Happy Campers in Boston

Complaining about the empty ritual of the press complaining about the “empty rituals” that conventions have become has now become, if you’ll pardon the expression, an empty ritual–and soon enough complaints about complaining about the complaints will be declared an empty ritual, and so on and so on, in the endless refractions that carom through punditry’s postmodern house of mirrors, where all commentary is about other commentary. The disdain that political journalists express for modern party conventions (not only “empty ritual” but “staged,” “choreographed,” “infomercial,” and all the other seething pejoratives) is matched only by the intensity with which they insist on covering them. Every national political reporter knows the drill. He will sniff at how “substance free” the conventions are, he will roll his eyes at the inflated claims of party publicists, and then he will mow down his grandmother if she stands between him and the chance to get a good hotel room adjacent to the convention center.

In 2004 the traditional chorus of complaints has swelled with a fresh set of high, piping voices. These were the bloggers, nearly a hundred of them, or so I heard, who were granted press credentials and workstations and who arrived in Boston and set to work with the earnest, insouciant enthusiasm of the hobbyist, which is their chief charm. From what I’ve gathered over the last few years, clicking randomly from one blog to another, it is the job of a blogger to record his every neural discharge, faithfully and minutely, leaving no thought unpublished, no matter how uninteresting. Bloggers think and think and think and scribble and scribble and scribble, and yet at the Democratic National Convention, perhaps for the first time in their lives, they found themselves in a situation where, by general acclamation, there was nothing to think about! They were not deterred for long, needless to say. They started to think about why there was nothing to think about, and that was all they needed. They were off. Graphomania reclaimed its throne. The websites suddenly bristled with copy. It was a nice representation, in miniature, of the phases that mainstream political journalism has gone through over the last two generations, as conventions deliquesced from robust tribal gatherings to hollow “Up With People”-style stage shows, swarming with an ever larger host of reporters who’ve come to write about how little there is to write about.

Yet I noticed something curious in the convention blogs, during those jam-packed few hours before I stopped reading them altogether. If there was a common thread running through them it was a casual mention by the blogger of being interviewed by mainstream journalists. “This was by far the nicest interview I’ve done so far,” wrote one blogger–on Monday morning, before the convention had even begun. The journalists, of course, were writing stories about the new presence of bloggers at the convention. “Convention Bloggers Feel Their Way,” wrote the Associated Press. “Web Loggers Get Their Credentials,” said the Baltimore Sun. “At the DNC, It’s a Blog-eat-blog World,” said the Christian Science Monitor, unappetizingly. “Blogs Give Unedited Convention View,” said the Kansas City Star. And as these convention-blogger stories piled up in the establishment press–there were several dozens of them by midweek–the real purpose of inviting bloggers to the convention suddenly became clear: They were there to be interviewed. Huddled together in the Fleet Center, conveniently herded into their own seating section, thinking and tapping away, they served the larger goal of giving mainstream journalists a story.

This too was a nice representation, in miniature, of some larger phenomenon. I’m not the first to have noticed that nowadays, when a political party convenes for its quadrennial gathering, there are actually two conventions going on: the traditional convention of perhaps 4,000 party activists and a much larger convention of 15,000 political journalists. Both conventions fulfill the customary social and business functions of such gatherings, as surely as a meeting of the Shriners would, or the annual convention of the Direct Marketing Association: The participants hang out, gossip, drink, spend expense-account money, “make contacts,” do a little work, eat better food than they would at home, skulk through the occasional illicit sexual liaison, and gather scraps of information that may later prove useful.

This tale-of-two-conventions is now commonly recognized. What is less often noted, though it becomes increasingly obvious, is that as the party conventions grow wan and meaningless, drained of all surprise and news value and practical importance, they have been kept alive by the second convention, the journalists’ convention, which in contrast grows larger, more elaborate, and more robust every four years. The parasite has consumed the host. A national political convention is now an extension, an outgrowth, of something much more consequential and, from the journalistic point of view, necessary: The political conventions exist for the journalists who cover them. It gives us a chance to hang out–a professional reason-to-be, something to do.

I’d be tempted to say that journalists have hijacked the American political process, except the phrase makes the thing sound too sinister; who else, after all, would care enough about the American political process to hijack it? But journalists do now determine its pace, the shape of its narrative, its climaxes and longueurs–everything but its final outcome, which, like a last redoubt, has been left in the hands of voters. The process itself now proceeds, as it were, at the pleasure of the journalistic class. I first noticed this strange tail-wagging-the-dog development in 1999, when a previously unnoticed event called the Ames (Iowa) straw poll unexpectedly, after twenty years of insignificance, assumed cataclysmic importance in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

The straw poll was conceived as a fundraiser for the state Republican party, and it ran concurrently with the Iowa state fair, a colorful spectacle that, in the daily experience of a typical national political reporter, is as exotic as a circumcision rite in Borneo. This fact alone made the straw poll an enjoyable story to cover, but more important, the event fell at a point in the election cycle–months before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary–when reporters and pundits were growing cranky and impatient. Political journalists require constant stimulation. Nothing much had happened, politically, for what seemed like an eternity. The corporate AmEx cards were burning a hole in our pockets. Millions of Frequent Flyer miles were languishing, unused. We were lonely. We missed one another. So we made something happen.

Suddenly it was understood that, as a matter of “expectations” and “conventional wisdom,” the Ames straw poll was “make or break” for several Republican candidates, including such party stalwarts as Dan Quayle and Lamar Alexander. Six hundred reporters and pundits descended on Ames like a cloud of yellow jackets. It was a blast. Everybody got to be together again. The restaurants in Ames are terrible, of course, but it’s not like we were paying for it ourselves. “It’s like going back to summer camp,” one pundit said.

And such happy campers! It’s important to remember that, since its beginning in 1979, the straw poll had been nothing but a lark, a summer diversion for local Republicans who, while they were at it, might raise a few dollars for the party. It had no intrinsic significance. Its results carried no official weight. No delegates to the nominating convention were selected. As a measure of opinion among Iowa Republicans, the straw poll’s sample was too small to be reliable. What significance it came to possess had simply been bestowed by journalists who had gotten sick of sitting at home.

And yet–well, I’ll be damned–it turned out all the reporters and pundits were right! The Ames straw poll was important after all! Under the brilliant Midwestern sun, with the stink of manure rolling in from the fairgrounds and from the alfalfa fields beyond, all 25,000 votes were cast and tabulated (there are half a million Republicans in Iowa), and the reporters combed through the results before delivering the verdict. And the verdict was grim. Those candidates who had been declared endangered, who had to do well in order to, um, do well, failed to meet “expectations.” As a result, soon after the straw poll, Quayle and Alexander dropped out of the race for president; the course of the campaign had been altered irretrievably. The journalists had cud to chew over for months. Then it was time for the caucuses.

It’s not hard to understand how we got here, how politics became a slave to the tyranny of journalism. Conventions, primary debates, straw polls–no matter how ridiculous as objective events, they offer solace in what can be a lonely life. Unlike, say, Irish step-dancers or amateur chefs, reporters and pundits who cover politics have built their lives around an interest that almost nobody else shares. The indifference Americans feel for politics deepens every day, further driving the political journalists back on their own resources. It was only natural that in time we would seek out one another’s company, and delight in it, and grow dependent on it, and eventually, as now, create opportunities to indulge it where none existed before. So the conventions will go on and on, long after their usefulness has been exhausted.

Indeed, their lack of objective significance is quite beside the point. Last week, when you watched the network or cable coverage, the trend became plain. Instead of the convention, what you saw was the same people saying the same things they’d been saying all year, in Manchester and Des Moines and Columbia, South Carolina, talking and explaining to the audience the ramifications of what they weren’t showing you. Settled before the camera, or gathered in the press tent, these happy campers could have been anywhere. It doesn’t really matter–just so long as they’re together.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.