In his detailed account of the McGovern-Nixon race, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, Hunter S. Thompson wrote that the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami was “shaping up very fast these days as one of the most brutal and degrading animal acts of our time.”
And maybe his words apply today.
With journalists at the convention outnumbering delegates by a three-to-one ratio, I expected this to be the event of the year. I expected the hordes of press to track down leads, sniff out scandals and uncover dirt. And if all that didn’t work out, I expected to get educated on “the issues.” I expected to learn something about the real John Kerry.
But if anything, I learned that the whole convention—with its 15,000 journalists along for the ride—is just entertainment, a show for the masses.
The average citizen is barricaded from the convention, separated by snipers, secret service and color-coded credential passes. Think of the irony that the Democratic convention is closed to the public—but open to the media. And for the media there are six different colored press passes—like six different social stratifications.
As a notable Harvard alum, T. S. Eliot, Class of 1910, once wrote in a context wildly different from the one in which I quote him here, “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.”
This “shadow,” the gray area that exists between intention and act, the place where we hope the real John Kerry and the party’s real goals exist, cannot be seen during the three hours the convention got on network television this week. And it cannot be gleaned from the pull-out sections that the national newspapers have run all week. In fact, the Democratic party has taken every possible measure to ensure the elimination of this “shadow” from its convention, working to choreograph every moment of the image it has presented all week—its own carefully constructed page of American history.
Instead of running another story about how bloggers are revolutionizing the convention, the national media should focus on why the convention needs to be reinvented.
Everything democracy stands for is violated by the current convention, and it’s time for the party to listen to its citizens, to invite some of them to let their voices be heard. The DNC opened its doors to the nations’ media—constructing a tent from which they could file stories, setting up wireless connections for bloggers—and it is high time that they let the nation’s citizens participate too.
—Staff writer Lauren A.E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.