The People's Republic of Conventionland
How country club journalists collaborated with country club Republicans to bore America to death
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Standing as I was at the bar of the San Diego Marriott Hotel, I had little chance of missing the incident. A group of hacks was whiling away the down-time of a distinctly slow Wednesday convention afternoon. A sort of rumor was in play, to the effect that the Republican Party handlers had prepared a "surprise" to enliven the otherwise predictable day. What could it be? There was this guess and then that guess, and then Sidney Blumenthal of The New Yorker gave his opinion that the only real excitement would come from a Bob Dole sudden death, announced just in time to forestall his acceptance speech. There was a brief pause, and then from nowhere there came nine grim security men, wires protruding from their ears. They had received a report of a verbal threat against the nominee. Names, please. Off to the right stood a woman (a Buchanan alternate from Alaska, if you can call that a life) with mad-teacher spectacles, who had patriotically made the report. I had seen her slumped in a neighboring chair a short while before, ears flapping at the press gossip.
Well, ABC's Jeff Greenfield and political essayist Garry Wills and others soon rallied around and calmed the security guys, whose whole bearing gave the lie to the adage that the price of liberty is constant vigilance. The episode was a joke by the time that evening rolled around. And yet it illustrated several things about the press and the Republican Convention -- a relationship that is still composing its post-mortem of shame.
First, there was nothing for the press to do but make absurd speculations. Second, the control over the least sign of spontaneity was absolute, and always ready to pounce. Third, the Republican rank-and-file really hate and distrust the press. Fourth, they have no real reason to do so. Fifth, this may have been the last time either side has to take the other one seriously.
Let me amplify these one by one. Well before Ted Koppel made his exit from San Diego, announcing a news dearth, it was clear that he was right. And I mean well before. Was this not the fault of the media moguls? Had they booked those skyboxes and uplinks and multiple floor-passes only the week before, or the year before? Had they made the decision to move entire bureaux from New York and Washington to San Diego, or had the decision been made for them? Had they had no hand in setting the convention agenda? Had they not repeatedly said that the only test of a successful GOP gathering would be "unity" or at least the appearance of same? Had they not, in repeatedly revisiting the Buchanan oration of 1992, claimed credit for exposing "extremism" and for the collateral defeat of George Bush?
The great ambition of all spin-control managers is to get a good press for getting a good press. That's a "10" in handler-land: the nirvana attained by Ron Reagan at the top of his game (remember "Great Communicator?"). Every single media outlet put the Republicans on notice, well in advance, that any sign of a "floor fight" on cultural or moral issues would earn them headlines full of the one word "division." As if politics were not division by definition. Can the GOP be blamed, then, for ensuring that the facade of unity remained at least apparently uncracked? Why, yes, it can be blamed -- by the very same media outlets complaining that there was no controversy to "cover"! Let's be clear -- big media demanded a null and bland convention, and then it got one. The words "floor fight" have passed into history, along with the words "brokered convention," as relics of a spontaneity that the networks deplore, and for which the network anchors are hypocritically nostalgic.
The result was a sort of stand-off, with generally positive if slightly grudging coverage and -- the other great prize in the media's gift -- generally positive polls. But this is a double insult to democracy. Two of the volunteer regiments upon which democracy depends -- the sort of people who become party convention delegates, and the sort of people who become independent journalists -- were treated like excrement all week. Both were used as props in a stage army. Both were contemptuously shoved around by "security" and impresario types, working in tandem. Both were taken for granted, and then dismissed when the camera angle changed. And both -- this is the worst part -- put up with it, almost without protest. The accidental collision between a weary joke from my friend Sidney Blumenthal and the wretched woman in the Edna Everidge glasses was almost the only unscripted moment in the entire gathering. Not even the old presidium of the Soviet Communist Party could insure against absolutely everything. "The Peoples Republic of Conventionland," as it was termed by Marc Herman of Might magazine, is still the most apt description I have heard of the events in San Diego. But the press was not the victim in this triumph of banana-republic politics. It was one of the authors of the idea.
I first noticed this process in New York in 1992, when the Clinton-Gore ticket pulled off a completely airtight convention and got the media to act as a megaphone for it. No doubt the Republican choreographers were watching closely. I certainly observed several of the same tricks being pulled -- especially the news-starvation and the exploitation of prime-time, so that there is only one thing to write or report, and that the official version. We should have protested then, except that the birth of a "New Democrat" was itself so much the evolution of a media scheme.
There are other professional deformities in play as well. Attendance at these farcical Potemkin events is a matter of prestige in the business -- it's a matter of "be there or be square" in most news bureaus and everybody wants the all-expenses "see and be seen" experience. I swear that I saw every member of the London Daily and Sunday Telegraph staffs, for example, as well as the entire George magazine team. How right the conservatives are to think of the media trade as a welfare system for arrogant and effete elitists. Had some cagey GOP operatives only had the wit to monitor attendance at the San Diego golf-course on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, they could have made a video that would have prevented the Fourth Estate from ever using the term "country-club Republican" again.
I am never going to any of these non-events again.
Christopher Hitchens writes the Minority Report column for The Nation and the Fin de Siecle column for Vanity Fair.
Is the media to blame for the bland spectacle in San Diego? Jump into the floor fight in Table Talk.