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I'm with Jay Rosen, so to speak (no known relation). While enjoying the sheer spectacle of being here at the Convention, I'm a bit overwhelmed, especially by the logistics of just moving into and around the Fleet center and wanting to be three places at once, various aforementioned technical difficulties, I can't hear the speeches very well from the 7th floor nose bleed section to which I have access, and am exhausted. And pretty darn starving, come to think of it. [Security confiscated two unopened cans of soda I had brought to the Fleet Center yesterday, but amazingly enough one can buy such beverages in the Fleet Center -- they just want you to buy theirs, I guess. Is this protecting us from terrorists? I doubt it. That said, there are so very many uniformed armed people at this thing, I just smiled and gave them up. I would have given them my wallet if they had insisted . . . Honestly when hundreds of journalists descended on Sarajevo for the first post-war 1996 Bosnian parliamentary elections, there was a better set up for coverage, honestly.] There's something frankly claustrophobic about the Fleet Center -- all these stairwells blocked off, an overwhelming amount of concrete cinder block, a desperate lack of windows, dozens of people waiting up to 20 minutes for one of four elevators that are apparently the only way to get between certain floors, and the fact that entertaining thoughts of leaving for a break entails contemplating the length of time and security procedures for getting back in . . . Like flying in post-9/11 America, once you get through airport security, you're pretty much stuck in an air-sealed universe 'til you land on the other side.
So I am taking Rebecca Blood's advice, via Rosen, and going to take a couple hours and think about what I want to focus on here at this amazing city-wide spectacle and try to get out of it what I can. I'm also going to put a couple hours work into a couple articles imminently due.
A couple observations . . . seeing all of these people in one space - Wes Clark, Clinton, Kerry, Kucinich, even Michael Moore -- is interesting and cool, but living in Washington DC, one sees those people more or less in their natural habitat in any case often enough. It's a bit of a DC road show feel up here.
Secondly, I kind of knew this was not my natural habitat when the convention audience gave a rousing heartfelt standing ovation to Jimmy Carter, just as he was taking the podium. I think Carter has done many admirable things in terms of democracy and peace promotion, but his presidency was a disaster and just what Kerry does not want to be associated with -- foreign policy impotence, essentially.