Yesterday was one of the truly happy days in my life. My Verizon/FiOS service added something like 50 additional high definition channels, including almost a dozen premium movie channels. The FiOS service now offers not just blazing fast internet service that never crashes but also the Golf Channel on high-def. If heaven doesn’t have these things, I don’t want to go. These joyous additions have brought back memories of the olden days of my youth. As a child in the 1970’s living about ten miles outside of Boston, we had six TV stations that came in with decent reception. There were the three original networks (Fox had sadly not come into existence), the useless PBS and two UHF stations. When the major political parties would have their quadrennial conventions, the three networks would devote all of their primetime hours to covering the non-events. For a kid, it was hell. Sorry for the rambling, but there’s a point to these nostalgic ruminations. Pundits keep offering analyses on the kind of convention bounce the candidates will achieve that look at the effects of past conventions. But there never have been conventions held in this kind of media environment. Three decades ago, you couldn’t get away from the political conventions. Somehow I suspect over the next couple of weeks the politically indifferent public will prove quite adept at avoiding the perorations of politicians they’ve hardly heard of and don’t care about. The only conventions that occurred in an era remotely like our own were those of 2004. All the other conventions were wholly different animals, having preceded the advent of the internet as a major source of news coverage and gathering. So if you want to compare apples to something at least a little like apples, it only makes sense to compare the upcoming conventions to the ones in 2004. John Kerry received virtually no bounce, in spite of the stirring rhetoric in his acceptance speech about how his mother taught him that trees are the cathedrals of nature. President Bush and the GOP ran a better convention and got a modest bounce. The upcoming conventions are akin to Barack Obama’s global journey. The candidates will receive a bunch of free media, and a fair amount of direct access to the electorate. But these are double edged opportunities. If Obama’s Ivesco oration is as lame as his “citizen of the world” speech was, he’ll damage his campaign. There’s an assumption out there that Barack Obama will get a big bounce out of his convention. He may; he’s a gifted speaker. But think of his upcoming acceptance speech this way – will he say anything that wouldn’t have fit in with his 2004 DNC speech that put him on the map? If the new material is limited to him whining about how mean John McCain is, it won’t move the ball forward. If Obama’s convention message remains as stale as it’s been the last several weeks, why will he bounce? There’s not some immutable law of political nature that dictates that just because the parties convene their standard bearers will receive a significant bounce. Just ask President Kerry.
