Hi all, it’s that time of year again where election season kicks into gear. Which I guess means it’s time for me to get the blog back up and rolling. I’ve got a ton of good music to post about, which will come as soon as I can find the time. But election season really gets my hackles up, so it’ll mostly be political stuff for the next few weeks, as I take breaks from writing the dissertation and applying to jobs to write about whatever thing is infuriating me at the moment.
Today, it’s all the postmortem complaints about the conventions. They’re totally staged, there’s no real news, everything is a foregone conclusion, etc. All of those are true, of course, but why is that so damning?
Conventions used to fulfill one purpose, but now they do something different. If you’re expecting them to all be battles a la 1940 or 1968, you’re clearly going to be disappointed. But while the point of the modern convention is a lot simpler, it’s still pretty important. Namely, conventions are an opportunity for the candidates to present their best face, to communicate their story. The conventions start to lay out the key narratives for the last two months, they identify weaknesses and strengths. And, partly as a matter of timing, they signal an important point in the campaign. For a lot of people, the convention is the time to genuinely start paying attention.
Of course it’s all staged. But so what? Staging is a big part of politics, and we expect the people who are running for this office to be reasonably good at politics. If they can’t successfully put on a good convention, it’s not a very good sign for their candidacy. Much like the guy who doesn’t bother to shave or put on nice clothes for an interview, small failures on less important things provide a market of a larger unwillingness or inability to meet expectations when it comes to more important things.
Instead of complaining that the conventions have no real news, focus on the choices about what to emphasize, what to frame and what to ignore, how they include various elements of the platform, the detail of their commitments, etc. These things all ARE the news.