Thursday, July 29, 2004

CONVENTION WEBLOG Continuing Coverage From This Week's Democratic National Convention Issues in depth: The Chronicle's coverage of Election 2004. Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints By JEFFREY SELINGO Boston One Man's Treasure ... JULY 29, 5:30 P.M. -- After the blizzard of balloons drops from the ceiling of the Fleet Center tonight, at the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention here, if you see someone walking off with the Massachusetts state standard -- one of those prominent signs firmly planted on the floor to identify the delegation -- it just might be Harry Rubenstein, a curator of the political-history collection at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. Rubenstein has had his eye on the sign for Massachusetts, the home state of both the presidential nominee, John F. Kerry, and the convention. But he knows he will need to move fast because the standards tend to "come down like goal posts," according to convention organizers. The Massachusetts sign and anything else that Rubenstein and his colleague -- Larry Bird (no, not the famous Boston Celtics basketball star) -- collect here this week will end up in the museum's 90,000-item collection. Their goal is to pick up stuff like signs, hats, and any other memorabilia that capture the mood of the event. "We want to preserve it and have it for researchers in the future who can use it to explain this political process," Rubenstein said. The best items are those that are unique, usually homemade signs and hats. "The more meaningful it is to the delegate," he said, "the more valuable it is to us." Rubenstein and Bird have trolled the floor each night of the convention, asking people to part with the items for the benefit of posterity. Surprisingly, most people are willing to give up their stuff, although they usually ask to send it to the Smithsonian after the convention is over. Among the most interesting goods promised so far: a paper bag, embellished with political slogans, that a Dennis Kucinich delegate has been wearing over his head; a pink slip worn by several women as a message to President Bush that he will soon be out of a job; and one of several hats made by a delegate from the political signs distributed in the hall each night. In addition to the goodies that Rubenstein and Bird collect directly from delegates, they try to obtain materials used by the news media, the convention hosts, and other individuals associated with the event. And just in case they miss something, Rubenstein and Bird plan to stick around the hall tonight, after everyone has left, to see if there might be a "find" on the convention floor. Music to Their Ears JULY 29, 1:40 P.M. -- As the delegates left the Fleet Center last night after the acceptance speech by Sen. John Edwards, a few were caught humming the tune that kept playing as he thanked the crowd: Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke." It's not clear if the campaign staffers who picked that song recognized the significance of its title. But if they did, they probably should keep quiet about it. Edwards graduated from North Carolina State University and got his law degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While the song is about Duke Ellington, the title nonetheless appears to allude to a bitter nearby rival of those two colleges: Duke University. Edwards, by the way, is the first Democratic nominee for president or vice president since Walter Mondale, in 1984, to have received both an undergraduate and postgraduate degree from a public university. Stars in Their Eyes JULY 29, 10:45 A.M. -- With so many Hollywood celebrities here in town this week for the convention, many Bostonians probably thought for a moment that they had moved to the other coast to escape the traffic nightmare that was expected -- but never materialized -- because of the security surrounding the event. Among my celebrity sightings: Jason Bateman, Billy Baldwin, Wendie Malick, and Michael Moore, who sat next to Jimmy Carter on Monday night. The most overexposed celebrity this week: Ben Affleck, a Boston native. Affleck showed up on the convention floor last night, during Sen. John Edwards's acceptance speech. As convention staff members tried desperately to navigate the crowded floor in order to hand out red placards reading "Edwards," Affleck caused a mob scene in front of the Colorado delegation, where a riser had been set up for television reporters to conduct interviews and stand-ups. As an NBC reporter waited for the go-ahead to interview Affleck, delegates and even other members of the news media pestered him for his autograph and snapped his picture (all while Edwards was promising that "hope is on the way"). Eventually, the NBC reporter told Affleck that the interview was not going to happen -- after all, Edwards was still speaking -- and the actor left. The connection between Hollywood and the White House goes back to President Warren G. Harding, who was the first to use entertainers on the campaign trail, said Alan Schroeder, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University here and author of Celebrity-in-Chief: How Show Business Took Over the White House (Westview Press, 2004). "Democrats do exceedingly well in the show-biz community," Schroeder said. "Republicans attract the second-string, Hollywood Squares crowd." (Paging Governor Schwarzenegger?) The meeting of the egos comes about, Schroeder said, because entertainers want to be taken more seriously and politicians want to be as popular as entertainers. Sometimes, the association between the two can spark a backlash among fans who may disagree with the politics of their favorite entertainer. Schroeder cited Sammy Davis Jr., who embraced Richard Nixon at the 1972 Republican convention. After that, his live audiences were mostly white. A more recent example is the Dixie Chicks, whose criticism of President Bush has resulted in loud boos from their country-music audiences and canceled shows. The same danger imperils politicians. "Entertainers say anything that pops into their heads," Schroeder said, "and that's exactly the opposite of what politicians want." For instance, during the Democratic-primary campaign this year, Michael Moore called President Bush a Vietnam War deserter during an appearance with the candidate Wesley Clark. When Clark failed to distance himself from the comment, reporters assumed he tacitly approved it. Bill Clinton was the most successful president in courting entertainers, mainly because of his charismatic personality and his love of music and movies, Schroeder said. And what about a President Kerry? After all, his daughter Alexandra is an actress and filmmaker. "Kerry," said Schroeder, "is not who Hollywood would cast as president like Clinton or JFK." A Faculty Pundit's 'Dream Job' JULY 28, 3:35 P.M. -- With the Democratic National Convention here in Boston this week, and the city filled with delegates, political reporters, and politicians from all over, there is no better place to be for political scientists. And they too are here in force, to collect research for papers and books, find nuggets of information for their classes, and, most of all, get quoted in newspapers and magazines or become instant pundits helping to fill hours of convention coverage on television and the radio. Some are in demand more than others. If you're a politics professor from a state regarded as a toss-up in the presidential election, for instance, you will be asked often to comment on the horse race. For example, there's G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, in the swing state of Pennsylvania. He said he was getting 5 to 10 calls a day from reporters even before he arrived in Boston. Then, once he got here, what turned out to be the news of the day made him even more popular: Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Sen. John Kerry, angrily told the editorial-page editor of a Pittsburgh newspaper to "shove it" during a meeting with the Pennsylvania delegation. So reporters started calling Madonna for his insight on Kerry's wife, who previously was married to a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania who was killed in a 1991 plane crash. So far, his quotes about Heinz Kerry have ended up in USA Today and The San Diego Union-Tribune, among others. "I've been getting a lot of questions this week on Teresa -- what kind of person she is, what kind of influence will she have on the campaign," said Madonna, who is also a regular pundit on several Philadelphia-area television stations here covering the convention. "More-knowledgeable people," he said, "ask about her impact" in western Pennsylvania, where she lives. For years, Madonna was at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, a state institution where he ran a regular statewide poll and served up similar political observations (this is his fifth convention). Madonna's ubiquitous presence in newspapers during the 2000 presidential campaign led Jake Tapper, then a reporter for Salon and now a correspondent at ABC News, to encourage college public-relations officers attending a conference a few years ago to develop their own faculty members as political experts to compete against Madonna. Tapper told the group he was from Pennsylvania, but had never even heard of Millersville. No word on whether Tapper has heard of Franklin & Marshall, where Madonna set up shop recently. F&M, Madonna said, had given him the chance to do the same thing, minus the teaching load he had at Millersville, just down the road. "It's sort of the dream job," he said. Students Learn to Be Ink-Stained Kvetches JULY 28, 1:25 P.M. -- Political conventions these days produce little news, but that hasn't stopped 15,000 members of the news media, including me, from converging on Boston this week for the Democratic National Convention. With about three media hounds for every one delegate here, the press itself has become a news event. Indeed, covering the newspaper, magazine, and television reporters -- not to mention the bloggers -- is a full-time job for 18 aspiring journalists at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Harvard University. The students are producing a two-page daily newspaper about the news media, dubbed Media Nation, that is inserted each morning in The Boston Globe. "A town of 15,000 has a newspaper, and this is basically a town of 15,000," said Seth Effron, a leader of the project who is a director at Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism. "It provides a place for the press to read about themselves." They have plenty of time and opportunities to do that. Every morning, copies of the Globe are placed outside the doors of each room at the convention's hotels. And each day, pallets of the paper arrive at the press venue outside the Fleet Center, where the convention is being held. (Besides the Globe, more than a dozen magazines and newspapers are given away free every day at the press center -- it's a news junkie's dream.) But a few journalists don't like getting a taste of their own medicine. One of the cub reporters, Jonathan Upton, a senior at UMass-Boston, said a correspondent for the Associated Press had refused to talk to him, saying he didn't like to be quoted. But for the most part, the students say the professionals have been receptive to their nose for news, even though they are the competition at times. "There are so many media people here, and there is nothing to talk about, so they start reporting on each other," said Devin Branhall, a junior at UMass-Boston. Effron said Media Nation had yet to report any scoops, but on Monday, it did feature an article that I didn't see reported anywhere else here: For the first time in at least 20 years, the Foreign Press Center, an arm of the State Department that supports international reporters in the United States, is not financing or supporting press centers at the national political conventions. Special Guests on the Campuses JULY 28, 11:10 A.M. -- Around 8 yesterday morning, a line of people began to form outside of Boston University's Tsai Performance Center, on Commonwealth Avenue. Curious passerbys wanted to know: Was it already time for early registration for the fall semester? Nope. A few brave souls wanted to be first in line to snag a seat for a live taping of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart last night (doors didn't open until 5). The fake-news show, which is based in New York City, is here for three days this week to "cover" the Democratic National Convention. With the Boston area home to the largest concentration of college campuses in the country, a few have opened their facilities this week to convention comers and goers. Among those campuses is Boston University, which set aside a 500-seat auditorium for The Daily Show. Several of the university's staff members, mostly in the residential-life office, also volunteered last night to help seat guests, and they got to stay for the show. "I've never seen it," admitted one of them. With a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showing that 21 percent of television viewers age 18 to 29 get their news from Stewart's show and from Saturday Night Live, it's pretty easy for Stewart to line up top newsmakers here. Last night's guest on the show was Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, former member of the Clinton cabinet, and chairman of the convention. Meanwhile, Northeastern University has opened the top three floors of a high-rise dormitory to the 21 delegates and 4 alternates from Montana. An article in this morning's Boston Globe describes their living quarters, "where bathrooms are shared, room service is self-service, and towels look like dinner napkins to some of the huskier delegates." The Montana delegates turned down fancier hotels in an effort to save money. They're each paying $77.50 a night, compared with the $200-a-night price tag at many hotels in the city. Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate who teaches at Northeastern and is well known for his frugal ways, praised the Montana delegates for their choice of accommodations in a speech to them on Monday. "It's a great atmosphere," he told the Globe. "I told a friend staying at the airport to change the reservation to the dorms." A Party Fit for Puritans? JULY 27, 2:50 P.M. -- The scene last night at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's party to honor Reps. Joseph Crowley of New York and Barney Frank of Massachusetts: A few minutes before 1 a.m., the lights flickered in the bar, signaling last call even as most partygoers were just arriving after Bill Clinton's speech, which had ended just two hours earlier. David Yellin, a new Colgate graduate who was sipping a Crowleytini, a special drink made just for the event, groaned at the warning as he chatted with Carlos Zapata, a junior at New York University and president of the College Democrats of New York. "This wouldn't happen in New York," said Yellin. "They party there all night." (The Republicans meet in New York City for their convention next month.) Many local businesses had asked Boston's mayor, Thomas M. Menino, to waive the city's strict liquor laws for the week of the convention. But the mayor, already under fire from residents for the traffic problems spawned by convention security, refused the request. "We come from a long line of Puritans," said an aide to Crowley. Still, the aide, who said he is a Boston native, did not understand why the mayor was standing pat. "It's not like all the college students are here to take advantage of it," he said. Beaming an Alternate Reality From Wisconsin JULY 27, 1:15 P.M. -- A group of 30 college students from Wisconsin appeared in the hall three times last night -- not in person, but on the giant screen behind the main podium. The live cutaways to groups watching the convention in other parts of the country are one way the Democrats are trying to connect the issues they are talking about here to "real people." In two of the cutaways, though, the students did nothing more than cheer in front of the camera. In the third, a student introduced U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin. Baldwin represents a district that includes the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and she was actually in the hall last night to speak about health care. While to those in the hall it appeared that the students were Baldwin's constituents, they actually were students from Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. They had gathered at the student union on Marquette's campus, some 75 miles from Madison. Marquette's College Democrats were contacted several weeks ago by the party's state organization to see if they would sponsor the event. With Wisconsin considered a swing state in the presidential election, the Democrats need all the support they can get in Milwaukee, the state's largest city. Madison, after all, is known as one of the most liberal cities in the country. Bill Clinton Still Turns On the Faithful JULY 27, 10:40 A.M. -- The Democrats pulled out all of their stars last night, including Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. But the biggest attraction for people here in the Fleet Center was Bill Clinton. At one point, the Boston fire marshals told people standing in the aisles between the state delegations on the convention floor that the hall would be closed if we didn't move. They have done it before: At the 1988 Democratic convention, in Atlanta, fire marshals blocked the entrances, making Ted Kennedy wait outside for a few minutes. Someone would probably get fired if that happened here. Even the seats in the upper reaches of the Fleet Center were filled, in contrast to the 2000 Republican convention, in Philadelphia, where a big portion of the First Union Center's upper deck was empty when George W. Bush accepted his party's nomination. Clinton was interrupted many times for applause during his speech, with the biggest roar coming when he told Democrats that "strength and wisdom are not opposing values." Delegates here from academe have complained often about what they've described as President Bush's lack of intellectual curiosity and his constant jokes about his own poor performance in college. John Hartman, a journalism professor at Central Michigan University who is a delegate from Ohio, said that if John Kerry were elected president, he "would restore the intellectual pursuit of knowledge." He called Kerry "highly educated, well read, and thoughtful, and someone college students can look up to." Tan, Rested, and Ready? JULY 26, 4:25 P.M. -- It was advertised as the official "kick off" celebration for the College Democrats as "they unveil their plan for how they're going to win the 2004 election." The featured speaker: Michael Dukakis, the failed Democratic presidential nominee in 1988. Although most students in the hall at the Hynes Convention Center this afternoon were in grade school when Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush 16 years ago, they gave him a standing ovation. "Let me begin with an apology," deadpanned Dukakis, dressed in a faded-blue Hawaiian shirt and khakis. "If I had beaten George H.W. Bush, you would have never heard of his kid. So blame me." Dukakis, who was governor of Massachusetts when John Kerry was lieutenant governor, went on to talk about how this year's election is the most important of his lifetime. He urged the students to organize off campus as well as on, in registering voters in their towns, educating them, and getting them out to vote on November 2. "For too many Americans, this campaign is a movie -- they never see anyone on their doorstep," said Dukakis, who teaches politics at Northeastern University here, except during the winter term, when you'll find him at the University of California at Los Angeles. After a 10-minute speech, Dukakis rushed out of the hall, followed by a small group of students. "What should I say to him?" one of them asked another. Both were students at Swarthmore College, Dukakis's alma mater. One turned to me and said, "It's very exciting when I see a Swarthmore alum doing great things." When Dukakis found out the students were from Swarthmore, he paused for a picture with them. A crowd gathered, and someone asked Dukakis if he was disappointed that he was not speaking at this year's convention in his home state. "No," he replied. "I made the greatest speech of my life in Atlanta and, unfortunately, it was all downhill from there." Campaign Tips From Jerry Springer JULY 26, 2:45 P.M. -- The College Democrats' convention is piggybacking on the Democratic National Convention here. The students' convention started on Saturday and ends today, although many students say they are staying through the week, some of them to participate in Howard Dean's Take Back America conference, which begins tomorrow. Many of them, like Lydia Satcher, a senior at Auburn University, are angling to get into the Fleet Center, the convention venue, to see some of the prime-time speakers, like former President Bill Clinton, who is appearing tonight. "It's tough to get in there," she said. Indeed, when I asked another student if I could sneak onto her computer to send an e-mail message, she looked at the credentials hanging around my neck and asked, "Is it worth your pass?" It wasn't. While getting into the Fleet Center may be tough for those students, it seems they know how to finagle their way into the best parties in town. Last night, several of them were at the Avalon nightclub for a party with Howard Dean, the actress Natalie Portman, and Jerry Springer. Yes, that Jerry Springer, who is said to be mulling a run for Ohio governor in 2006. The former Cincinnati mayor turned talk-show host urged the students to run for office themselves. "He told us anyone can get elected," said Erik Winker, a student at the University of Tampa. And Springer is certainly proof of that. Virgin Voters at Harvard JULY 26, 1:35 P.M. -- What happens when you get fired from a losing presidential campaign? You end up at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. That's where Joe Trippi, the former national campaign manager for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, will land this fall as a fellow at the Institute of Politics. Trippi entertained a bunch of college students during a forum this morning at the Kennedy School, sharing stories from the primary campaign and telling them that if they had the power to send the recording industry into a frenzy with the Napster music-trading software, then they should use the Internet to get out the vote this fall. "If you Napstered the vote, people would be blown away," he said. One of the best efforts out there, he said, is VoterVirgin, a Web site started by young people to register first-time voters. "It's OK to break your virginity to vote," he told a crowd of about 100 students. "You don't need protection to vote." Kerry Takes the Field, to Boos JULY 26, 12:05 P.M. -- One of the hottest tickets in town last night was not a party featuring former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. It was a seat at Fenway Park. That's where the Red Sox were closing out a series with their hated rivals, the New York Yankees, in a nationally televised, prime-time game. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee was selling tickets for $5,000 each. Delegates and others associated with the convention were scattered throughout the stadium, many holding signs that said, "Sox Fan for Kerry." Their candidate, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, even made a surprise appearance. But when Kerry went to the mound to throw out the first pitch, you would have thought he was wearing the Yankees' pinstripes, even though he has represented the state in the U.S. Senate for two decades. The boos in the park almost equaled the applause. One of those booing was Ben Vincent, a part-time student at Boston University. While most Boston residents fled town to escape the throngs of visitors here, Vincent said he had stayed to be part of what he called the "truth squad," an informal group of College Republicans who are here to answer attacks, mainly by student groups, on President Bush. "Isn't it great that Kerry is here in Fenway Park, home of the biggest losers in baseball," said Vincent, who was wearing a Yankees hat. The Red Sox haven't won a World Series since 1918, although they did end up winning last night's game, 9-6.