St. Paul — Students at West Virginia Wesleyan College who want a ring-side seat to the political-party conventions, need to only turn on the campus radio station every afternoon at 5.
That’s when Robert Rupp, a professor of political history at the college, does his daily political analysis, live from the convention floor. The half-hour radio show is an outgrowth of Mr. Rupp’s fall-semester campaigns and elections course.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Rupp sat high above the floor of the Xcel Center, watching workers run through last-minute preparations for the evening’s convention program, cell phone to his ear, fielding questions e-mailed or text-messaged to his teaching assistants, Michael Bush and Elizabeth Short, who act as hosts and moderators for the show. One student even showed up in the station’s studio.
Mr. Rupp, who was credentialed as a journalist at both conventions this year, held forth on the visuals (the Democratic convention, in Denver, was more “Hollywood”), the speech by Sarah Palin, the vice-presidential nominee, that night (“America tonight will find out whether McCain’s biggest gamble in getting a virtually unknown person one heartbeat away from the presidency paid off.”), and the marginalization of the incumbent, George W. Bush, who didn’t even appear in person this week in St. Paul (“The McCain campaign is doing everything it can to separate itself from the administration.”).
Mr. Bush, a junior majoring in political science, asked Mr. Rupp whether the Republicans can really claim to have party unity when 10,000 people showed up for a rally this week for maverick GOP Representative Ron Paul, in neighboring Minneapolis. The professor noted that Mr. Paul, like the other contenders for the Republican nomination, had offered to speak at the convention this week; he was turned down, Mr. Rupp said, because his speech was critical of the Iraq War.
Mr. Rupp has been attending political conventions for four decades and dissecting them in his courses. But with his radio show and a blog, he says he and his students can have that discussion in real time. A regular commentator in the West Virginia media, he also is penning a convention column that has been picked up by several newspapers and television stations statewide. He plans to continue the radio show through the November elections.
As a scholar of political history, Mr. Rupp says he is fascinated by the evolution of the nomination process. “Yes, it’s staged,” he says, “but let’s look at the direction the players are taking, at the new script.”
But he also wonders whether the party gatherings four years from now will look markedly different. Hurricane Gustav, he says, “might have put the nail in the coffin of the four-day convention event.”
