Nate Knows Nada

I’m going to some of the religion-related events in the convention
tomorrow, and I’m gonna ask some questions of the delegates and anyone
else whom I might run into.

Do any of you have any questions?

Here’s what’s going on (with some help from my friends (only one has a web presence) who study the development of the American political system.

Lots of the bloggers here have noted that the DNC is pretty
boring.  It is.  Really.  Right now, a variety of
candidates for congress and such all over the country are speaking and
telling us why they should be elected.  And we’re getting a
retrospective (necrology, actually) of Democrats who have died since
the last convention — all to the “Forrest Gump Suite.”  People
are bored because “nothing happens here.”

But the boredom results almost directly from the attempt of both
parties to infuse their processes with more democracy.  As one of
my colleague-friends put it, “The Democratic National Committee changed
its nominating rules after 1968 such that a majority of the delegates
to the convention had to be chosen by ‘the people’ — that is, through
primaries or caucuses. In response, most of Democratic-controlled
states changed their election laws to be in compliance with the DNC,
and so both the Republicans (because they were forced to, not because
they wanted to) and the Democrats chose their candidates through
primaries and caucuses.”

The Democrats have what are called “super-delegates”, who are
essentially party hacks, electeds, and so forth, who make up about a
sixth or a fifth of the votes needed to get the nomination.  They
tend to commit their votes early on in the process, so that Al Gore,
for example, had about one third of the votes needed for the nomination
before the primaries even started.

So democracy may not have killed the convention as some sort of
meaningful political event, but it was certainly one of the primary
weapons.

Ted Kennedy is speaking as I write this, even if I can’t post until later….

There’s a bit of a feeling of optimism here, it seems.  The
Democrats act and speak as if they have little to hide; they’re
consistently on message; they are presenting a message of considerable
unity.

Now, I grant that much of that is due to the fact that this is a modern
political convention, in which the whole thing is a show of unity.

But the Democrats act as if they’ve spent more than just one presidential term in the political wilderness.

On another note, part of the problem with blogging the convention is
that it’s unclear what one can do here, especially if you can’t get on
the interweb thingy to read and link to other stuff.

Random question:  Who ARE the people who get to sit on the podium
for short periods of time?  They get cycled on and off pretty
regularly.

Wait a minute.  Jerry Springer is visiting the bloggers….

All right.  Back.  (It’s hard to keep a consistent thread of thought going here.)

My theory about the stage people is that they are delegates from
critical states and this is their pre-reward for getting out and
getting people going about Kerry.

WiFi Access here is still spotty. Windows people are more affected, it seems, but even the Mac people can’t hold a connection.

I’ve got plenty in the tank, but I’m gonna have to go downstairs into the media hell to get a hrd connection.

…but we’re doing what we can.  I’m up and running for now, and I’m working away.

So I’m gonna try to blog from the DNC once again today, but I’m only
giving it about a 50/50 chance of working right now.  I think a
lot of the bloggers are thinking of buying Ethernet cables cables and
taking over the press center the DNC has set up for the “regular” press.

But I have some info on how “democracy” has actually helped to lead to the boredom and predictability of the modern convention.

Ninja Stu knows what’s up with the blogger area nightmare of access.

As someone once said, “I belong to no organized party.  I’m a Democrat.”

I had to come home to my dial-up access to get onto my blog.

Permit me to complain for a bit.  This morning we were told that we
were an important part of the future direction of political
interaction.  But then we got to the convention site, and the three odd
dozen of us were supposed to cram into a space with 12 chairs.  At
least half of us couldn’t access the WiFi network that we had been told
had been specially set up for our use so that we could blog.  There
were no tech people that we could get in contact with.

Half an hour ago, according to an e-mail I just got, they added another access point that might work.

So after a day of frustratingly trying to blog, like I had asked and
been asked to do, I’m going to give up for tonight and try to do this
again tomorrow.

…showed up at John Kerry’s (and my boyfriend’s) church tonight. 
There were only about 50 people at the evening Mass, and Shields
dropped in a little after the service began, and popped out a little
before it ended.

Incipient research?  Will he gain insight into John Kerry by seeing where he and his wife worship when at home in Boston?

In case you don’t know, he’s one of commentators on News Hour with Jim Lehrer.  Always entertaining.  At least, I think so.

Tomorrow, the madness begins.

Reinvent has a story on how he was edited in the Newsday piece that came out about blogging. 
I was also interviewed for the piece, as you can see if you scroll down
a bit.  His gripe — a legitimate one, I think — was about the
way they edited him.  They cut and paste bits of his responses to
some questions in other questions.

When I do my own writing, it’s like writing a paper or an
article.  I write so that the piece fits together in some
rational, and hopefully organic, fashion.  Sure, you can cut and
paste, but it often changes the meaning of what I’m trying to get
across.

The media seem obsessed (on a very small scale) on how bloggers are
going to be different than the traditional media at this
convention.  And there’s some idea that without constraints, we’ll
perform worse than the traditional media.  But perhaps we’ll do a
better job.  Instead of shaping a set of ideas to fit our concept
about “how the story should look,” we’ll report on what we saw and
heard and then go on to say what we thought about it.  Our ideas
are central to our discussion of what’s happening, but perhaps we can
do a better job of telling people what’s happening, without
predetermined scripts about what telling about what’s happening is
supposed to look like.