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Dave Barry on the convention
August 27, 2008
Dave Barry is writing a column on the convention for National Journal. It is the most fearlessly truthful reporting I have seen so far. (What a ridiculous profession this is.)
Call me a courageous explorer in the mold of Lewis and Clark if you want, but I did something insanely brave here: I traveled alone, on foot, all the way across the convention floor.
This is actually a lot harder than what Lewis and Clark did. Yes, they had to cross thousands of miles of hostile wilderness surviving on pine needles and squirrel jerky. But that’s nothing compared with the obstacles I faced. Spike Lee, for example.
Here’s a minute-by-minute account of my ordeal:
7:40 — I get a temporary media floor pass, which allows me to be on the floor for exactly 30 minutes. If I don’t return the pass by 8:10, something bad happens, although they don’t tell you exactly what, so you have to assume waterboarding.
7:41 — I step onto the convention floor and am immediately caught up in a surging mass of humanity consisting of every Democrat who has ever lived. Grover Cleveland is in here somewhere. Yes, he died in 1908, but the crowd is so dense that he is unable to fall down.
7:43 — Somewhere in the distance is the podium, where an important Democratic dignitary is speaking about Change. He is for it. Down here on the floor, we are wishing that our fellow surgers would change to a stronger deodorant. We are pressed together so tightly that some of us could easily wind up pregnant by as many as eight different people, and I am not ruling out Grover.
7:48 — Through intense effort I manage to surge maybe eight feet, where the path is blocked by a TV network that has set up a platform on the floor so its reporters can report on the convention by talking to each other with their backs to the actual convention. There is huge excitement in the surge as people catch glimpses of both Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer, who are, in this environment, the Beatles. The surgers all stop, whip out cellphones, and take pictures of the backs of the heads of people who are taking pictures of the backs of the heads of people who might actually be getting direct visual shots of Anderson and Wolf. It is a lifetime convention memory.
I find it distasteful.
Posted by: RCS | August 27th, 2008 at 6:25 pm | Report this commentRCS–Which do you find distasteful–the convention or Dave Barry’s column?
Posted by: Terry Walker | August 27th, 2008 at 8:01 pm | Report this commentHahaha, good old Dave Barry, thanks for posting it, Clive, I LUUUUUUUURVE it!! Is there a link to the daily colum?
Posted by: elizabeth schumann | August 27th, 2008 at 8:18 pm | Report this commentI found the columns, thanks so much Clive. Love it, he’s telling it like it is. Can’t wait for the next ones, including the Republican Convention’s!!!
Posted by: elizabeth schumann | August 27th, 2008 at 9:30 pm | Report this comment>>RCS’ remark is perplexing, but perhaps it is because he is heavily invested in security companies, which clearly get no respect from Barry.
The Clintons’ behaviour is becoming the story that I’m certain most journalists have been guarded against getting sucked into. They are feeding rumours and bringing down the party.
It seems clear that their negotiations to get the DNC to suspend rules and fund their debts haven’t gotten them anywhere. Clearly, they are disgruntled (in the legal and, one can suspect, the “couple” sense).
Obama in a pseudo-Roman/Fundamentalist temple in the middle of football stadium will be a moment of ridicule that he is unlikely to recover from. Even the most lyrical of words in this spectacular breach of Convention tradition will unlikely win a single vote or catch as many eyes/ears as the last word on the Clintons as they leave Denver. The decision to go with such a spectacle was ultimately his; for not knowing better, he deserves sharp criticism.
From the beginning, it has been clear that one power base would never allow B–H–O to have more than a moment in the sun. Their job is still an uphill one: they need to sell Americans McCain.
Posted by: wcm | August 27th, 2008 at 11:50 pm | Report this commentI found your article on liberals learning respect very interesting. As a 63 year old woman who grew up on a farm and was the first in her family to go to college, I have been a self-proclaimed liberal since 1959! I find your analysis simplistic and shallow. But then maybe I’m just being elitist. The fact is that many of the people you lump together simply believe what they are told and don’t bother to dig for the truth.
Posted by: Verna Caruso | September 8th, 2008 at 3:48 pm | Report this commentApologies. My previous comment was meant for Clive Crook’s column on liberals.
Posted by: Verna Caruso | September 8th, 2008 at 3:50 pm | Report this comment