Is the party over?

Democrats may have just sounded the death knell for national political conventions. When Vice President Kamala Harris received her party's presidential nomination via a "virtual roll call" Aug. 6 — 13 days before the Democratic National Convention, which begins Monday in Chicago — it exposed the needlessness of the elaborate and grossly expensive quadrennial tradition.

The event is now as outdated as powdered wigs and the town crier. When the first national political convention was held in the United States, it served a need. Some 155 delegates from 18 of the then-24 states met in a large saloon in Baltimore on Dec.

13, 1831, and unanimously made Henry Clay the National Republican presidential candidate in the following year's contest. Though he lost, a winning tradition was born. For more than a century, a party's nominee J.

MARK was chosen at a convention. Highly important POWELL but less conspicuous, party platforms also were adopted. Over time, things changed.

State presidential primaries, held since the early 1900s, were often little more than political beauty contests with little practical eff ect. But they came into their own in 1960 when John F. Kennedy used the primary route to demonstrate to the city bosses who controlled the Democratic Party machinery that his Catholicism was not an obstacle to winning in November.

In the early 1970s, a wave of populism shifted power from the smoke-filled rooms of convention lore to the primary and caucus system. When little-kn.