RNC Chairman Michael Steele is skipping a scheduled appearance before the nation's largest gathering of African-American journalists, citing gastric distress.
The NABJ just sent out the following release, noting -- acidly -- that Steele's still a go for the Breitbart fundraiser:
July 30, 2010 - San Diego, CA - National Association of Black Journalists Convention Convention Chair, Elise Durham was informed by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele's advance team earlier that Michael Steele was cancelling his panel discussion scheduled for 4:00 p.m. today because of food poisoning.
The RNC statement reads, "While traveling out West the Chairman came down with a bad case of food poisoning. He is disappointed to miss the opportunity to take part in this valuable dialogue and looks forward to engaging with NABJ in the very near future."
Steele was scheduled to appear at NABJ one day after former USDA Regional Rural Director Shirley Sherrod indicated that she will take legal action against conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who she said caused her to lose her job. Sherrod, who appeared before hundreds of journalists at the NABJ Convention yesterday, was forced to resign after Breitbart posted a video excerpt of a speech she gave to the NAACP and accused her being a racist.
Steele is scheduled to appear at a RNC fundraiser with Breitbart in California next month.
Arizona Republican Party Chairman Randy Pullen, protesting, well, a lot, congratulates Tampa in a statement and adds:
While many will point to Arizona’s new immigration law as one of the reasons that Phoenix was not chosen, nothing could be further from the truth. Members of the RNC overwhelmingly support the immigration bill signed into law by Governor Brewer, and Republicans from coast-to-coast stand with Arizonans as we fight to secure our border.
A reader points out — and a search of the speech texts on the GOP convention site seems to confirm — a surprising fact: There hasn't been a single mention of Afghanistan at this convention.
Almost a year to the day before the Republican National Convention began, members of a self-described anarchist group gathered to talk about ways to disrupt it, including kidnapping delegates, sabotaging air vents at the Xcel Energy Center, blocking bridges and "capturing federal buildings"
Unbeknownst to the RNC Welcoming Committee, two police informants and an undercover investigator had infiltrated their ranks, according to an affidavit and search warrant application filed Tuesday. The informants and investigator accessed group e-mails, attended meetings, talked strategies with members and participated in camps and workshops.
RedState catches former DNC chief Don Fowler on camera joking, as he flies back from Denver, that Hurricane Gustav is a sign that God supports the Democrats.
A bad moment for the party, and a reminder about the ubiquity of cell phone cameras.
Obama chose a prominent Evangelical megachurch pastor from Florida, former Christian Coalition President Joel Hunter, to deliver the closing benediction, and avoided the ecumenicalism of many political events: He delivered his prayer "In Jesus' name."
UPDATE: An Obama aide clarifies that while Hunter's prayer was Christian, he told members of the crowd to conclude the prayers according to their own traditions.
The Obama campaign has devoted a reasonable portion of this convention to the dull business of organizing, with campaign manager David Plouffe making an appearance.
At 9:45 Eastern, the young state director, Ray Rivera, gets on stage to plug the campaign's text message program again, and announce that they've already had more than 30,000 text message sign-ups today.
This is partly about national organizing, largely about Colorado, and also to a degree about Obama's message, a chance to cast him as the candidate of the grass roots.
The "American Voices" segment of the convention has the crowd totally engaged and waving flags; it's the sort of thing that often feels like filler, but seems to have worked here.
Obama wasn't able to roll out a major Republican endorser at this convention — Eisenhowers don't really count as apostates any more — so he gives prime time to a pair of Republicans in the last two slots. The core message isn't about Obama's biography or his character: It's that American workers can't take more GOP economic policy.
"I can't afford four more years of this," says Pamela Cash-Roper.
She's followed by a man selected in part for his name.
"We need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney," Smith says.
The viral e-mails have taken such a large role in this campaign that a prime-time speaker, an Ohio teacher named Monica Early, addresses them directly.
She got the e-mails, she said, and did her own Googling:
"What I discovered is that Barack Obama is a man of faith, a man of values, and a man of action," she said. "I am grateful for the e-mail that tried to scare me — it brought me here."
Time Kaine's young, wholesome presence gives you the immediate sense of why he was a tempting vice presidential choice, and he delivers another jab at McCain. It's a passing shot -- the convention never turned into a sustained barrage -- and it recalled some of the themes of class that John Edwards spent a lot of time talking about in the primary.
Maybe for John McCain the American dream means seven houses—and if that’s your America, John McCain is your candidate. But for the rest of us, the American dream means one home—in a safe neighborhood, with good schools and good health care and a little money left over every month to go out for dinner and save for the future.
Kaine's speech also has a religious overlay, and he closes with a reference to a hymn, and a call to move mountains with faith.
Invesco Field at Mile High seems a bit more than half full as the speeches really get under way, and the stadium does change the feel of the event. The first three days of the convention felt like the internal party gatherings they were; the giant venue feels like a rally or a sporting event. They're doing the wave in the upper deck. The effect that the campaign was shooting for — an open, rather than a closed gathering — comes through in the stadium, though I'm not sure how it will translate on television.
As at most of Obama's large events, the crowd is strikingly diverse, by race and by age. Martin Luther King III drew their applause for telling them that his father would be proud of the party that nominated Obama and of the country that would elect him.
They're seated unevenly, because a large share of the seats in the stadium are obstructed — behind the stage, or behind the press risers facing it. The seats in front of the stage each had the name of an ordinary supporter taped to it, and they've filed in to fill the inner ring. Beyond them, the seats for delegates on the floor of the convention are almost entirely taken.
The stadium has also been scrubbed of competing brands: Black cloth covers six advertisements on each side of the satdium, and the word "Change" rotates with the candidate's name and his website.
"Why did you join the campaign for change?" asks the giant monitor at one end of the field, asking supporters to text in their answers.
Reporters, meanwhile, wander the field grabbing interviews — Mike Dukakis and Jesse Jackson each addressed press packs behind the riser — and sit in the neat, air-conditioned, glassed in press boxes above the mezzanine, asking one another whom McCain will choose as his running mate.
Kitsch is a convention constant, but the classical backdrop to Obama's speech isn't any subtler up close, from the floor of Invesco Field. The tight shots may not capture this — there are windows with panes in the gaps between columns that feel a little more humble — but the cutaways will be all Caesar's Palace.
I ran across a DNCC interview from January with Bruce Rodgers, the veteran stage designer — he's done Super Bowl halftime shows, rock concerts, and other huge events — who put the event together.
His take:
The pressure on this project is all about creating something that will inspire people visually and speak to people from all walks of life. I deal with this pressure by reminding myself where I come from, my family, my hometown, etc. — that I’m part of the audience of normal people that want a positive exciting outlook on life.
No complaints from the building, and — as often at these huge Obama events — wildly diverse crowd.
Also at Invesco: Coors ads everywhere, but no beer at the concession stands.
UPDATE: A couple of pros email that we should wait to judge the set.
"Those columns might look a whole lot different tonight under theatrical lighting than they do right
now," emails a lighting designer. "I think the Roman column thing is getting overblown."
Though there has been a bit of chatter at this convention about the Obama campaign homogenizing the speakers' words — as there always is — this seems, relative to other conventions, to have been loosely controlled.
Brian Schweitzer's speech, as I reported before, was freelanced. A leadership source tells my colleague John Bresnahan that Harry Reid's came in quite late, and had just minor changes. John Kerry's staff says his went straight to the TelePrompter. And Bill Clinton wasn't taking edits from anyone.
The downside to this, as Noam Schieber notes, was that the convention wasn't simply hammering home one message, over and over, with the kind of clarity and repetition familiar from GOP conventions.
The upside is that those were some pretty good speeches.
There's lots of ticket cadging going on in Denver today, but this posting in the "casual encounters" section of Craigslist is hard to beat:
I am a card carrying Dem but that's only part of my interest in this week. This week has brought more excitement, people, and activity than I will probably ever see here again. I just need the right guy to help me plug into it all.
I'm downtown today and would love to accompany you tonight's speech and the parties afterward. I'm real. I like sex but I'm not a ho, so please show some respect. I'm 43, 5'6", slender, brown hair, hazel eyes, hispanic, ex-model.
I could easily meet you for coffee, lunch or drinks to see if we click ... if you reply with a pic, I will respond one way or the other. Let's enjoy the day, see our next President speak and celebrate afterwards.
The post in the "w4m" section of Denver's Craigslist page is illustrated with a snapshot of the poster's cleavage.
Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer said his show-stealing speech Tuesday night, which brought the crowd in Denver to its feet and made him the talk of the convention, was a last-minute improvisation that departed from the prepared remarks he'd agreed on with the Obama campaign.
"We had a convention that went through the first day and didn't get anybody fired up," said Schweitzer, who spoke on the second evening after keynote speaker Mark Warner of Virginia. "We didn't have anybody stand up, and we didn't have anybody get excited," he said.
"Sometimes you go to the line and you say, 'Let's go,'" he said in a brief interview after appearing on a Politico/Yahoo!/Denver Post panel at the Denver Athletic Club.
Schweitzer, other sources said, had already clashed with convention organizers over the editing of his speech. So when he took the stage, the Montana governor expanded dramatically on a prepared text sent by the campaign to reporters, adding signature language that stuck out from the rest of the speakers' words -- he was the only one talking about "petro-dictators" -- and offered a rhetorical merger of environmentalism and patriotism.
"If you would have turned around and looked at the teleprompter, you would have seen that for most of my speech, it didn't move," he said.
The result: The best received speeches in Denver, Schweitzer's and former President Bill Clinton's, were among those over which the Obama campaign had the least control.
"I thought it was a pretty good line when I said, 'The petro-dictators will never own American wind and sunshine,'" he said.
The campaign e-mails with more detail on the peristyle:
There are two podiums, a main one at the end of a runway centered on the stage and one at a lower elevation on stage right. The main podium is set up "in the round" so that the audience will be all around the speaker. The backdrop includes two large Greek pillars flanking a video screen at each end of the stage, and then eight smaller columns framing a classical style backdrop. There are ten stairs leading up to the main podium in the round. Black drapes covered up all advertising in the stadium.
Obama, at the end of his appearance, takes a moment to explain the choice of a football stadium for the convention's final day, which worries some Democrats.
"At the start of this campaign, we had a very simple idea, which is: Change in America doesn't start from the top down, it starts from the bottom up," he says. "We want to open up this convention to make sure that everyone who wants to come can join in the party, can join in the effort to take America back."
He also offers generous praise to the prior speakers, including Bill Clinton: "President Bill Clinton reminded us of what it’s like when you’ve got a president who actually puts people first," he says.
John Kerry has emerged, a bit unexpectedly, as a leading Obama surrogate, and an old McCain friend — he essentially asked him to be his running mate in 2004 — willing to attack the Republican nominee.
I have known and been friends with John McCain for almost 22 years. But every day now I learn something new about candidate McCain. To those who still believe in the myth of a maverick instead of the reality of a politician, I say, let’s compare Sen. McCain to candidate McCain.
Candidate McCain now supports the wartime tax cuts that Sen. McCain once denounced as immoral. Candidate McCain criticizes Sen. McCain’s own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding? Talk about being for it before you’re against it.
Let me tell you, before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself. And what’s more, Sen. McCain, who once railed against the smears of Karl Rove when he was the target, has morphed into candidate McCain who is using the same “Rove” tactics and the same “Rove” staff to repeat the same old politics of fear and smear. Well, not this year, not this time. The Rove-McCain tactics are old and outworn, and America will reject them in 2008.
So remember, when we choose a commander-in-chief this November, we are electing judgment and character, not years in the Senate or years on this earth. Time and again, Barack Obama has seen farther, thought harder, and listened better. And time and again, Barack Obama has been proven right.
Also, this long campaign has developed its own cast of characters, and Charlie Payne, Obama's uncle who served in World War II, is one. So instead of hailing a symbolic soldier or veteran in the rafters, Kerry hailed a symbolic "American hero" who's also a real character in the narrative of the race. (Republicans briefly attacked, and then quickly backed off, Obama's confusion over which concentration camp Payne had helped liberate.)
His appearance beside Michelle Obama in the box, waving a bit tentatively, was his first public appearance.
