Even before coronavirus, American political conventions were little more than TV shows

Television networks first broadcast political conventions for a mass audience in 1948. Production values were practically non-existent: grainy black and white

“I give you a fighting veteran, the next Lt. Governor of the great state of North Dakota, whose acres of wheat feed millions…”

This went on from gavel to gavel, all day long.

All of this dragged on until the evening, where the meat of the conventions was served: the nominating and acceptance speeches, the balloting and, of course, the obligatory balloon drop.

This type of coverage went on until about the 1980s, when the television networks curtailed their coverage until evening only, and the parties adjusted accordingly.

The first one I attended, at age 19, was the 1980 Democratic National Convention held at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

You could pretty much walk freely throughout the convention hall, and security consisted of a metal detector right at the doors of the Garden’s arena. NYPD officers milled around, but there was no overwhelming visible security presence.

It was a minor matter to get a floor pass during the day. At night, of course, you had to know a guy who knew a guy, and my guys were the New York Daily News. This enabled me to get in to see Sen. Edward Kennedy’s emotional blowout oration.

Ted Kennedy, at only 47, knew he was never going to become president, and it was etched in his face, saying: “For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

The applause went on for a full half-hour after that. The passion in the hall was explosive. The air was hot, stifling and humid. If poignancy were a measurable atmospheric event, it would have been 100%.

I attended several more conventions, Republican and Democratic, and by the time the 2000 Democratic Convention was held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, one thing finally occurred to me.

I was an extra.

A crowd shot.

I was playing the media in democracy’s National Television Show. This realization made that convention and the GOP’s confab in Philadelphia my last.

Sure, conventions were fun. Want to see David Brinkley screaming at someone on an escalator because they wanted to shake his hand? Atlanta, 1988. Want to see Eric Sevareid try to navigate a narrow, shaky metal tube stairwell up to the CBS News booth and watch Walter Cronkite’s back? Check. New Orleans, 1988.

Want to bump into a famous national anchor or writer at the restroom sink? Easy.

I was so bored that my colleagues and I used to play a game called “Taller or Shorter?” We’d see a media celeb and, if they exceeded or did not meet our height expectations, we’d make the call on the spot.

Sam Donaldson (taller!). Walter Cronkite (shorter!). And so on.

The pace of these things during the day was so slow that it mostly became a media high school reunion, except we would all interview each other instead of noting how fat, bald, and gray we had all become.

Fast forward to 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

No more convention halls, no more balloon drops, no more funny hats, no more Sam Donaldson-is-taller, no more Hey!-Walter-Cronkite-is-at-the-urinal.

Instead, we have a closed set in Wilmington, Del., where a few journalists and staff mill about in masks as Sen. Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in a vacuum-sealed room where one errant staffer accidentally clapped afterward.

The upside is that now that we explicitly know it’s a television show, we can watch it accordingly. Oddly, the Democratic Convention was something like compelling, as opposed to past DNC Platform Committee meetings discussing ag price supports.

In 2020, the roll call of the states became a visual travelogue. Real people told crushing stories of discrimination, death, and calamity. The drama of how the conventions adapts to the pandemic is far more dramatic than the outcome itself.

Media critic Marshall McLuhan once wrote that the medium is the message. Now it’s flipped on its head: the message is the medium.

We are here because of the medium, and the message is a more human story than bare, dry policy in spoken word.

I would not be at all surprised to see, in a (please, God) post-pandemic world that future political conventions will accept the fact that we knew all along: it’s a TV show. Frankly, President Donald Trump understood this way better than Hillary Clinton did.

We’re extras. We’re an audience. But this time, we can’t channel surf out of the catastrophe we are experiencing.

Trump will learn another thing about television, too: Live by the ratings, die by the ratings.

This story was originally published August 21, 2020 at 6:00 AM.