Talk about unintended consequences. Democrats may not know it, but they 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” on Aug.
6 — 13 days before the Democratic National Convention was scheduled to begin — it exposed the needlessness of the elaborate and grossly expensive quadrennial tradition. There’s just no escaping reality any longer. The emperor has no clothes.
The event is now as outdated as powdered wigs and the town crier.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. (Spoiler alert: He lost.) Though the candidate was defeated, a winning tradition had been born.
For more than a century, a party’s nominee was chosen at the convention. Highly important but often shunted off second-fiddle status was the adoption of the platform during that gathering. It’s a statement of what the party stands for and what it intends to do in office.
Over time, things changed. Though state presidential primaries had been held since the early 1900s, they were often little more than political beauty contests with little practical effect. However, they came into their own in 1960 when Joh.