Kerry's Faux-ny Convention Idea
Dotty Lynch is the Senior Political Editor for CBS News. E-mail your questions and comments to Political Points
I've often thought that if I ran a cable station I would have a Friday night show called "The Big News of the Week." Because for years now, Friday afternoons and evenings are when White Houses and political campaigns put out information they want to float quietly or bury entirely. Last Friday, the Kerry campaign confirmed that John Kerry might want to put the Democratic convention on hold, put off the nominating vote for five weeks and accept his party's nod on Sept. 1 so he could keep spending his primary campaign money.
If this was an attempt to float something quietly, it failed. All the networks and major papers decided something that would break with years of tradition was worth noting. For 172 years, a convention has picked the nominee and for the last 72 the nominee – or in 1940, the nominee's wife – has accepted at the event. Democratic lawyers think it is the "vote" that makes the nominee official and that is what would have to be deferred for Kerry to keep on spending.
The Kerry folks seemed surprised at the fuss and tried to point out that this was all because of Karl Rove, and all they were doing was trying to level the playing field. Kerry himself called it merely an attempt to get around "legal silliness."
A September acceptance speech was an idea very much in play in 2002 when those foxy Republicans announced that they would meet after, not before, the 2004 Summer Olympics, just eight weeks before the general election. At the time, Hotline's Chuck Todd wrote that "the single most important news item regarding the 2004 presidential race to appear in the Hotline in the past six months came Friday, courtesy of our friends at the CBS News political unit," who were "the first to report that the RNC is asking its convention-bid cities to prepare to host for one of the following three weeks: Monday, August 23; Monday, August 30; Monday, September 6."
The Democrats worried about "bounce" and money and went to ground strategizing about what to do. DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe and his aides, including then-communications director Maria Cardonna, thought long and hard about switching the Democratic convention to late August or September. At that time, Democrats believed Bush would have all the money he needed while the Democratic candidate might be broke by July, so they went back to the original timing and kept the convention in July.
The situation changed, however, when John Kerry decided not to accept public money in the primaries and found that he could raise almost as much money as George W. Bush. Suddenly, those five weeks between conventions meant not only a loss of "bounce" but a financial shortfall as well.
One solution – to have a partial convention that would include a big speech by Kerry but no vote for the nominee or formal acceptance speech – threatens to diminish the already diminished stature of the political convention. The mayor of Boston, who has suffered a number of blows from locals because of the cost and traffic nightmares of putting on the convention, heard yelps from restaurants and hotels that felt viscerally what the Kerry campaign doesn't seem to comprehend: that the faux convention is a fraud.
But give the Kerry campaign credit for thinking "outside the box." There's nothing like money to inspire creative ideas. One of the driving forces here is the media people who seem to think that more ads (and more ad dollars) are more crucial to Kerry's success than free media coverage of an official event. The DNC could run ads during those five weeks paid for by their independent expenditure group but that money would not be controlled directly by Team Kerry and the revenues would be given to other media firms.
The immediate fallout appears to be mixed. Many true-blue Democrats are falling in line on the need to spend as much money as they can raise to "level the playing field." And the Democratic delegates know their role is mainly window-dressing anyhow. The Republicans were quick off the mark saying that this proved their point that Kerry is a flipper and a phony. The old lions of the press proclaimed the idea "nuts" (Bob Schieffer), "stupid" (William Safire) and "institution destroying" (David Broder). Network executives are waiting and seeing. And the chatterers think this may all be a cover for the Kerry campaign, which is just trying to make the point that they need to raise and spend big bucks during those five weeks, and that they will back down and choose a less controversial approach.
Risking the loss of free media coverage of who John Kerry and his VP are and what they stand for may have consequences. Harvard's Shorenstein Center Professor Tom Patterson, who has been studying the impact of conventions, says that even a small amount of network coverage is important for the less engaged voter. When the broadcast networks cover something, a wider audience (hint, hint: swing voters) gets information. Kerry risks losing that opportunity if he turns the convention into just another big rally.