Quote of the Day (Wilfrid Sheed, on Political Conventions)

“Well, you know about conventions. No matter how dull they try to make themselves, to show how America has truly come of age, they still have all the silly excitement of kids’ birthday parties. If you've happened to miss one, the next closest thing would be wandering around a county fair with a straw hat and a jug of moonshine.”— English-born American novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed (1930-2011), People Will Always Be Kind (1973)

For delegates at conventions, I imagine that Wilfrid Sheed’s description here still captures the giddy feeling of getting together with others of your tribe cheering for a candidate. But so much else has changed, for both attendees and television viewers.

Sheed didn’t know it back in 1973, but the central notion of conventions for the 140 years to that point—a quadrennial gathering in which a party would truly decide on its nominee and running mate—was already coming to an end.

Dismayed by the outcome of their Chicago convention in 1968, when party grandees chose a nominee, Hubert Humphrey, who had not entered a single primary, the Democrats had instituted by 1972 new rules that made primaries the principal means of selecting nominees, and limited delegates’ ability to back off pre-convention declarations of loyalty.

With party leaders’ role in choosing nominees vastly diminished, it would be all over but the shouting when delegates got to the convention and the TV cameras—which had aired for all the world to see the Democrats' disorder inside and outside the confab in '68—whirred once again.

That same year, the Republicans amplified their 1968 model for how conventions would be run—" a picture of a buttoned-down organization,” headed by "law-and-order" nominee Richard Nixon, as recalled in Don Gonyea’s August 2018 NPR retrospective.

Not only would films of the candidate now be aired in prime time, but TV networks would receive advance copies of minute-by-minute convention-night scripts already approved by party leaders.

Conventions were now becoming extended, prime-time political commercials rather than events where party futures were decided—marketing opportunities that reflected the experiences of Nixon advisers H.R. Haldeman (a longtime J. Walter Thompson executive) and Roger Ailes (whose work as the candidate’s executive producer for television was chronicled in Joe McGinniss’ The Selling of the President 1968).

This year’s GOP convention already looks like it will follow this recent model. As for the Democrats—well, we’ll see if they remain bound by the rules they instituted a half century ago, or if they will remind viewers, after so much time, of the Will Rogers wisecrack, “I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat.” 

The image accompanying this post, showing the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, on Aug. 22, 1972, is from the Nixon White House Photographs, 1/20/1969 - 8/9/1974 series, in the White House Photo Office Collection (Nixon Administration), 1/20/1969 - 8/9/1974.