On a beautiful evening earlier this month, I attended the Republican Party of Dane County’s annual “Night at the Duck Pond,” at the Warner Park baseball stadium. As the Madison Mallards struggled toward eventual victory, I commiserated with old friends and made a few new ones.
I was very keen to get a read on how the local GOP grassroots is processing the unusual summer our party is having. We were just about a week away from what promised to be — best-case scenario — the weirdest major party convention since 1968.
Whatever you might say about the Republican elite — the politicians and rich folks you see in the media — the activists and leadership of the RPDC are almost uniformly thoughtful, conscientious and civic-minded. They are party stalwarts, to be sure, but they are not slavish followers of GOP dogma.
The previous summer’s Duck Pond event was on the same night as the first GOP presidential debate. (The party had reserved space at the ballpark before the debate was set.) Some attendees were paying closer attention to debate updates on their phones than they were to the ballgame. Hackles were raised when it came through that Donald Trump, alone among the debate participants, would not commit to supporting the eventual GOP nominee. His preemptive refusal to fall in line struck these faithful Republicans as insolent, or even disqualifying.
What a year it has been. Trump’s enormities on the campaign trail have made that early transgression seem quaint. Ironically, his antics have made rejection of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee a perfectly acceptable position among the party grassroots. Though the majority of party members I spoke with at this summer’s Duck Pond outing plan to vote for Trump, few seemed to be looking forward to it. And none were in the least bit put off by me or the others there who flatly refuse to support our party’s presidential candidate.
I have long hoped to see a shake-up within the GOP. But unlike some of my libertarian brethren, I do not wish to see the party shattered.
As a credentialed member of the press for the 2016 Republican National Convention, that might well be what I’m about to witness. Donald Trump has dropped like a bomb on the Republican establishment, and the Quicken Loans Arena is ground zero.
Major party conventions usually bore me silly. The last interesting one was the DNC of 1980, when Ted Kennedy famously avoided Jimmy Carter on stage after having lost a bruising primary.
Few remember that the Kennedy forces also lost a protracted floor fight at that convention, a fight to unbind delegates who were pledged to Carter through the primary process. This year’s effort to insert a “conscience clause” into the RNC Rules, and thereby unbind Trump-pledged delegates, was overwhelmingly rejected by the Rules Committee July 15. And it seems that the effort to get the question to the full floor, through a Rules Committee "minority report," has been abandoned. But given the fervor of the anti-Trump delegates, they are likely cooking up a plan of some sort to publicly embarrass the party’s presidential nominee during the convention proceedings.
Either way, I am not worried about being bored by this convention. Try though they may, Donald Trump and his minions cannot sustain four days in the intense convention spotlight without something bizarre and outrageous happening.
