Can This Relic Be Saved?

Like the Olympics, the Democratic and Republican conventions are elaborate media events staged every four years, with lots of flag-waving and anointing of popular champions. The difference is that many people actually watch the Olympics.

Whether it’s the Democrats in Boston later this month or the Republicans in New York next month, the conventions have become events so carefully staged for television that even the delegates will look bored until they’re ordered to cheer. In 2000, the major networks allotted four to five hours of prime-time coverage; because low ratings are expected this year, there could be only three hours nightly.

It was not always so. Well before television, conventions were an essential part of the democratizing of America in the early 19th century. They replaced the system called “King Caucus,” in which members of Congress chose presidential and vice presidential nominees. Skulduggery, backroom dealings and rowdy crowds ensured excitement at the early conventions. Whig Party leader Henry Clay memorably complained in 1839, after being denied the nomination in Harrisburg, Pa., “It is a diabolical intrigue, I know now, which has betrayed me.”

Decades later, little had changed. Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 Republican nomination, notes historian Eugene H. Roseboom, as a result of “midnight conferences of liquor-stimulated politicians, deals for jobs, local leaders pulling wires to save their state tickets, petty malice, and personal jealousies -- a strange compound, and the man of destiny emerges.” The atmosphere was always circus-like: Woodrow Wilson wasn’t nominated until the 46th ballot in 1912.

Today’s primary system, in which states compete to hold their primaries earlier and earlier, ensures that presidential candidates are selected long before the conventions. Because of federal campaign finance rules, the conventions can’t be held much earlier.

Democratic and Republican party operatives are reduced to imploring MTV and Comedy Central to train their cameras on the dullness. Web bloggers will get special spots at Boston’s FleetCenter. GOP organizers are counting on star power: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani will head the bill. It won’t be enough. Unless the candidates do something crazy, like John Kerry allowing convention-goers to select his running mate, public interest will keep dwindling.

The conventions need to be reinvented. Or killed. It’s hard to imagine what could rescue them from meaninglessness.

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