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Convention Wisdom

By Cullen Murphy
Posted Thursday, Feb. 18, 1999, at 12:26 PM ET

Lucky you: a night off. I was out, too, but I'm checking the newspaper photos of yesterday's White House conference right now. It's a little hard to discern the president's forehead in the Globe photo--a lock of Hillary's hair falls right over the area we want to examine. As for the Times, it seems to be a little late. I've seen it happen time and again: a little fog at Logan, and the rest of the world falls apart. The big news in Boston this morning is that the city appears to have successfully dodged a bullet, in the form of the next Democratic Convention. Our estimable mayor, Tom Menino, preemptively announced late yesterday that the city's ambitious bid had failed, and that the convention would go to Los Angeles. The initial reaction here has been one of deep disappointment. It will eventually be supplanted, I think, by one of considerable relief.

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I've been to only one major-party convention--the 1976 convention in New York that nominated Jimmy Carter. I'm glad I went, mostly for a single memory: the sight of the noble Senator Philip Hart, in the last stages of his mortal illness, sitting for hours in a seat by an open aisle so that friends and well-wishers could pause and say hello. But is Boston, with its odd psychological combination of high self-esteem and high insecurity, and its relatively small size, really the best locale for a punishing spectacle of this kind (as opposed to, say, hosting all the rowing and equestrian events in the Summer Olympics; or, someday, another World Series)? I don't doubt that the city would have come through with its usual pluck and brio, but logistics were always going to be a little tight. (Hand-wringers raised the specter of the Guamanian delegation, for instance, having to be headquartered at a Motel 6 in Fitchburg.) Los Angeles, in contrast, can swallow 35,000 conventioneers in a gulp, and then go back to sleep while they digest.

Question: Do these convention-siting decisions have any positive political impact? An unfortunate decision sure can dampen one's mood. A few months ago I attended the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion, a conclave of 7,500 that settled in for three days in what everyone quickly realized was the Wrong Place--as it happens, Disney World. The symbolic dissonance (Orthodox rabbis; Buddhists in saffron; Goofy) was made all the more intense by the utter isolation: Disney World offers no escape. One might as well have been on Yap. At dawn on Sunday morning, anxious throngs pressed against the glass doors of the gift shop for news from the outside world, only to discover that the convention hotel had ordered only twelve--12!-- copies of the Sunday Times. (A professor of moral theology, in line in front of me, bought two of them.) It was a crisis of Malthusian proportions, and no latter-day miracle of the loaves and the fishes resolved it. By mid-afternoon the lobby had become a deranged souk of black-market commerce as soiled "Book Reviews" and "Sunday Styles" sections traded hands among the gaunt-cheeked and hollow-eyed. Ah, the Times has at last arrived--and, yes, there's a clear shot of the First Forehead, and no evidence of clerical tampering or presidential pandering.

Still to come: A few loose ends.