NOTHING DULL ABOUT THESE CONVENTIONS
Back in 1996, then- Nightline host Ted Koppel shocked the media and political worlds.
Two days into the Republican National Convention in San Diego, Koppel announced that he and most of his team were pulling out. The reason? There was no news to be found there.
“This convention is more of an infomercial than a news event,” Koppel said. “Nothing surprising has happened; nothing surprising is anticipated.”
Nightline had covered every convention since the program premiered in 1980. Yet the events had become so tightly controlled, so scripted, that they hardly required so much reporting firepower.
“There was a time when the national political conventions were news events of such complexity that they required the presence of thousands of journalists,” Koppel said. “But not this year.”
And the trend has continued — until now. In 2016, both conventions have been newsy affairs replete with surprising twist and turns.
To be sure, we haven’t witnessed a “brokered” or contested convention, which at one point was being anticipated for the GOP conclave, like the one in 1948 where it took three ballots for Thomas Dewey to secure the Republican nomination. There definitely has been nothing on the order of the Democratic convention in 1924, which required 103, yep 103, ballots to produce a winner.
But the conventions certainly have been lively.
The GOP gathering in Cleveland last week began on a sour note when Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s top campaign aide, tore into Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has refused to endorse Trump and boycotted the convention his state was hosting. “He’s embarrassing his party in Ohio,” Manafort said.
The bad vibes continued with a bitter fight in which anti-Trump forces were denied a roll call vote on proposed rules changes, prompting some angry delegates to walk out.
On the convention’s opening night, a speech by Melania Trump, the candidate’s wife, was generally well-received — until an out-of-work journalist discovered that a portion of the speech closely resembled one that had been delivered by Michelle Obama. The plagiarism flap became a major preoccupation the second day of the convention.
But the convocation’s most dramatic moment occurred Wednesday night, when Trump’s vanquished rival Ted Cruz refused to endorse The Donald, instead telling delegates to “vote your conscience.” The Quicken Loans Arena was quickly engulfed by boos and catcalls, and Trump later suggested he should have allowed Cruz to be “ripped ... off the stage.”
The Democrats watching at home no doubt enjoyed this carnival of chaos and anticipated a drama-free coronation for Hillary Clinton now that insurgent Bernie Sanders had at last endorsed her. But they hadn’t counted on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, who decided this would be a great time to leak pilfered Democratic National Committee emails.
Some of the emails reflected what many Sanders supporters already believed: that the DNC had its finger on the scales for Clinton.
By Sunday night, convention eve, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had announced she was resigning by week’s end. But the fun was only beginning. Rather than quietly slinking away, Wasserman Schultz still planned to gavel the convention to order. That idea quickly became inoperative when she foolishly appeared before the Florida delegation Monday morning and was roundly booed.
So Wasserman Schultz was gone, but the Sanders forces were hardly placated. When Sanders implored his delegates Monday afternoon to back Clinton, they booed. When the convention opened officially that night, the Sanders die-hards booed each mention of Clinton’s name and chanted “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!”
Even for Philadelphia, the acknowledged boo-bird capital of the world, this was a lot of booing.
The week wore on, and things calmed downas the convention heard from a bevy of Democratic heavy hitters. But boisterous protests continued on the streets of Philadelphia, including a particularly rowdy one outside the Wells Fargo Center on Wednesday night while Obama was speaking,
All in all, there has been enough news coming out of conventions to please even Ted Koppel.