Lobbyists at the Democratic Convention

A previous post noted that business lobbyists swarmed the GOP convention despite Trump's purported outsiderism. Other party, same thing. Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick report at The New York Times:

On Tuesday, when Hillary Clinton became the first female nominee of a major party, a handful of drug companies and health insurers made sure to echo the theme, paying to sponsor an “Inspiring Women” panel featuring Democratic congresswomen.

And in the vaulted marble bar of the Ritz-Carlton downtown, wealthy givers congregated in force for cocktails and glad-handing, as protesters thronged just outside to voice their unhappiness with Wall Street, big money in politics and Mrs. Clinton herself.

“This is a good place to be — for a lot of reasons,” said former Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, a Democrat now running for Congress, as he glided through the room on Tuesday. “We must have set up five fund-raisers today. This is the bank.”

...
 “I think we’re past that,” said Alan Patricof, a longtime donor to Mrs. Clinton, when asked about the need to lie low during the primaries.
...
The Philadelphia convention offered other symbolic contrasts to the party’s last two gatherings, when President Obama sought, with mixed success, to restrict his party from raising money to pay for the conventions from lobbyists or political action funds. Those shackles were thrown off this year, waving a green flag to Washington’s influence industry. Lobbyists and corporate representatives flooded the city, where much of the Democratic Party’s elite — and potential senior members of a future presidential administration — had gathered.

Conventions: The Majority Rules

Trump is saying that the candidate who enters the convention with a plurality of delegates must get the nomination even with less than a majority.  He is wrong. Several former GOP national chairs write at The Wall Street Journal:

Because many of our fellow citizens have never experienced a “contested” convention, one which went beyond the first ballot, there is some confusion about how this works. Only an absolute majority of the delegates assembled in the convention can select an individual as the party’s candidate for the presidency.

It is not correct that a candidate who enters the convention with a plurality of delegates, although short of a majority, must receive the nomination. Such an interpretation would be a gross violation of the essential purpose of the nominating process.

If that were the rule, Abraham Lincoln would never have been president. He came in second on the first ballot at the 1860 Republican convention, but won the nomination—with a majority of the delegates—on the third ballot. In 1976 Ronald Reagan got a million more votes than President Ford in the primaries. But Reagan did not win a majority of the delegates, President Ford did, and so he received the nomination.

Reagan understood the rules. Without complaint, he supported the winner. That’s how it works.

Convention Ballots

There is a chance that no Republican presidential candidate will have a majority of delegates (1237) before the Republican convention.  “I think whoever gets to the top position as opposed to solving that artificial number that was by somebody, which is a very random number,” Trump said at a recent debate. “I think that whoever gets the most delegates should win. That’s what I think.”

By the Trump standard, Abraham Lincoln would never have been president.

At the 1860 Republican convention, the leader on the first ballot was Senator William Seward of New York, who had 173 1/2 votes.  Abraham Lincoln had only 102.  Seward led on the second ballot as well, but by a narrower margin: 184 1/2 to 181.  Lincoln only pulled ahead on the third ballot.

A Clint Eastwood Quotation

From Mangum Force (1973):

More Ahistorical Reporting on the Platform

Time analyzes the GOP platform:

On social issues, the GOP grows ever more conservative. The platform defines marriage as between one man and one woman, assails an “activist judiciary” for decreeing otherwise at the state level and urges a crackdown on Internet pornography. Separate planks support prayer in public schools and the pubic display of the Ten Commandments as “a reflection of our shared Judeo-Christian heritage.” The party would ban all abortions, asserting that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”

Conservative, yes, but more conservative than before?  Hardly. All of the positions in this passage have been in GOP platforms for years, if not decades.

• The 1992 platform opposed same-sex marriage.
• The 2000 platform supported a crackdown on Internet porn.
• The 1972 platform supported voluntary school prayer.
• The 2000 platform supported public display of the Ten Commendments.
• The 1984 platform, and every one since, has declared that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life.

Listing "strange obsessions," the article says:  "There is an obligatory prohibitions against the use of “foreign law by U.S. courts in interpreting our Constitution and laws,” a reference to the right’s infatuation with Sharia."  The 2008 platform called for the appointment of judges who would not "inject foreign law into American jurisprudence."  The issue was not Sharia, but the actual practice of some Supreme Court justices of citing foreign law in their opinions. Far from being a "strange obsession," the issue has been the subject of lively legal debate for a number of years.

The Platform: Not As Great a Shift

Much of the reporting on the GOP platform is ahistorical – even when it purports to provide historical background. Take this passage from a Washington Post article: “Influenced by the rise of tea party activists, this year’s platform, adopted Tuesday at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, has shifted to the right, particularly on fiscal issues. It calls for an audit of the Federal Reserve and a commission to study returning to the gold standard. There are odes of fidelity to the Constitution but also calls for amendments that would balance the federal budget, require a two-thirds majority in Congress to raise taxes and define marriage as a union between one man and one woman.”

These items aren’t as much of a shift as the passage suggests.

• The 1984 platform criticized the Fed and openly suggested a look at the gold standard: “ The Federal Reserve Board's destabilizing actions must therefore stop. We need coordination between fiscal and monetary policy, timely information about Fed decisions, and an end to the uncertainties people face in obtaining money and credit. The Gold Standard may be a useful mechanism for realizing the Federal Reserve's determination to adopt monetary policies needed to sustain price stability.”
• The 1980 platform suggested that the election of a Republican president and Congress would eliminate the need for a balanced-budget amendment. It added a caveat: “However, if necessary, the Republican Party will seek to adopt a Constitutional amendment to limit federal spending and balance the budget, except in time of national emergency as determined by a two-thirds vote of Congress The 1984 language was more direct: “We will work for the constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget passed by the Republican Senate but blocked by the Democrat-controlled House and denounced by the Democrat Platform. If Congress fails to act on this issue, a constitutional convention should be convened to address only this issue in order to bring deficit spending under control.” Every platform since then has endorsed a balanced-budget amendment.
•  The 2004 and 2008 platforms backed “supermajority” requirements for tax increases.
• As the article itself later acknowledges, the opposition to same-sex marriage goes back to 1992.

The article also notes that the 1992 document used the term “Democrat Party,” adding: “That abbreviated version of the other party’s name, without the `-ic’ suffix, appears for the first time in 1976, an early sign of the sniping that has come to dominate interparty rhetoric.” Wrong, the term was in the 1956 platform, and William Safire traced the usage back to Tom Dewey.

Conventions

Many years ago, American political conventions actually chose each party’s presidential nominee. Conventions often started with doubt about the outcome, which depended on bargaining among delegates and party leaders. But candidates now win delegates by competing in primaries and caucuses, and the identity of the nominee is clear by the end of spring.

Conventions put a formal conclusion to the nomination process. Instead of forums for decision, they are big political rallies that enable each party to gain a few hours of television coverage. Yet they remain significant. The televised speeches and the media coverage may affect public opinion. Conventions usually help candidates, but sometimes they can hurt.

This week's Republican convention will be important to Mitt Romney. Although he ran for president four years ago, and resumed his quest for the presidency soon after President Obama’s inauguration, many Americans still know little about him. The convention speeches, and especially his own acceptance speech, will introduce him to millions. If he and his party make a good impression, then he will gain several points in the polls.

Conventions, however, can go badly. Thousands of delegates will attend, and reporters will be eager to catch them making intemperate remarks or engaging in unsavory behavior. That's especially true in the age of camera phones and Twitter. This year, the latter risk is great because Tampa is notorious for its strip clubs. Convention planners will try to keep the delegates busy with wholesome activities.

Acceptance speeches usually go well, but they can fail. Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992 gave weak performances that made their supporters worry about their prospects. Romney needs to avoid that fate. 

The Democratic convention takes place next week, in Charlotte, North Carolina. The stakes are not as high for President Obama as they are for his challenger. After nearly four years in office, he does not have to introduce himself: most voters have decided whether they like him.

Nevertheless, his convention will still matter. The president has a reputation as an outstanding orator, which presents a challenge to him. Expectations will be extremely high, so a moderately good acceptance speech will come across as a disappointment.

In the end, the conventions might only shift a point in the popular vote. But the election is likely to be close, so that point could be crucial.

The Digital Conventions

The second edition of our book will have a boxed feature on the impact of social media and communications technology. AP reports how the national party organizations are adapting their conventions:

Democrats and Republicans are using social media to turn their national conventions away from the smoke-filled rooms of yore and into meetings where anyone who wants to get involved is just a click away, no matter where they are.

Both parties' ambitious plans reflect the maturation of social media sites that played a much smaller role in the conventions four years ago. The Republicans call theirs a "convention without walls," while the Democrats say their gathering will be "the most open and accessible in history."

Democrats will not just show prime-time speeches live on the Internet, but will also stream caucus meetings and the council discussions of the party's platform and ideals over the Web. Republicans have hired a full-time blogger and a full-time digital communications manager to do nothing but engage people online.

The conventions' Facebook and Twitter sites are already stoking interest in the events, with photos of the Republican stage under construction in Tampa or profiles of Democratic volunteers and delegates. Users can interact with a mouse click, such as one who urged friends to help the GOP convention Twitter feed muster more followers than its counterpart. Both had more than 10,000 followers Friday.

Social media was still in its infancy four years ago. The number of items posted on Twitter on Election Day 2008 is equal to about six minutes worth of tweets today, the social media company recently wrote on its blog.

Keach Hagey writes at The Wall Street Journal:

Political conventions, long the ultimate made-for-TV presentation, this year are coming of age as digital-media events—highlighting the decline of network television coverage of the gatherings.

When Republicans convene next week in Tampa, Fla., and Democrats the week after in Charlotte, N.C., major broadcast networks will use the Internet to provide the kind of extensive coverage they long ago abandoned on their airwaves. 

NBC, in fact, is likely to forgo prime-time TV coverage entirely of the Democratic convention the night of Wednesday, Sept. 5, when it is contractually bound to air the kickoff game of the NFL season between the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys.

In response, organizers of the Democratic convention moved Vice President Joe Biden's speech from its traditional Wednesday night slot to Thursday. NBC's website and its sibling cable channel MSNBC plan to cover Wednesday's events live, including a speech by former President Bill Clinton.

While ABC, NBC and CBS streamed the conventions on their websites in 2008, that was before the iPad and other tablets, the explosive growth of smartphones and the rise of online video as a truly competitive medium to television.