Entries for August 2008

Like Joseph P. Kennedy, who did not stay in Los Angeles to see his son deliver his acceptance speech in the Los Angeles Coliseum—the last time a Democratic nominee did so in a stadium (for a good account of that, see this excellent story in USA Today)—I decided to watch the speech on television rather than in the stadium.

John McCain has chosen Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate. This obviously undercuts his theme of experience, just as Barack Obama's choice of Joe Biden undercut, at least marginally, his theme of change. Palin is just in her second year as governor; she was formerly mayor of Wasilla, a fast-growing town in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley.

DENVER— After a musical interlude, the crowd fell silent just before 5pm MDT when Congressman John Lewis started speaking. Lewis began by saying that he was present 45 years ago to the day when Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial at the end of the 1963 March on Washington. His presence connects us all to that history, and even those of us in the press corps have been listening pretty intently. The thought occurred to me that very few others of the 20,000 or so people here—Invesco Field is just starting to fill up—were at that place. Very few elected officials or politicians participated in the March on Washington. President Kennedy was conspicuously away from Washington that weekend. Only a handful of members of Congress attended. George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, did not attend; Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers did. Forty-five years have passed, and probably half of the people who participated in the March are no longer alive. Today it is unthinkable not to celebrate a March that almost no one prominent in public life wished to be associated with back then.

The 42nd president of the United States spoke to the 46th Democratic National Convention for 20 minutes last night, 10 minutes more than his allotted time. But did anyone expect Bill Clinton to conclude on time? And did anyone in the crowd, even those few in the press corps firmly opposed to the Democrats, want it to end more than a minute or two earlier (as they wanted his 1988 nominating speech for Michael Dukakis to end 20 minutes earlier)? Bill Clinton was obviously having glorious fun in the spotlight for his sixth Democratic National Convention. And, more than Hillary Clinton in her speech the night before, he did the job that the Obamaites wanted the Clintons to do. Even so, when you examine his exuberant speech and try to scoop up the substance, you end up (mostly) with quicksilver.

At 8:18 p.m. MDT, by my watch, the Democratic National Convention nominated Joseph R. Biden Jr. as its vice presidential candidate. Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Biden had accepted the nomination, had been asked to give an acceptance speech, and had agreed to do so: an observation of the formal rules of the convention, which are based on the rules of the House of Representatives, which I am told are the most complex parliamentary rules in the world.

One of the pleasures of covering a national convention is that you run into all sorts of interesting people, some of them not politicians, and you can ask them anything you want. I remember at the 1988 Democratic National Convention running into a man who was on the Forbes 400. I asked him what he was doing there; he wasn't even a Democrat. "Oh," he said, "I just take a suite at the Ritz Carlton and meet with people from around the country. It's amazing how many important people are here."

DENVER–Joseph Cari, one of Tony Rezko's accomplices, self-admitted in 2005, was Biden's Midwest field director and has been a friend for 30 years. I'm not surprised that Biden has Chicago connections; I remember being at an Adell, Dallas County, Iowa, Biden event in the spring of 1987, and accompanying him was Bill Daley.