Take Lid Off Conventions

Are political conventions really necessary? If the GOP conclave in Philadelphia beginning Monday and the Democrats’ in Los Angeles commencing Aug. 14 are any indication, it hardly seems so. Yawn. Where are the hotly contested nominations of past years?

Republicans haven’t gone past the first ballot since 1948, when Thomas E. Dewey won on the third. Adlai Stevenson was the last Democrat to be nominated on a third ballot, in 1952. Gripping floor fights over a state delegation’s right to be seated were not unusual in decades past. Now, with early voter primaries in more and more states, the suspense has evaporated.

Republicans are gathering in Philadelphia with their ticket nailed down and platform committees rigidly applying the party line. Input from the citizenry is largely absent or ignored. The platform committees may as well stay home.

George W. Bush and Al Gore have had their nominations sewed up for four months. They’ve been campaigning against each other as if they were in the homestretch of the fall election. The convention roll calls will be pure formalities.

So why have a convention at all? The television networks have drastically scaled back their quadrennial live coverage. In recent election years, each party’s presumptive nominee usually has announced his vice presidential running mate in advance of the convention, as Bush did Tuesday. Party leaders do their best to suppress any interesting controversy.

This very deliberate dullness and exclusion of debate on real issues of the day are part of what drives street protests and alternate gatherings like this year’s shadow conventions in both Philadelphia and L.A.

The conventions still do matter to the parties themselves. They are the supreme rule-making authority of the parties. In drafting a platform, the convention ostensibly sets out the principles for which the party stands, sometimes in agonizing detail.

Beyond that, the convention is a safety valve that could prove crucial if anything happened to an apparent nominee between the primaries and late summer--illness, death or some scandal. And it’s still barely possible that, in some future year, two or more candidates could come to the convention without a majority of delegates. The convention once again could become the forum for nomination.

The thousands of delegates and other attendees spend a pretty penny for the privilege of being cooped up in meeting rooms, hospitality suites and the convention hall for three or four days. “It’s an event,” one party official said. “People like events. People are social animals.”

That’s nice for the conventioneers, but the parties had better awaken to the fact that, unlike doctors’ or lawyers’ conventions, political conventions are supposed to have a very broad constituency.

Until 1856, presidential candidates were chosen by congressional caucuses. The move to conventions was a triumph for democratization over self-appointed oligarchies that handpicked candidates. Eventually, primaries further opened the system to voters, but inevitably conventions mattered less.

As the convention season approaches, the challenge of the two major parties now is to find ways to make nonconventioneers feel connected to increasingly predigested and distant political conventions. The parties won’t do that with more platitudinous speeches from Philadelphia and Los Angeles.