DENVER - Presidential conventions are revving up, so it must be time to start tearing them down.
You've heard the criticism: Conventions have become meaningless. They're glorified commercials, stripped of all real suspense, choreographed more tightly than a Beijing opening ceremony. There's no real news, so why bother?
In fact, conventions still matter - just not the way they used to.
Yes, with so many chasing the same story, the coverage can get a bit derivative. The Associated Press explained the nature of modern conventions the other day by resorting to words like "choreography" and drawing comparisons with sports events such as the opening and closing ceremonies at the Olympics.
"Like a Super Bowl minus the game," wrote the AP reporter, in a clever, if not completely original, turn of phrase (its earliest known use, by CNN talk show host Larry King, was reported by a Sun correspondent back in 1996).
Some convention traditions, such as the roll call of the states for selecting a nominee, make little sense, since primary voters pick the winners now.
One unwritten rule that should never be repealed requires reporters to quote the great H.L. Mencken, still Baltimore's most famous newspaperman, despite being dead more than half a century.
Mencken didn't invent convention coverage, but he set the standard. (Frederick N. Rasmussen wrote an excellent Sun column on the subject in 2004; find it at www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/politics/). In the process, Mencken also established himself as a model journalistic whiner.
"National conventions are almost always held in uncomfortable and filthy places," he told readers of the Sunpapers. The "food is bad and expensive ... and everyone goes home exhausted and sore."
Unair-conditioned Madison Square Garden grew swelteringly hot during the legendary 1924 convention, when Democrats needed 16 days and a record 103 ballots to pick a (losing) nominee. Mencken's coverage that summer for Maryland readers included a classic description of the convention experience, now faithfully recycled by others every four years.
"There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging," he wrote from New York. "It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming. One sits through long sessions wishing all the delegates and alternates were dead and in hell - and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour."
