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Now that virtually everything will be online, the 2020 Democratic National Convention will have very little connection to Milwaukee.
This should have been an exciting week for Wisconsin and for Milwaukee in particular.
The Democratic National Convention was set to convene at Milwaukee’s shiny new Fiserv Forum on Aug. 17 and the run-up to it this week would have been at fever pitch by now.
But the world came down with a virus and now it has all collapsed. There will be some sort of faux convention, but it gets thinner every day. For all intents and purposes, the event will be virtual with no meaningful connection to Milwaukee.
That’s a bitter and undeserved kick in the teeth for my old hometown. The convention could have showcased the cool stuff about the city and raised its national profile. There would have been a big immediate economic boost. And while it’s impossible to calculate, there would have likely been some long-term economic lift as well if thousands of influential people came away with a fresh and positive view of the city. Now, nothing.
But this does raise a fundamental question: Why do the parties bother with conventions in the first place? I’ve been to two national conventions and several state conventions. The state events were uniformly awful experiences from top to bottom, but the national conventions were a heck of a lot of fun.
For one thing I like being in the company of politicians, especially mayors. The term “practical politician” is redundant. Almost all successful politicians are practical. They got elected because they trimmed their sails, if they had any strong ideological wind in them to begin with. They tacked back and forth, did what was necessary to appeal to the most voters. The process tends to filter out the insufferably moralistic. This does not apply to the Madison city council where everyone thinks they’re Gandhi, but happily they are the exceptions to the rule. Most pols are fun to be around.
Still, is it really worth going through all the bother and staggering expense of putting on a big party for a relative handful of movers and shakers? (And by the way, almost all of that staggering expense is paid for by big corporations.) That’s a question both parties are going to have to ask themselves before 2024.
After all, no real work gets done at a convention. The presidential and vice presidential nominees are already set and the party platform (to the extent anybody cares and almost nobody does) has been adopted. I was a delegate twice and I was never asked to vote on anything.
The candidates do tend to get a lift in the polls right after a convention, but that fades long before Election Day. The way a party presents itself on prime time television matters less and less as convention coverage on the major networks shrinks. You can watch a lot more coverage on Fox, CNN or MSNBC, but if you’re doing that you’re already a junky and you’re already a partisan. People with real lives who might be persuaded one way or another by what happens at a convention aren’t paying all that much attention. They’re right to spend their time more productively watching American Idol while the parties try vainly to produce real American idols.
And, especially this year, there’s risk in a convention. It’s not crazy to think that Portland could have decamped to Milwaukee. The statue of poor Solomon Juneau would probably have been decapitated and dragged into Lake Michigan to make the point once again that all dead white men are bad — and the living ones aren’t any better. In fact, some protesters are still planning on showing up in Milwaukee even if Biden won’t, but the protests are likely to end up as scaled down as the convention itself. A full-on in person convention could easily have generated images reminiscent of Chicago in 1968. If you recall, nothing good happened that year. If you’re too young to recall, trust me, nothing good happened that year.
Milwaukeeans are hurt and some are furious that the Democrats have essentially canceled their physical convention in every way but officially. But it was a smart thing to do to send the right message about how seriously they are taking the pandemic and also to avoid the risk of a blow up in the streets.
The question is, does it make sense to ever have another convention again? Maybe it’s time for some unconventional thinking.
