Friday Potpourri: 9 August 2024

Again, I amuse myself

The DNC is coming up quickly. For a lot of people, all they really know about the convention is what they see for a few primetime hours each night. But conventions are much, MUCH, more than that.

I had a press pass to both the 2012 Convention in Charlotte, and the 2016 Convention in Philadelphia, and can tell you, a convention is a terrific experience.

Everyone is familiar with the delegates. They are the people, along with the speakers, on whom attention is focused. Often, there are not enough hotel rooms in the convention city to house the delegates. That will NOT be the case in Chicago, where all delegates will be housed at eight hotels within a 5-mile radius of the venues. In a lot of other cities, delegations were housed in multiple states (I kid you not), with lots of traffic jams, and making it difficult for delegates to interact with delegates from other states. In Charlotte, some delegations were so far from the Convention Center, that their day started with a daily breakfast at the hotel, getting on the bus, spending several hours traveling (traffic) to Charlotte, then being on the floor, then taking the bus back to the hotel. Not only will all the delegations be close, but all hotels are union, and NONE are Trump-affiliated. Best of all, they’ll have a cool route:

While many of the hotels are within walking distance from each other, delegates will be bused back and forth to McCormick Place for official meetings. The trek will take them along a two-and-a-half-mile restricted access route used only by Chicago’s mayor, the Cook County Board president and special buses with security clearance. Officials taking part in the 2012 NATO G-8 Summit in Chicago also used the route.

Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel liked to call it the “bat cave” because a large portion of the route is underground. Source.

There are actually two venues: United Center and McCormick Place. The former will be what you see on TV for speeches and official proceedings. The latter will be used during the day for meetings. At most conventions, there are two venues. In Charlotte, the two venues were connected by a short train between the two locales, although you could also walk between them on a regular street, they were pretty close. In Philadelphia, it was a long schlep from the two venues. There were scheduled buses, or you could Uber. At the time, Uber was working its way into Philadelphia, so there were special deals on Uber rides for convention attendees. And yet, in my personal experience, the Uber drivers could NOT find the Wells Fargo Center, where the convention convened every day. But I digress.

To amuse myself, I’m going to recall for you my some of my personal favourite memories from the Charlotte convention.

In 2012, for the second time, selected bloggers were given press passes. Back when blogging was an honorable thing. This was great because the pass granted access to the general press rooms, which were always hubs of activity. I had the opportunity to meet a ton of bloggers IRL that I only knew through the ozone of the internet.

In addition, there were daily morning meetings for all credentialed bloggers with background information, and interesting speakers. The pass allowed entry to all the off-the-beaten-track events, speeches and many DNC meetings.

Plus, it was possible to attend various breakfasts and lunches put on by PACs and companies. One morning, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden spoke in a small venue, and they were electric. I met Michèle Flournoy and had a fascinating chat with her at one of the breakfasts.

One day, while walking between venues, I ran into Robert Gibbs. I was SO IN AWE that I was struck speechless. I stuttered. I had trouble with sentences. Finally, I just bowed.

There was a bar/restaurant where, if you were a delegate, an elected official, or had a press pass, you could sit, get fed (for free) and charge your devices. And it was air conditioned! One morning, I was reading the newspaper, drinking some coffee, and two men brought food from the buffet and sat at the next table. It was John Lewis and Elijah Cummings. This time, I bowed first. And then I blathered about how much I respected them, valued what they had done for civil rights, and that I stood in awe of them. They were actually embarrassed by my over-the-top praise. They said that they both felt called to have done what they did, and I should sit down since I seemed to be shaking. I got to shake their hands, snapped a photo of them, and went back to my table since I didn’t want to interrupt their conversation more than I already had.

There was an outdoor venue where people made speeches. One day, the program was run by Planned Parenthood. A friend and I walked over, past the obnoxious morons holding jars of animal fetuses. (NO ONE had a human; it was mostly pigs and fish.) It started drizzling, and we were all given pink Planned Parenthood ponchos if we wanted to stay. And WOW was it worth it! It was the first time I’d seen Cory-Booker-Super-Hero speak. I was already in awe of him for running into a burning building a few months earlier to save a woman. He told an anecdote that has made me love him ever since. He was new to Newark, working in NYC, and trying to get a sense of Newark where he wanted to undertake community organizing and later a political career.

The neighborhood he lived in was, um, not rich. He looked around and saw needles and other trash, kids who should have been in school on street corners, and sad, sad, people.

He engaged a few of the women in conversation and told them what he’d been thinking would help. And they told him that BEFORE he came up with a plan, or even an idea, he should spend time listening to what the residents saw as their problems, and potential solutions, as well as their successes. He took that advice to heart and instead of “dictating solutions”, he developed ideas and plans in concert with the residents. SO VERY IMPRESSIVE.

A month before the DNC, Clint Eastwood rambled on, improvising, to an empty chair at the RNC. Yeah, Rethuglicans were weird even then. The way the DNC works is that the convention location for the speeches opens early in the day, and different people are in and out all day, before the main programming begins in the evening. One afternoon, I was sitting in the press section, working on a post, and James Taylor (my personal favourite musician of all time) came out to entertain the (small) crowd. As his back-up musicians were getting set up, he brought out a folding chair, like the one Clint had used. He said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk to it, I’m going to sit in it.” Which he did, and then, as his musicians were still setting up, he strummed his guitar a few bars, stopped and said, “I’m an old white guy and I LOVE Barack Obama.” The crowd roared. And then he played “Carolina in my Mind.”

I’ve been warned to limit the length of my posts because no one reads anymore, so I’ll stop here, and likely have more convention memories next Friday.