Convention
season is upon us. There will be clichés, giant flags, funny
hats--and much, much whining about how these party-themed infomercials
aren’t worth our time. But are there ways in which we could genuinely improve
the content of the conventions? We asked a few friends of the magazine to offer
their suggestions. Here’s James Galbraith, professor of
economics and government at the University
of Texas and author of The
Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals
Should Too.
Twenty
years ago, I encountered in the halls of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public
Affairs my elderly colleague Emmette Redford, President Johnson's boyhood
friend and distinguished administrative historian. Emmette asked if I was
planning to attend that year's Democratic convention. I said no, I had already attended one
interesting convention, in 1968.
"I
know what you mean," he replied, "I also attended one interesting
convention. In 1928."
I had
in fact attended three Democratic conventions by then. The first was in Chicago,
where I managed to be in Grant Park the night the police beat up everyone in Lincoln Park. The next
night I was at the hall, to watch my father second the nomination of Eugene
McCarthy, and to march back by candlelight, after they beat up everyone in
Grant Park. The following morning, my father extracted me from the Chicago
Hilton; that evening, the police raided my room on the McCarthy floor, and beat
up everyone there.
Needless
to say, that convention was a disaster for the Democratic Party.
In
1972, having just cast my first vote, I was an alternate delegate from
Massachusetts to the great meeting in Miami Beach, a marvel of procedural
struggle, late-into-the-night political discipline and popular democracy. Or so
we who were there thought. The rest of the country was not impressed;
apparently they wanted their television show over by midnight, thank you very
much. Richard Reeves later wrote that the regulars couldn't tell people like
the Galbraith brothers from hippies because we dressed the same way, but this
was an outrageous invention. I had a suit on, every day.
Needless
to say, that convention was a disaster for the Democratic Party.
1976
in New York
was the last convention I went to, and while it had moments of drama--“Ron
Kovic's great speech, "Born on the Fourth of July"--nothing important
happened. Mo Udall, great and gracious, ceded the nomination to Jimmy Carter
and the McGovern and Johnson wings of the party reconciled, briefly. That
convention was a success.
All
those since have just been television shows, scripted, fake, and boring, the
American political equivalent of Olympic opening ceremonies, without the
panache. And so when the editors of TNR
asked for 500 words on how to improve them, I offered just two. Tear gas.
But I
have a serious suggestion also.
As a
McGovern Democrat at the Johnson
School, I have a special
respect for these two great non-persons of modern Party history. Lyndon Baines
Johnson, born one hundred years ago, the greatest civil rights president since Lincoln, was airbrushed
from official memory because of the Vietnam War. George McGovern, bomber pilot,
was written out of the record because of his opposition to that same war.
And
yet the Democratic Party today is the product of these two men: of Johnson's
heroic stand on race, and of McGovern's heroic stand for peace.
It
would be an act of decency, of honesty, and of probity to celebrate them both,
this year.
--James Galbraith