The Conventions, On Cue

Washington editor Matthew Cooper will be on site at the Democratic and Republican conventions blogging for Portfolio.com. Watch an interview with Cooper where the lays out what to look for at the confabs.

We've never had a convention season like this, not in modern times anyway.

First, the party confabs have been stacked back-to-back, and they've never come this late. That means that the effect of the conventions—giving the nominees a bounce or helping to doom them—is likely to be greater than ever. Of course, the national conventions are scripted events by-and-large, so the chances of anything really bad happening is de minimus.

The parties long ago abandoned doing any real work at these quadrennial meetings. Democrats reacted with horror—sheer horror!—at the prospect that Hillary Clinton might actually want to pursue her bid for the nomination all the way to Denver. Since conventions used to actually decide nominees, this was once seen as normal ambition. But now conventions are infomercials designed to allay voter fears about their nominees, and so she was pushed into bowing out.

So we're left with four-day advertisements: George W. Bush used the 2000 convention in Philadelphia to show off his "compassionate conservatism," putting an endless parade of African-Americans on stage to show that he was a different kind of Republican. John Kerry used his coronation in Boston to tell Americans that he was "reporting for duty."

This year, each party will try to ease the concerns that voters have with it. Barack Obama will show that he's a real American, and John McCain will be at pains to demonstrate that he's not running for the third term of an extremely unpopular president.

About the only tension going into the conventions is the selection of vice presidential candidates. As I write this on Wednesday morning, we don't know whom the vice presidential candidates will be. If John McCain picks someone who favors keeping abortion legal, we'll have a little bit of convention drama as the parade of thousands of bored reporters look for pro-life delegates to complain. I tend to think that whatever drama happens in the hall over the abortion issue, it's not likely to make a huge difference come November. If McCain chooses Tom Ridge, for instance, to be his running mate, he could easily make the case that his administration would still pursue anti-abortion policies and appoint judges who would weaken abortion rights. Ridge himself could promise to uphold his boss' policies in the unlikely event that President McCain died while in office. Besides, Ridge favors a slew of abortion restrictions on late-term abortions and waiting periods that would ease at least some pro-life concerns.

For Obama, the challenge is to use the convention to ridicule McCain and reinforce his own credentials to be commander in chief. The signal moment of the convention is likely to be the rally at Denver's Invesco Field, where Obama will accept the nomination before a stadium crowd expected to top 80,000. Will the whole night rally look a little too "rock star?" Maybe.

Interestingly, one little noted advantage of the Invesco forum, an Obama ally told me, was that it would dilute the number of Hillary delegates in the audience. Had the acceptance speech taken place in a hall where nearly half the delegates were pledged to Hillary, this Obama ally feared, the TV cameras might have panned to Hillary supporters looking bored or frustrated. My guess is it wouldn't have happened, but the fact that it was even on the minds of Obama allies shows the very real worries about Clinton somehow ruining their moment in the sun.

In fact, August 28, when Obama accepts the nomination, will also be the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech on the Washington mall. By the way, if King were as scripted as today's presidential candidates, would he really have had Muslims standing behind him when he gave his famed address?

In the end, both candidates are likely to get a bounce in the polls out of the convention, and perhaps McCain will benefit more by going after Obama. What won't happen are any fits of misplanning, like the 1972 nomination where George McGovern didn't deliver his acceptance speech until 3 a.m., long after most folks had gone to bed. There won't be the churlishness of Ronald Reagan in 1976 or Ted Kennedy in 1980, giving their respective nominees only the most grudging endorsements after a hard-fought primary.

Everything will move on time and according to plan, but what that means for the election will remain unknown for some time and will, in all likelihood, be swamped by the debates in September and October. Unlike conventions, debates aren't scripted. At least, they're not supposed to be.

Photo: Senators John McCain and Barack Obama talk on the Senate floor. Credit/AP.

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