Democratic convention won’t be short of political drama

DENVER — The four-night Democratic National Convention that opens here Monday will offer a televised glimpse into whether the party can engineer a peaceful, unifying climax to a raucous and divisive nomination battle.

Like all TV-era national political conventions, this one will be carefully choreographed and scrupulously scripted. But because of the one-for-the-books battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the script includes featured roles for Clinton and her high-profile husband.

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Ron Edmonds/AP

Work crews put the finishing touches on the podium at the main Democratic National Convention site in Denver.

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It’s a risk, one aimed at giving Clinton and her loyal backers several chances to take center stage, but one that Obama calculated he had to take toward the goal of putting the bruising primary season in the past as he accepts the presidential nomination.

What it means is a convention that goes against recent conventional wisdom by carrying potentially significant consequences for a party that might have some explaining to do if it cannot win the White House amid an unpopular war, an unpopular GOP incumbent president and a faltering national economy.

“It really matters in the sense that there is much more drama in the 2008 Democratic National Convention than there has been in a convention for a long time. That drama is watching the first three days and wondering what the last night will look like,” said Cal Jillson, a Southern Methodist University political scientist.

At least two of the first three nights are sure to include raucous demonstrations of support for Clinton. Hillary Clinton is listed as “the headline prime-time speaker” for Tuesday night, a billing that puts her above the keynote speaker, former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, now a Senate candidate.

The vice presidential candidate is listed as the headline prime-time speaker for Wednesday night, but former President Bill Clinton, always a headline prime-timer, also speaks that night.

“I think the great danger is that turning the Clintonistas loose for the first three days and then expecting them to come home on the final day in visible support of Obama is risky,” Jillson said in a nod to the ongoing hard feelings among Hillary Clinton backers who are peeved about a process in which superdelegates stifled her effort to become the first female presidential nominee of a major party.

University of Texas government professor Bruce Buchanan sees the Clintons behaving. He’s not quite as sure about the Clintonistas, who will be given a chance to shout their support for their candidate during a roll-call vote when her name will be put in nomination.

“There is a chance for things to go wrong and they do involve the Clintons,” Buchanan said. “This roll-call vote is a little dicey, this business of giving the two lead Clintons air time. Odds are neither of them will be a problem but that roll-call vote could be a problem.”

It adds up to convention that could be about damage control, and that also could put in doubt the post-convention bounce nominees usually get, he said.

“There is more to be lost than to be gained from the convention. It’s important enough to avoid the loss that they do what they’re doing in order to avoid defections after the convention,” Buchanan said.

Jillson sees a similar scenario, probably ending with something like 15 percent of Clinton backers coming away unpledged to Obama and continuing “to look for a camera, and they will tell you nasty things about Obama and say they will never support him.”

It could be measured in a single moment, according to Jillson.

“You watch the fourth night of the convention and you watch the end of Obama’s acceptance speech when, presumably, Hillary comes on the stage,” he said. “Is Hillary lifting Obama’s arm over his head saying ‘We are in this together and he is our champion?’”

“She has to demonstrate real enthusiasm (for Obama) and she has to shake a finger at her supporters who are not yet willing to join him,” Jillson added.

It’s not unusual for political parties to have to use the conventions to bring closure to contentious nomination battles. Sometimes it goes well. Sometimes it doesn’t and has a lasting, negative impact.

In 1976, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan seemed to have buried the hatchet after Reagan’s aggressive, unsuccessful effort to knock then-incumbent Ford from the GOP ticket.

Four years later, Democrats had less success in offering a picture of unity after Edward Kennedy failed to oust then-incumbent Jimmy Carter as the Democrats’ nominee.

In 1992, Pat Buchanan stole a lot of the thunder when Republicans renominated then-President George H.W. Bush.

Ford, Carter and Bush all have something else in common. Each had to move out of a nice house on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Some experts see the Denver convention as one that could have lasting impact in a way that few nominating conventions do, especially in the era in which they have become little more than political advertising. What if Clinton backers — especially women — remain outside the tent? What if Democrats fail to win in a year when so much seems to skew in their favor? What happens if the promising candidacy of the first black presidential major-party nominee fails?

For Democrats gathering in Denver, there is a lot on the line for a party that has put only two people in the White House since Lyndon B. Johnson threw in the towel on seeking re-election in 1968.

“It’s going to go into the last night before we know whether they’ve had a successful convention,” Jillson said.

Unknown — and perhaps unlikely — is whether the Denver convention will have the kind of lasting impact that some conventions did back in the era when they were the event where nominees were selected, not coronated.

In its current edition, Smithsonian magazine highlighted four conventions it picked as “the most consequential.” Included were the Democratic gathering in Chicago in 1968 and the party’s 1948 meeting in Philadelphia.

Ohio University historian Alonzo Hamby’s account of the 1948 convention recounted President Harry Truman’s effort to gain the nomination for the office he inherited when Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Enmeshed in the effort was a platform fight over civil rights - an issue that divided blacks and white Southerners, two key Democratic constituencies.

When civil rights supporters prevailed in a close vote, many “Dixiecrats” walked out and wound up as supporters of States’ Rights Party presidential nominee Strom Thurmond.

Hamby wrote that it was a convention moment whose lasting significance would not be realized for many years.

“Truman would not backtrack on his commitment to civil rights, but neither would Congress give him the civil rights legislation he requested,” Hamby wrote. “His successors as party leaders would show little disposition to push civil rights until the mass protests led by Martin Luther King Jr. forced the hands of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Only then would the ultimate threat of the Dixiecrats be realized - the movement of the white South into the Republican Party.”

Former reporter Haynes Johnson recalled the tumultuous and violent 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, which gave Hubert Humphrey the nomination against the bloody backdrop of police aggression against anti-Vietnam War protesters.

“It left the party with scars that last to this day when they meet in a national convention amid evidence of internal divisions unmatched since 1968,” Johnson wrote in Smithsonian.