Mr. Romney lands a few very funny lines about the president’s leadership, Mr. Obama will freak out. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?

A small point with practical significance. Convention crowds are revved up. They want to stomp and cheer. During Mr. Romney’s speech, they’ll go crazy applauding and yelling. This is fun in the hall but tedious for the viewer at home. At some point Mr. Romney should signal, by his demeanor and through his text, that everyone should calm down so he can talk to America. Applause line, cheers, applause line—that’s not political discourse, it’s a ticket to nowhere.

*   *   *

Finally, the big broadcast networks plan to give the Republicans (and the Democrats) only one hour a night of TV coverage.

They used to give all night, long as it took, and treat the proceedings with respect. What they give now, to the people of a great democracy fighting for its economic life in an uncertain world, is . . . an hour a night? For a national political convention?

This is a scandal. Mock them for it. This isn’t Edward R. Murrow in charge of the news, it’s Gordon Gekko in charge of programming.

*   *   *

Much is uncertain, no one knows what will happen this year, how it will turn out. But when I think of Mr. Romney’s speech I find myself thinking of Alan Shepard.

It’s May 5, 1961, in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and everyone’s fussing. This monitor’s blinking and that one’s beeping and Shepard is up there, at the top of a Redstone rocket, in a tiny little capsule called Friendship 7. Mission Control is hemming and hawing: Should we stay or should we go? Finally Shepard says: “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”

That’s what a good speech and a good convention right now can do. There’s a great race ahead. Make it come alive. Come on and light this candle.