GOP Convention Day 1: Tea Party, ‘Call of Duty,’ and walking vaginas
Daily report from the Republican National Convention in Tampa.
[http://clatl.com/atlanta/republican-national-convention/Slideshow?oid=6238871|
- Joeff Davis
- TAMPA, FL - August 26, 2012 - Jane Milhans points to the sky at the Republican National Convention Welcome Event at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida during a medley of the Pledge of Allegiance and God Bless America, “I just love this country,” she said when asked what she felt during the medley.
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James Richardson is an Atlanta-based Republican operative and editor of GeorgiaTipsheet.com. Each day this week he’ll be reporting on the highs and lows of the Republican National Convention from Tampa. All photos are by CL photo editor Joeff Davis, whose photo gallery wrap-up will run Friday.
Republican elders narrowly averted late Monday night a floor flight over a proposed change to the party’s delegate selection process, a storm that proved even more problematic for GOP convention chiefs than the wind and rain that forced a temporary delay of proceedings. Even as four Georgia delegates refused to pledge support for Mitt Romney, local tea party activists launched a blistering offensive against national party bigs for a new rule that would have given presumptive nominees veto power over delegate slates.
Julianne Thompson, a delegate for Romney and an early tea party activist, wrote in a Monday letter to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus that the change was tantamount to snuffing out the grassroots, whose influence is generally outsized in the selection process, in which the existing regime relies on local balloting. “You are essentially striking the first blow that chips away at that freedom,” the Georgian fumed in the letter, “and you disenfranchise the very people that turned the tide for the GOP in 2010 by returning power in the U.S. House of Representatives to Republicans.”
To bring the fight to the floor, in plain view of press and the public, party rules required a six-delegation minimum. But just as opposition had cleared the threshold, a compromise was struck that provided for delegate penalties for those party casters that go rogue. (On Twitter, Thompson said the new language was “fair.”)
WHAT EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT: The convention campus, which was necessarily designated a national security event for the huge diplomatic presence, has triggered an intense police force, roaming SWAT vehicles and riot-proof fencing lining a half mile-wide perimeter around the hall and center. It’s “George Orwell meets a ‘Call of Duty’ cityscape,” quipped the Atlantic’s Conor Friedorsdorf.
WHAT NO ONE WAS TALKING ABOUT: Isaac, the tropical storm bearing down today on the Gulf Coast, had the potential to do what no president could: bridge a divide between warring Republican and Democratic partisans. The Tampa Bay Convention Center, one of two buildings in which delegates and press are split between, was a designated evacuation site should the storm have posed a threat to the coastal Florida city. The practical implications meant that both Republican convention-goers and labor union protesters picketing outside would have been huddled in the same building. Also not generally discussed, lest it offend social conservative sensibilities: walking vaginas, courtesy of Code Pink.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR TONIGHT: Ann Romney and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie are slated to take the podium tonight in primetime addresses with especially divergent agendas: the former, to humanize her sometimes-aloof husband; the latter, to gin up enthusiasm among party faithful still smarting from the primary contest. The networks have only committed to carrying one hour of speeches each night, leaving erstwhile Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum in the cold, or sweltering heat and 100 percent humidity as it were. Others on tap include: Governors Bob McDonnell of Virginia, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Nikki Haley of South Carolina, John Kasich of Ohio, and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma.