When this magazine asked whether I would be interested in covering the Republican convention in St. Paul, what could I say? Of course! What American writer would not be honored to put his wingtips into the outsized footsteps of Norman Mailer? Norman had actually run for public office, thus had hands-on experience of American political life, but Bill Holm was a convention virgin. He'd thought hard about Chicago in 1968, but chickened out. Should inexperience disqualify an American from trying out a new enterprise? Should Sarah Palin have said, "No, thanks" and stayed in Wasilla? Should Barack Obama have organized an extra community or two to bolster his résumé? So Holm came back to Minnesota from three calm and newsless months in north Iceland a few days before the convention to immerse himself abruptly in the mad whirlpool of an American campaign.
My credentials arrived two days before the convention: big black Coke bag full of treasures, maybe a symbolic bag of America: four computer-coded elephant-shaped entrance passes, an umbrella, an AT&T gift phone card, a New Testament-sized coupon book for the Mall of America, elephant-shaped Post-it Notes, two Republican lapel pins (since they're so much in fashion these days), an elephant-shaped airline luggage tag (Delta-NWA) that jumps the merger gun a little, magazines and maps, party invitations, and (my favorite) a box of Kraft's "Republican Macaroni & Cheese" pasta elephants. (Did the Democrats get pasta donkeys?)
A political convention is, from one angle, only a ritual in the American church of civil religion, but in another way it's a celebration of commerce not much different from a
convention of shoe salesmen, dentists or real estate brokers. Stuff, door prizes, handouts, special offers, new gadgets. You will need your big black Republican Coke bag to deposit your haul from the gauntlet of handed-out goodies you must pass on your walk into the Xcel Center.
The parties began early before the Sept. 1 opening gavel. I couldn't resist a "bipartisan" opening reception at Sam and Sylvia Kaplan's house. The Kaplans, as every reader of this magazine knows, are politically active and savvy Democrats, fundraisers, not quite "king makers" but important endorsers, hosts to many huge political events. Rep. Jim Ramstad, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Twin Cities mayors Chris Coleman and R.T. Rybak were guests of honor to welcome the Republicans to St. Paul, a graceful gesture of bipartisan hospitality. I was curious. The Kaplan house was a little hard to find, odd given its size-about half the St. Paul Cathedral. It's a vast, elegant house, designed for large parties, for speeches, and for (I regret the word ...) networking. (Is "schmoozing" better?) The speeches were, indeed, polite, graceful, no red meat. It was a very Minnesota occasion, where even people who disagreed strongly showed their best civilized behavior. The ghost of Elmer L. Andersen was invoked often. The "buzz" question at the Kaplans' house was: Would George W. Bush and Dick Cheney appear? Would the convention even happen? A new hurricane had New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in its gun sights. By Sunday night, the Republicans decided to take a day off, no prez, no veep, only the necessary parliamentary business. A piece of half luck, I thought. Both Bush and Cheney were clearly millstones around the necks of Republicans interested in winning elections. The big protest demonstrations were planned for them, but now most of that ferocious anger seemed likely to evaporate in their absence.
No big speeches were scheduled for Monday during the hurricane watch. I thought it a good time to have a look at the inside of a convention-and at fortress St. Paul. I'd read the papers and heard the stories, but I was unprepared for the shock of it. It was 90 degrees and humid Monday; State Fair weather arrived a little late. My friend Louise offered to give me a ride to the fortified perimeter around Xcel, but we found ourselves in a traffic tangle: freeway entrances closed, crossway-parked city trucks blocking streets, an astonishing number of armed ... what? police, national guard, Blackwater personnel? One uniform looks much like another to me. I felt pity for the poor troops: heavy boots; heavy vests and shirts and trousers; heavy helmets with face guards; heavy arms, clubs, tear gas, grenades, whatever other weapons they sported. They must have been, as Joe Biden might say, literally melting under that hot armor. We rolled down the window to ask. A polite though sweaty cop informed us that we could go no further. Because the anarchists' demonstrations had turned nasty, the Xcel cordon had been widened-a hot hike to the arena. I joined a small stream of well-dressed pedestrians, most in suits and ties or dresses and high heels. Republicans are formal dressers, unafraid of heat. We all pocketed a few pamphlets, DVD trailers and petitions in our black bags. I hardly recognized downtown St. Paul: 10-foot concrete walls, walls within walls, 10-foot storm fence inside that, a maze or a labyrinth guarded by what seemed to me a whole division of armed security. It felt eerie, reminding me of East Berlin in 1979, or Beijing after Tiananmen, places waiting on tenterhooks for violence. My press pass slid through a security computer reader twice at the two narrow doors in the storm fence, then through the X-ray line. I was no threat, so I escaped inside into blessed air-conditioning.
Xcel is mammoth, the size of two Minneotas (my home town) under one roof, a testament to the local love of hockey. I continued the long march around the halls to level 100, section 113, reserved for periodical press, just to the left of the speakers' dais, a fine perch for the action, and as luck would have it, just a few steps from the Minnesota delegation. I had gotten a one-hour floor pass, so I thought I'd look for any familiar faces among the Minnesotans. My local house representative, Marty Seifert, was a delegate and had been most courteous and helpful on the phone, answering my probably inane questions about the convention, what preparations to make, etc. I peered over the group-no Marty, busy elsewhere. Even on this uncrowded, mostly boring day, the floor was crowded. You moved slowly, sideways through it, seeing only a few rows in. I gave up, retreating to my perch on the side when a commotion began on the floor maybe 10 feet away. Mitt Romney was passing by, followed by photographers, delegates, admirers, as if he were a rock star. Romney is a handsome, well-turned-out fellow. He looks like what he is-a wealthy businessman. His haircut was perfect-sculpted, not a flying hair. His double Windsor and the cut of his blue suit were neat, trim, impeccable. And what splendid teeth! What a smile! Romney could do commercials for dentists. Many delegates pressed close to be photographed with him. He was affable, smiling, a patient public man at his work, but he wasn't destined to be veep.
How odd this big hockey arena looked with its new red carpet as if for a coronation-or a high school prom, the sliding puck space now chock-a-block with a dense clot of humans-2,200 delegates, alternates, operatives, hangers-on, journalists, managers, operators, not so much 10,000 or 15,000 individual balls and bodies as a single writhing, vibrating, multicolored body, a Petri dish of cells in perpetual though slow motion. I dipped into it a few feet, then slunk out of it, suddenly shy. I'm a small-town man-many multiples of all Minnesota surrounded me. I found a private perch on the aisle in section 113 and watched. No ghosts of the hippie '60s here; rather ordinary business suits, or dress shirts, dresses, pantsuits, conventional hair, an altogether dignified lot of folk. Could have been a Lutheran synod convention-hardly a teenager, most between 30 or 35 and-90? Great numbers of my contemporaries, mid-60s.
I'd just read an essay on the black presence at the 1892 Republican Convention in Minneapolis: 116 black delegates, 13 percent of the full body. For the black delegates the prime issue was lynching; 161 already in 1892. The black delegates submitted a strong anti-lynching plank to the platform committee. Frederick Douglass, now very old and with a snow-white pompadour, and surely the most internationally famous black man in America, came to rally the delegates. While checking into the convention hotel (no Jim Crow here-yet), he was "surrounded by a great crowd eager to stroke the old man's head," the Minneapolis Tribune reported. The Republicans in 2008 seemed to have lost ground among blacks; I counted only a handful among the mass.
The party chairpersons convened the convention, asking for the delegates to offer their prayers for their hurricane-targeted fellow citizens at the nether end of the Mississippi River. No formal speeches today, no Bush, nor Cheney, just business. Down came the gavel on its miked stand, a sound loud and ominous enough to clear the cemeteries-and to shock Holm sitting a few hundred feet away. I hadn't heard the formal language of parliamentary procedure for years, with its moving, seconding, ayes-have-it, and cannon-shot bangs of the gavel. It's the music of committees, school board meetings, the music of democracy maybe.
Laura Bush and Cindy McCain made little cameo speeches to welcome the delegates, and again ask for their prayers and mindfulness for the storm victims. Mrs. Bush was serene, graceful, practical, a woman who has done this before a thousand times and may or may not like it. She wears a well-fixed public face. Mrs. McCain seemed less at ease, but the next few months will clearly offer her sufficient rehearsal.
The chairman announced a tentative order of events for the next three days-who is speaking when. This was the first public naming of Sarah Palin in this room. At the sound of "Sarah," a roar rose from the crowd and the mass of humans seemed almost to vibrate on the floor. The president's name and the nominees caused no such response, and the old veep's name was not spoken. For the next three days, "Sarah" could be spoken like an alarm bell to wake any who might have dozed off from a surfeit of procedure and oratory.
A responsible convention reporter would offer a reader some digest of the multitude of orations for the next three days. But I abjure that duty. Whether Democrat, Republican or other, most convention orations are not actual human language or thought; they are machine-tooled gestures, the memorized speech at the Sunday-school program. They are vetted rituals, as empty of content as speaking in tongues. But always a few memorable exceptions surface-some language that performs real work.
Joe Lieberman was, of course, a surprise, but only his presence, not his lengthy endorsement of the nominee. Isn't he a Democrat? Rudy Giuliani recited his snide insults as if he were playing in a slasher movie. But Wednesday night-Sarah Palin-was not ho-hum. After a three-day timpani roll whenever her name was spoken, the convention orchestra erupted into a full fortissimo tutti, brass blazing, cymbals crashing. That red-carpeted hockey arena was as alive as a human body en masse. This was the moment the real Republicans had waited and longed for. Ms. Palin, flanked by her large and various family, grinned and waved while the human tsunami subsided. She gave a good speech, an old-fashioned political gut-buster. She is a slight and very attractive woman who seems to try, with her odd glasses and beehive hair, to look frumpy. She can't manage it. Her nasal western accent, dropped g's and workaday slang and idioms suggest she's (as so many said to me) just "one of us." She seemed to me a grown-up version of a high school cheerleader, full of "pep," doing her verbal cheers for our team in the home stretch. She seemed a shrewd pick for McCain. Clearly this room of Republicans thought so. Her gift of new energy even pumped McCain himself. He gave a better speech than anyone expected to close the convention and send out the delegates to do their work, but even on Thursday the big cheers came when the Palins joined the McCains on the stage.
The house-all however many thousands of them-chanted with ever more spirit and volume: Sar-ah! Sar-ah! Sar-ah! Banners waved in the air: "Hoosiers for the Hot Chick," the Texas delegation tipped their 10-gallon sombreros in unison, then a chorus of "Drill, baby, drill!" Oil drilling offshore, in parks, wherever it can be found, was a particular Republican enthusiasm. Holm is always a little nervous in the presence of large groups of people thinking as one and chanting their unity. The thought of 84,000 jammed-together Democrats chanting in unison response to Mr. Obama made Holm happy not to have been in Denver.
We fear, with considerable justice, the mob: its size, its psychology, its raw power. Holm remembered a sentence from an old book: "Beware the single truth. Inside it anywhere on earth is a loaded gun pointed straight at your head." What, then, is a political convention but an organized mob, we hope with better manners and less violence in its heart? Americans have performed these rituals now for a few hundred years, and seem unlikely to give them up. Maybe they, too, are part of the music of democracy.
In the midst of my convention watching, I got lonesome for Iceland and called my old friend Wincie. I asked if she was following the conventions. (BBC broadcasts in Reykjavik.) She had. What did she think? "It reminds me of high school pep rallies. Pure silliness-and those tedious speeches and cheering." Wincie had gone to high school in America before becoming an Icelander 50 years ago. She was right; the convention was indistinguishable from cheering at the state tournaments in 1957. (Or probably 2007.)
The week was not without real thinking; though I suspect that most of it took place outside the Xcel Center. On Wednesday morning (before the Sarah speech) the think tank "Growth and Justice" hosted a gathering at the St. Paul College Club next door to the governor's mansion. "Minnesota's Progressive Republican Tradition," it announced, with speeches and Q&A by Govs. Al Quie and Arne Carlson, and Rep. Jim Ramstad. "Progressive" was not an adjective much heard at the Xcel Center this week. Dane Smith, the host, began the morning by summoning up the memory of bipartisan governing in Minnesota in the days before America was surgically parsed into red and blue states and the parties turned into pitched encampments, waiting to draw blood from one another. But Minnesota in the last generation boasted Stassen, Youngdahl, LeVander-and that grand model of public civility, Elmer L. Andersen.
Al Quie, as conservative a Republican as you can imagine, began. He's a huge man, erect and vigorous at 85, looking ready for another continental divide horse trip. He asked the audience to consider these words of advice: think, listen, love-love?! (Quie is a serious Lutheran.) He thought the Republican Party had lost its way; chanting the partisan mantra of "No new taxes!", putting political expediency ahead of principle, not listening to any ideas outside their base. Quie thought any group needed what he calls "congenial disputation," that no progress can be made without listening closely and seriously to those who differ. He told lovely stories from his political career about what he had learned from Democrats, from street gangs, from Republicans to the left of him. When he arrived at love, I was already a little teary-eyed. Where was this civil and humane old Norwegian when we needed him? Is 85 a good age to run for governor again?
Arne Carlson was not quite so cuddly, but he can certainly think, and add and subtract columns of numbers. He ignored both conventions. Neither of them, he thought, addressed any real issues facing the United States, only pre-scripted media circuses, campaign gimmicks. Carlson, an auditor by trade, had looked at the numbers and found the United States ruined, hostage to its mammoth deficit, hidden from Americans by creative accounting: $50 trillion, half owed to foreigners, much to China; yet we refused to face our catastrophe, to balance a budget or to tax ourselves. He said all this before the big bank collapses.
He heard no mention of the massive erosion of civil liberties in the last eight years. Constitution? What's that? He thinks we have lost the third estate-a feisty and independent press. Internet news digests are not genuine journalism. Where are the muckrakers? Where is this man, I thought, when we need him to tend the economy and give us the bad news straight, without false cheer, flag pins and patriotic gore? So we're broke, and it wasn't an ideology that sunk us. We lied to ourselves. Ramstad, the Democrats' favorite Republican, was good too. He's retiring. I found the "progressive Republican" news entirely satisfactory. We can all feel a little nostalgia for the days when Andersen-a man of impeccable decency and intelligence-was the Minnesota model.
That's my convention report. It was a curious experience, not entirely cheerful, not because it was Republican, but because it was a political convention. The Democrats would have been no better, though I agreed with their notions more often. It was not an adult experience-no place for grown-ups. The United States (as all parties agree) is in a sinkhole from which we may or may not emerge. We need not cheering, not gestures, not boilerplate, but thinking-hard thinking. And we didn't get it. What we got was "God bless America" 50 times from every speaker, no matter how slight-empty piety. Aside from the arrogance of asking God to bless us and not the human race, not the Iraqis, not the Tasmanians, not the Icelanders, not the Tajiks, we diminish God however we conceive it by humoring ourselves with this empty civic piety. Eugene J. McCarthy, the most theologically sophisticated politician of the 20th century and an orthodox Catholic to his dying day, never said it. He knew better; he understood the distinction between God and Caesar and honored God by observing it-our modern crop of politicians ought to try it too. If pep club cheering and prayer meeting are the best metaphors we can summon for a political convention, what does it say about us that we continue to indulge in them?
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