Convention

NEW YORK -- The NAACP and AT&T Corp. will announce this month a $300,000 initiative to narrow the growing gap in Internet and computer use between black and white Americans, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said yesterday.Through the program, telecommunications giant AT&T will provide hardware, software and on-site support for technology centers in 20 cities, including Baltimore, Mfume said. It will also stage technology seminars to introduce African-Americans to the Internet, he said.The announcement came on the first day of the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a six-day event here that will focus on myriad issues including police brutality.

There are no scandals -- and no reverberations of scandal. Only issues.For the first time in years, the NAACP heads into its 89th annual convention, which starts tomorrow in Atlanta, with an almost clean slate: Its finances are in order and its new leadership team is highly visible and well-respected.Now the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization has free rein to reinvigorate its activist agenda -- and counter perceptions that it is not relevant -- in an era when issues such as racism and discrimination are no longer at the center of national debate.

PITTSBURGH -- Kweisi Mfume shed his suit jacket, pulled an NAACP T-shirt down over his white shirt and suspenders, and plunged into the crowd.This was the 48-year-old former Baltimore congressman's new constituency as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: 500 Pittsburgh youngsters who had just been given free NAACP membership cards and learned to pronounce his African-inspired name (kwah-EE-see oom-FOO-may).Whether mugging for television cameras with these children, leading a youth march against police brutality, politicking with delegates to the NAACP's 88th annual convention or pushing through internal reforms on the convention floor, Mfume was at the center of whatever the NAACP was doing this week.

Rejecting Baltimore County's unofficial school board selection process as "exclusive," the county's only black state senator is pushing for an African-American educator to fill a board vacancy.Sen. Delores G. Kelley, a Woodlawn-Randallstown Democrat and an ally of county executive C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, recently arranged for Ruppersberger to meet the only black among seven applicants for the board.And two of the county executive's aides interviewed Warren C. Hayman, a Lochearn resident and Morgan State University assistant dean who has tried twice to win recommendation from the county School Board Nominating Convention.

Women in evening gowns mingle with men in jeans and cowboy boots. Everyone wears ribbons and badges with their name, hometown and the word "poet." They nibble on Goldfish crackers and celery sticks, and sip a red "champagne punch."This is the "lavish reception" promised in letters inviting National Library of Poetry customers to the International Society of Poets' annual convention. The letters guarantee a plaque commemorating the customer's induction as an International Poet of Merit and a chance to win cash prizes.

SAN DIEGO -- Sea World is offering Republican delegates half-price tickets to see Shamu. Qualcomm, a local telecommunications company, is giving them nearly two months of e-mail service for free.And for visiting reporters, a news center's staff answers questions, places restaurant reservations and fixes broken laptops at no charge.With the opening of the Republican National Convention today, everyone from Mayor Susan Golding to local restaurateurs is working relentlessly to make a good impression.

Anne Arundel County Executive John G. Gary is threatening a court challenge of any measure that would limit him or the governor to appointing school board members from a list recommended by the School Board Nominating Convention.Such a provision would make the convention more powerful than a judicial nominating commission, whose recommendations are not binding on the governor, Mr. Gary told the county's General Assembly delegation Friday. He said such a measure also could be unconstitutional, violating the one-person, one-vote rule, because convention delegates are self-appointed.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- Bob Dole apparently moved to within striking distance of Bill Clinton yesterday as the White House took a newly aggressive stance in the presidential race.A Newsweek poll published this weekend reports that Dole's performance during the week of the Republican National Convention shrank Clinton's lead. The poll gave Clinton a lead of 44 percent, to 42 percent for Dole and 3 percent for Ross Perot, who is again running an independent race.The Dole campaign's internal polls put the spread between the Democratic and Republican candidates at 3 percentage points, according to campaign manager Scott Reed.

SAN DIEGO -- Bob Dole and Jack Kemp arrived to an ear-splitting, flag-waving welcome yesterday in the city where they will claim the Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominations this week.Sounding confident, despite polls that show him trailing President Clinton by double digits, a pumped-up Dole tried to rally his party for the uphill campaign ahead. "Everything before has been a warm-up, a trial heat," the 73-year-old former senator told thousands of cheering Republicans in a waterside park outside the hall where the GOP National Convention begins today.

They called themselves "Democratic-Republican." Then "Republican Delegates from the Several States." Then, at a convention in Baltimore in 1832, they adopted the name that has endured: Democrats.Baltimore must have charmed them. The Democrats returned for their next five conventions, through 1852. Baltimore's attraction? In the decades when slavery was being debated, the city seemed a safe, middle ground between North and South.The Democrats hold their latest convention next week, this time in Chicago.

President Barack Obama recently did something very few American presidents have done: announced his intention to sign and submit to the Senate for ratification an international human rights treaty. The U.S. has ratified only three of 26 international human rights treaties; some in Congress cling to the idea that the U.S. should never sign any international piece of paper. Even Yemen and Sudan have ratified The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It's time for the U.S. to come on board.

ST. PAUL, Minn. - With soft rebukes of his opponent and his own party - and harsh words for the culture of Washington - Sen. John McCain claimed the Republican presidential nomination last night and promised that "change is coming" after eight years of the Bush Administration. The address was much like the candidate: forceful and blunt-spoken, with little of Obama's lyricism. McCain filled it with biography and calls for bipartisanship, hammering his convention theme of "country first" and jabbing Obama.

St. Paul, Minn. - John McCain's 10-year climb from his desk in the Senate to his party's presidential ticket will top out this evening at an arena in Minnesota. McCain, who was formally nominated last night, has memorably addressed national conventions since Ronald Reagan's presidency. His moving, patriotic speech nominating Bob Dole in 1996 helped mark McCain as a rising Republican star. But the stakes are higher than ever. McCain is trying to catch Barack Obama in the polls. At a late-starting convention, delayed by Monday's hurricane, he has been buffeted by questions about his running mate and how he chose her. Republican politicians and strategists, and independent analysts, identified five big things McCain should be shooting for when he steps onstage, sometime after 10 p.m. Sharpen the contrast McCain should draw sharp lines of difference with his Democratic opponent over experience in government, expertise in international and military matters, and tax-and-spend policies.

Cheryl Miller, 55, and her husband, Michael, coordinate the Volunteers for Obama office in Anne Arundel County. She is an Annapolis resident and mother of two who runs a home-based event-planning business. Despite studying political science at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania, Miller was not particularly involved in politics until this year. She was invited to a fundraiser last fall and soon found herself immersed in the Obama campaign, working phone banks and traveling to Ohio and Pennsylvania to knock on doors.

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Republican Party officials have developed a well-deserved reputation for planning ever more extravagant national conventions, each built on the party's ability to secure abundant cash. But just six weeks before the convention - at which Sen. John McCain of Arizona is to accept his party's nomination - executives found they were about $10 million short of what they needed for a party they had already cut back. Officials say that they have already secured most of the funds and that meeting budget needs was never in doubt.

Sen. Hillary Clinton's win in Pennsylvania's Democratic primary underscores the need for the Democratic Party to bring the nomination battle to a swift and fair conclusion as soon as possible. The best way to do that is to move the Democratic nominating convention from the end of August to the end of June. Why? When Democrats vote in Indiana and North Carolina on Tuesday, they will probably render a split decision, with Sen. Barack Obama handily winning in the South and Mrs. Clinton eking out an industrial Midwest victory.

The 2008 primaries have quickly shaped up as the most interesting in recent memory. Both parties' races are so tight and in flux that there is a chance in each party that no candidate will have captured enough votes to secure the nomination before the convention rolls around. This may be a far greater danger for the Democrats, because of a rule enacted by previous party leaders aimed at maintaining control over their presidential choice. In 2008, the result may be a Democratic convention choosing a nominee who lacks the legitimacy of being the "people's choice."

WASHINGTON -- They're armed with lobster and heirloom tomatoes, with plush carpets and flattering lighting, with a custom-designed bus. With free-flowing Chateauneuf-du-Pape, with endearing little presents, with fawning attention. Such elegant weaponry - one could almost forget there's true combat under way here as Baltimore, with its best crab cakes and confit, attempts to capture enough convention business to stay alive in a game that can be as gracious as it is ruthless. In a corner of Washington's posh Ritz Carlton last week, Baltimore's convention sales team courted a roomful of decision-makers, people who might bring their lucrative annual meetings to Charm City - or choose to take them to a town that charms them more.

CHICAGO -- The organizers of massive coast-to-coast immigrant marches tried to keep their growing national movement headed in the same direction yesterday by devising a strategy for the fall elections. About 400 people from 25 states gathered for a two-day national convention in Hillside, Ill., to debate how best to achieve legalization for the nation's 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants and a moratorium on raids and deportations by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Immigrant leaders created their first formal national structure, taking the place of a loose catch-all of labor unions, immigrant advocacy groups, ministers and students whose informality was once viewed as a strength.

LAS VEGAS -- Hundreds of liberal (they'd say progressive) Internet bloggers crawled out of their cybertunnels for face-time and political networking here at the first-ever YearlyKos convention. Named after DailyKos.com, the widely read political Web log by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the three-day convention that opened Thursday is something of a milestone - an event that unites the irreverent and ever-morphing liberal blogosphere with mainstream political figures who have begun to recognize the bloggers' potential influence.