Tag: convention

This week the GOP has presented a strong slate of Latino, African-American, and female speakers who have addressed overwhelmingly white RNC audiences. But the illusion of diversity is hard to put over with prominent Republicans like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham saying things like, ““We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Today at a breakfast for the Tennessee Republican Delegation pollster Whit Ayres laid out the demographic realities underpinning what appears to be a two pronged strategy of racially charged rhetoric combined with an attempt to cultivate more diversity — or, at least, that impression.

TAMPA BAY — After several warm-up appearances by members of his supporting cast, Thursday night, the culminating act of the 2012 Republican National Convention finds the main player himself, Mitt Romney, ready to take center stage.

Romney’s acceptance address will not be his first extended moment in the tableau. He has already broken with tradition by spending the better part of a prime time evening in a highly visible red-rimmed box of sears on the floor of the Tampa Bay Times Forum. That was on Tuesday night, during an address to delegates by Chris Christie, the rotund and resonant governor of New Jersey, whose star turn was one of the few that have come close to upstaging the principal actor.

The other contenders in that regard have been Romney’s wife Ann, whose self-presentation as a plucky, attractive, and unexpectedly warm helpmate had immediately preceded Christie’s speech, and Paul Ryan, the angular, somewhat Ichabod Crane-ish ideologue of the Right who was chosen by Romney as a vice presidential running mate and who comes far closer than the presidential nominee himself to representing the core thinking at the heart of today’s Republican Party.

On Wednesday night, Ryan did better than most with a script that emphasizes themes of sacrifice and austerity rather than vaulting ambition. The anointed heir apparent is well-known in Congress as the author of a budget plan and transformational economic prospectus that would largely scuttle not only what remains of FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society but would significantly carve into the residual governmental apparatus left by Richard Nixon, creator of such add-ons as the much-denigrated Environmental Protection Agency.

“We can do this!” was the war cry intoned several times by Ryan to cheers from the GOP audience — the “this” being a dramatic regeneration of the American private sector, theoretically to be achieved by shrinking of governmental largesse and oversight coupled with increased incentives for a class that Republicans these days call “job creators” and whose members have historically been designated by various other names ranging from “captains of industry” on the high side to “malefactors of great wealth” on the low side.

With some justice, perhaps, Democrats at their party’s convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, next week will assail this GOP new-think as the same old trickle-down philosophy that ended in the financial debacle of 2008 that helped to usher in the tenure of Barack Obama as president.

Anticipating as much, Ryan was careful to suggest that the nation’s current troubled economy owed something to the big-spending ways of Obama’s predecessor, the unnamed George W. Bush, but, for obvious reasons, most of the blame was reserved for the current president, whom Ryan dismissed with patronizing scorn more than condemnations per se.

Ryan even posed as something of a tech-age hipster, gently mocking his ticket leader’s iPod preferences as elevator music and boasting, “My playlist begins with AC-DC and ends with Zeppelin.” (A thought: Inasmuch as this was generational outreach as much as true confessions, wouldn’t ZZ Top have gone over better with this crowd?)

As if fairly well know, the Republican rank and file of 2012 probably feels more comfortable with Ryan, the acolyte of Ayn Rand, than with Romney, the man of many masks, none of them thus far very revealing. The Wisconsin congressman’s task will be to broaden his message and his appeal, just as Romney’s will be to firm up his standing with the Republican base. (Obviously, his selection of Ryan was a large step in that direction.)

The opportunity for the Republicans has been harped on in every message from every speaker — the fact of a still stagnant economy and job market and the suspicion in many Americans’’ minds that the president doesn’t have a sure sense of what to do. That note was sounded by everyone who appeared from the rostrum.

The problem for the Republicans is how to make a message of sacrifice ad belt-tightening appealing. Much of the rhetoric at the convention has had a Valley Forge tinge to it, and the issue of more incentives for what Democrats call the privileged 1 percent is an unspoken anti-theme which does not speak its name here in Tampa Bay.

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Ryan closes out his speech on Wednesday night.

The Tennessee Republican Delegation enjoys lobster rolls, sushi, and a bit of the bubbly on a steamy Wednesday afternoon at the Clearwater Aquarium.

The GOP has figured out a clever and relatively gentle way to end Red State/Blue State politics. They’ve redecorated. Everything once red at the RNC, from campaign materials to temporary convention architecture, has been painted a rich shade of Obama blue.

Conservative America is working its way through an identity crisis, or so it would seem from overheard comments like, “Why is Janine Turner wearing that awful blue dress?” As Rick Santorum, the party’s boyish moral scold transitioned into another of his lectures about the awesomeness of traditional marriage, a young-looking blonde woman in the crowd got up and started screaming about money and politics. In the old days it would have been a safe bet she was a Democratic agitator making trouble for the opposition. This time she might have been a Ron Paul fan, angered by the decision not to seat members of Maine’s delegation, which was split between candidate Mitt Romney and Paul, the tenacious nominal Texas Republican whose libertarian views have won over a small army of young, politically active supporters, just not in the numbers it takes to win an election.

If there was a theme to this first night of the Republican National Convention, in addition to the obvious “We built it,” it’s that the party of Lincoln isn’t just for white people anymore. Although the crowd at the Tampa Bay Times Forum was, like the party itself, an overwhelmingly caucasian group, the speakers and performing artists on stage Tuesday night fairly represented the American melting pot. It was a good show, even if polls still show Romney receiving 0% of the African-American vote, and less than 30% of the hispanic vote. But it wasn’t a perfect evening either as tories quickly circulated about an African-American camera operator for CNN who was assaulted by an attendee who threw nuts taunting, “This is how we feed the animals.” When Zoraida Fonalledas, the Puerto Rican chairwoman of the Committee on Permanent Organization spoke portions of the crowd responded with a chant of “USA! USA!”

Former Alabama Congressman Artur Davis was better received, although his speech seemed to be constructed from little more than sour grapes and specious claims. The one-time Obama supporter who became a Republican after losing Alabama’s Gubernatorial primary to a more liberal Democrat, complained about President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — legislation modeled on a plan once popular among Republicans and passed by none other than Mitt Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts—was created entirely without compromise or across-the-aisle a input. His ovation was considerable.

Bloggers were unkind. Andrew Sullivan tweeted that this is what a cold civil war looks like, accusing the speakers of vast duplicity in all things, especially descriptions of a boogie-man President who exists only in the collective unconscious of Republicans. Another commenter took issue with Janine Turner’s comment that America was built by working hands, not by people with their “hands out,” reminding the former Northern Exposure star that many of the hands that built America were in chains. At a breakfast for the Tennessee delegation Wednesday morning, a similar, but opposite idea was espoused by Vanderbilt Political Science professor Carol Swain. The African-American academic says she was “born” a Democrat but switched parties following a religious conversion and described public assistance programs supported by Democrats as being a less obvious but equally devastating form of bondage.

Throughout the evening conventioneers were treated to stories about hard work, overcoming adversity, raising special needs children, and the perils of big government and overregulation. In a less polarizing moment disarmingly personal Ann Romney spoke of love, recalling a time when she was a newlywed and the Romney’s lived, like normal college students, in something short of splendor. An equally affable Chris Christie advised that love, as wonderful as it may be, needed to take a back seat to respect.

While messages about tax cuts and small government remain unchanged it’s clear that the GOP is trying very hard to rebrand itself. It’s equally clear that some old, unsavory ghosts linger, making that job harder than it ought to be in an economy so unstable it’s hard to imagine how a sitting president could be re-elected.

In New York in 2004 emotions ran hot. But Republicans doubled down on President Bush, put their differences aside and marched shoulder to shoulder, like a great white river, from Times’ Square, through the culturally diverse landscape of Manhattan, and on to victory. St. Paul was every bit as electric in 2008 even though the GOP’s top ticket candidates were destined to lose.

But there’s something different about Tampa, and it’s not just all the blue. As a group the Republicans seem uncharacteristically uncertain, off their game and more interested in ousting President Obama than in electing Mitt Romney.

TAMPA BAY —Although my reference to a conversation with state Rep. Joe Carr (R-Rutherford County) in Tuesdays’ dispatch from the Republican National Convention, “GOP Delegates Spend a Day Hunkered Down at Home Base,” was minimal, it got maximized in further attention paid it in the Nashville area.
And God knows where else. Most recently, it had turned up on NPR.

I had reported that Carr was one of three delegates who responded no to an impromptu audience poll by consultant Frank Luntz as to whether Missouri Senate candidate Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin should exit his race.

My next paragraph went as follows: “Carr would explain later on that he agreed with Akin that women did indeed possess certain biological means to close themselves off against pregnancy in cases of violent rape. He further thought that Republicans had no business telling a bona fide Republican primary winner what to do.”

I was not prepared for the attention that brief paragraph — an island, as it were, in an atmospheric account of a day at the RNC — would get. Much of my afternoon was spent fielding calls from media people in the Nashville and Murfreesboro areas.

In short, Carr was clearly getting the same sort of adverse attention that Akin had gotten after telling a local TV interviewer in Missouri that he thought women had biological ways of preventing pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape.”

And I have no doubt that he was submitted to the same sort of hotboxing from fellow Republicans concerned about being stigmatized by such a view.

There are several ways in which a politician in that kind of scrape can respond: (1) He can, like Akin, stand by the incriminating remark and damn the torpedoes; (2) He can say, “I was a little imprecise. What I meant to say was….”; (3) He can say, “Well, maybe I misspoke myself;” and walk it all back somewhat, or (4) He can claim to have been misquoted.

Rep. Carr chose the latter course, but then, as he, too was barraged by several different media — mostly in his Middle Tennessee bailiwick — he began to walk that back as well.

When Carr was in his full denial phase, he contended that I had not identified myself as a reporter. I am certain that I did. And specifically I told him I had observed him on the House Education Committee while in Nashville to cover legislation affecting the Memphis suburbs’ ability to vote on municipal school districts.

Carr responded to that by bragging, as he remembered, about how he had put Memphis City Schools superintendent Kriner Cash in his place. (Actually, I think he misremembered; I don’t think it was Cash, but somebody else from Memphis, who testified about the over-numerous school districts to be found in the state of Pennsylvania, that being the subject of Carr’s riposte. (“I told him, ‘Well, don’t the schools in Pennsylvania rank pretty high?’”)

Carr’s first answer to me, when I asked him why he had voted the way he did, was an assertive
“He won the primary, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but….,” I said, but, I asked, wasn’t he both embarrassing to other Republicans (I mean, everybody from Romney and Ryan on down was demanding he be gone) and, er, a little bit crazy?

At this point, Carr began explaining to me, in the patient manner of an adult to a child or a professor to a dull pupil, how there was very likely a scientific basis for presuming a woman’s physiological ability to prevent pregnancy from a forcible rape.

I’m giving him his due by saying he disapproved of Akin’s term “legitimate rape,” which had ignited much of the firestorm. I am also cutting him considerable slack with the term “very likely” in the preceding paragraph. In fact, I found myself in the position of arguing against the thesis of a biological shield against impregnation by rape.

Carr kept insisting on such a possibility to the point that I had to protest, “Look, I’m not invested in this issue.”

Now, he may well have been arguing the point in the scholastic how-many-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin manner rather than from the point of view of a true believer. But the point is, we found ourselves in a real back-and-forth. It became like one of those dorm debates over transubstantiation that certain kinds of earnest freshmen have in college.

Eventually, I backed off — as it is always wise to do when one is in the presence of someone propounding a thesis so vigorously. And we parted pleasantly.

My reference to the conversation in my Flyer post of Tuesday was really somewhat off-handed, I thought. I never dreamed that so much would be made of it.

Literally, I found myself being deluged by media inquiries about the matter. I wondered if it was on its way to becoming a baby version of the Akin affair. I sincerely hoped not.

As I told an NBC affiliate that wangled me a booth pass at the convention for the sake of having an interview done for their broadcast, “I’m sure he’s sorry he’s said it, and I’m right with him on that. I’m sorry he said it, too.”

I’d be happy to get the situation walked back to some relatively harmless middle point. And to that end, here is how I would be pleased to amend the brief paragraph from my Tuesday article quoted above:

“Carr would explain later on that he agreed with Akin that women might indeed possess certain biological means to close themselves off against pregnancy in cases of violent rape. He further thought that Republicans had no business telling a bona fide Republican primary winner what to do.”

“Might” instead of “did” — OK? And that’s the best I can do.

TAMPA BAY, FL –Technically, Monday was an off day for the Republicans in Tampa. The threat of being wiped by some spoor of Hurricane Isaac had caused Reince Priebus, head of the Republican National Committee, to cancel all official events for what had been scheduled to be the first day of convention activity.

In effect, the Tennessee delegation was confined to quarters at the Safety Harbor Resort and Spa, some five miles away from Tampa proper, across the ever-roiling bay waters via a narrow causeway. Some Tennesseans made their way across for private convention-related events. Most, not wishing to end up stranded in case something swelled up of a sudden or not possessing independent means of auto travel, stayed close to home base.

There were two events in the hotel itself on Monday — the traditional group breakfast, boasting speeches from state office-holders and celebrity guests, and a dinner honoring Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey and other members of the Republican legislative leadership.

Speaking at the breakfast were U.S. Senator Bob Corker, Chattanooga congressman Chuck Fleischmann, and, as a “surprise guest,” well-known pollster/consultant Frank Luntz. The latter worked the crowd like the political pro he is, mixing laugh lines and analytical nuggets. The highlight moment of Luntz’s remarks came when he asked the assembled delegates and alternates how many of them thought Todd Akin, the Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, should withdraw from his race.

Akin, it will be remembered, had made the breathtaking claim that women possessed the innate biological means to prevent pregnancy from what Akin, in an interview, had called “legitimate rapes.” Republicans from ticket leader Mitt Romney on down had called for Akin to step aside, and the delegation chorused its assent to that judgment.

All except for three naysayers— one of whom, State Rep. Joe Carr of Rutherford County, had previously made a $3,000 bid that won a brief auction held by Luntz for a large portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Looking straight at Carr, Luntz said, “I don’t know what you’re saying, but you can still have the painting.”

Carr would explain later on that he agreed with Akin that women did indeed possess certain biological means to close themselves off against pregnancy in cases of violent rape. He further thought that Republicans had no business telling a bona fide Republican primary winner what to do.

To no one’s surprise, Luntz confirmed the consensus view that the presidential race between Romney and President Obama is a toss-up.

In his remarks, Corker made a point of addressing the issue of Medicare, simultaneously stroking vice presidential nominee-designate Paul Ryan, the Ayn Rand-loving congressman from Wisconsin who wants eventually for Medicare to become a voucher program. As below:

The dinner affair featuring Ramsey had originally been scheduled as a Tuesday lunch, but in the reshuffling of things had become a full-fledged evening banquet on Monday. Ramsey joked that his listeners, who originally would have been treated to a brief hour or so at lunch, were in for the whole ride now, and he gladly dilated on his prepared remarks.

A highlight of his speech was his recounting of how he came to be Lieutenant Governor in 2009 through the vote of former Democratic state Senator Rosalind Kurita of Clarksville:

Events scheduled for Tuesday, the convention’s official opening day now, include a showdown on some controversial rules changes and a prime-time address by Ann Romney, wife of the presidential nominee-presumptive.

TAMPA BAY, FL: Having mistimed my ride to the airport for a non-stop Memphis-to-Tampa flight on Delta — partly because of a monsoon that came up of a sudden, harbinger of all the hurricane talk dominating the news this weekend (and partly because, let’s face it, I am no stranger to missing flights, especially morning ones), I am sitting in the Atlanta airport on a Saturday evening, waiting for a connect to Tampa that will get me there, the site of the 2012 Republican National Convention, relatively late in the evening.

One stroke of fortune, which will ring bells of recognition for all travelers familiar with the sprawling Atlanta airport, a place in which merely going from one leg to another of a connect flight can take upwards of an hour — up and down ramps and escalators, through tunnels on light-rail trolley compartments that manage to go slowly fast from terminal A to B to C to D:

This time my Memphis flight arrived at a B gate, and the connection to Tampa turned out to be at another B gate, no more than a minute’s walk away. Hallelujah! There is indeed a first time for everything.

On the plane to Atlanta, I had read a piece in the Wall Street Journal making it clear that the non-cable networks, the once-upon-a-time “Big Three,” planned to bring only one hour each night of convention coverage, no more — both of the RNC affair in Tampa and next week’s Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. Both, of course, are coronations, theoretically devoid of the old-fashioned suspense and fireworks remembered so well in a piece by veteran pundit Michael Barone in the same WSJ issue.

On top of that the Democrats have decided to compact their convention into a mere three nights from beginning to end — show-and-tell affairs from Tuesday through Thursday, leading the selfsame networks to declare, ostensibly for reasons of fairness, that they would televise only those nights of the RNC’s convention — forcing the move of an address by Ann Romney, wife of nominee-designate Mitt Romney, from a Monday night slot to one on Tuesday night.

And now I see, via a news flash on my cell phone, that Reince Priebus, the RNC chair, has decided, ostensibly (and maybe actually) for reasons of safety prompted by the hurricane threat, to postpone the events that had been scheduled for Monday’s rump session of the GOP convention, until, guess what Tuesday, the first day of prime-time network coverage. What a coincidence.

Be this spin or be this reality, it is — as they say these days — what it is.

Waiting for the Tamps flight, still checking my cell phone, this time for email, I see that several political-junkie friends, members of a de facto debating society, are corresponding with give-no-quarter intensity about an article in the current Harper’s, “The Changeling,” by David Samuels, wherein the author documents in forlorn matter-of-factness President Obama’s cautious journey to what the writer sees as some safe and negotiable political center — a Dullsville of sorts, a place where nothing good can happen, even if, as a balancing corollary, the worst also happens to be avoided.

I defer my reading of that article, going instead to one in the same issue by Mark Halpern, entitled “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which essentially characterizes contender Romney in the same bleak light while assigning him far less redeeming social value.

This unusually readable issue of Harper’s, in effect, casts a plague on both men, one of whom a few short months from now will be guiding the destinies of what used to be called the Free World but which, the magazine’s contents suggest, is actually a Bought and Paid For place controlled by rival — and, to some extent, overlapping — special interests.

Once ensconced, along with the Tennessee delegation to the RNC, at Safety Harbor Resort and Spa, a rather homey and elegant place in Clearwater, some five miles or so across a causeway from Tampa proper, site of the convention, I let the two jeremiads constitute my bedtime reading.

And I woke to a world in which more than acts of God or nature might be conspiring to alter the preordained script. Although it wasn’t obvious right away.

It turned out to be a day, overcast, with off and on rain, in which the elements performed a kind of protracted tease — never hinting at an all-clear, never threatening serious harm, never offering a clue as to what came next.

Driving back across the long causeway in daylight to get my week’s worth of credentials at the designated Tampa hotel, I was struck by the fact that the bay waters, which at spots seemed only a foot or so below the edge of an outer road, looked somewhat more than mildly roiled. It clearly wouldn’t take too much of a storm to put the causeway, and anybody along it, in jeopardy.

Back at Safety Harbor, some delegates were busy with pre-convention preliminaries, others were touching base with friends or making new ones, and others were whiling away the day. Scott Golden, an ex-Memphian who works for 8th District congressman Stephen Fincher, got in 9 holes of golf, but the wind and rain kept alternating enough little surprises to keep him out of any kind of groove. Shoot in the 40’s? “At least,” he said.

Golden had also been keeping up with the work of the Republican rules and platform committees, where an unsuspected drama had been developing through the previous week. Memphis lawyer John Ryder, a national committeeman for Tennessee who has been named assistant parliamentarian for the convention, would shed some light on that at a Sunday afternoon reception hosted for the delegates by GOP state Senate majority leader Mark Norris of Collierville.

As Ryder explained it, the forces of libertarian icon (and also-ran presidential contender) Ron Paul had rebelled against at least two revisions made by the party’s rules committee in the run-up to convention week. One — Article 12 —would give the standing RNC the power to make other rules changes between conventions. The other — Article 15, a complicated one — would in essence give established party organizations more power over the approval of convention delegates.

An organization calling itself the Republican Liberty Caucus was vowing to fight the changes on the convention floor, something that could disrupt the well-ordered itinerary and keep it from peaking in prime time on Tuesday night.

Even in the small talk that got traded by delegates at the reception, it became obvious that there was indeed a schism between Republican factions, one that had gone mainly unnoticed by the media.

And in ways surprising to the delegates themselves. Beth Campbell of Nashville, a well-remembered former Memphian, was jolted to realize that her brother Willis Ayers, attending his first convention as a Newt Gingrich delegate from Shelby County, was apparently a member of the dissident faction. Ayers had previously supported the failed challenge of Woody Degan, a Tea Party favorite, to Norris’ releection.

Arnold Weiner, the eccentric but hard-working Memphis Republican who serves as president of the East Shelby Republican Club, the county’s largest, compared notes with another Tennessean who apprised him of the Paul faction’s challenge to GOP normalcy, leading Weiner to liken that situation to one within the last year in which he was able to mobilize virtually every living long-term Republican in Shelby County to turn back an organized Tea Party bid for control of the club.

Debra Maggart, the GOP caucus chair in the Tennessee House, famously defeated this year for reelection by a massive infusion of support on the National Rifle Association’s part for challenger Courtney Rogers, speculated that much of the damage may have been committed by restless, quasi-libertarian forces in opportunistic coalition with the NRA.

Kathleen Starnes, chairman of the Davidson County (Nashville) Republican Party, ticked off some of the components of that coalition: “9-12ers” (i.e., Glen Beck disciples); Tea Partiers; libertarians, Ron Paul libertarians (whom she regarded as a separate category); and, in cases like Maggart’s, the NRA. But it was more than that, she and Maggart and Campbell agreed. They sensed the rising tide of something bigger even than those parts, a determined, revisionist force that had reared itself in Tennessee in the past year or two and was likely to do so again this week on a national scale.

Indeed, wherever Tennessee delegates gathered on Sunday, the conversation tended to run to anticipations of a suddenly swirled-up internal storm to match the external one that meteorologists were carefully monitoring as Tropical Storm Isaac, having savaged Cuba, made it way toward the Florida peninsula.

Would it blow over? Probably, but that remained to be seen.

TO BE CONTINUED. Meanwhile, here are further signs and signifiers of the occasion in Tampa, beginning with delegate Beth Campbell’s own creation, a Romney-Ryan badge: