When Ted Koppel and his ABC “Nightline” crew pulled out of San Diego half way through the Republican National Convention, saying they were bored and had better things to do, my reaction was to laugh. The notion that the Republicans were defaulting on their obligation to provide material for television struck me as ludicrous.
But interviewing voters in New Jersey last week and talking with political journalists at a Sept. 7 conference in Reston, Va., has taught me how wrong I was. Smart people really seem to think that if the television ratings are low and the big names in TV-land are no longer entertained, the conventions are probably kaput. And should be.
What a crock!
In the days before the TV anchor booths dominated the convention halls, these were lively affairs. That is almost always the case when politicians play politics for high stakes. But when the cameras came in, starting in 1952, and the networks, eager to showcase their anchors and political reporters, began giving the conventions more hours of coverage than anything else in the political cycle, the politicians learned they were at risk.
At bottom, politics is about resolving conflicts. That requires rolling over the opposition or compromising with it. Either way, voters didn’t like it. The more the party showed its conflicts, the fewer votes it got.
The politicians, being smart, began moving the conflicts out of camera range. Presidential nominations, instead of being fought on the convention floor, were settled months earlier in the primaries. Where presidential nominees once bargained with factions over the choice of a running mate at the convention, now they make that decision before the delegates arrive. The platforms, too, are signed, sealed and delivered before the opening gavel bangs.
Instead of doing their own business, the politicians decided to produce TV shows–contrived narratives heavy with emotion. That trend reached its peak this year, with everything except the two acceptance speeches aimed more at evoking tears than cheers. The irony is that television, which drove politics out of the conventions and encouraged the politicians to convert them into TV entertainment, now complains about the result.
So what is to be done? Will the declining TV audiences force the abandonment of the conventions or their curtailment into 48-hour weekend affairs? Only if the parties allow themselves to be cowed.
Let me suggest an alternative. Give up producing TV spectacles and go back to doing politics. Tell the TV networks they are welcome to cover as much of it as they wish–or as little.
What politics could conventions do? Unless primaries are somehow curtailed–which is unlikely–the presidential nomination will be settled before the delegates gather. But party rules could easily be changed to bring everything else from the choice of the running mate to the platform debates and the presentation of the party ticket and program into the time frame of convention week.
The key is to assure that the people who can speak with authority for the party–its elected officials and the people who run its affairs on a year-round basis–dominate the ranks of convention delegates. Today, those seats are filled with people more loyal to interest groups–labor unions, teachers, the Christian Coalition, anti-abortion movements–than to the parties.
The real purpose of a convention is to set the terms on which a party is prepared to campaign and to govern. If the rules were changed to allow the delegates to choose a vice presidential candidate from a list of three names submitted by the presidential nominee, he would be forced to bargain with the leaders of his party’s factions over the line of succession.
If the final two days of platform committee action took place on the opening two days of the convention when all the delegates and reporters were in town, it would increase the stakes in that policy bargaining and end the San Diego farce of having the candidates and party leaders claim they didn’t know or care what the platform said.
If immediately afterward, the party’s elected officials–governors and legislators and members of Congress–were required to caucus and debate the platform they would presumably have to carry out, it would be a useful check on the platform-writing activists’ tendency to go overboard.
And if the format of caucus meetings were altered so that opposites in the party actually had a chance to interact–New York and Texas delegates spending a morning together, for example, or labor and the Democratic Leadership Council, or the Christian Coalition and its critics, the conventions could become the place where the work of party-building actually takes place.
Let the politicians bring them back to that vital function. And if TV finds it boring, so be it. I can assure you others will not.
