DISPATCHES FROM DENVER | August 27th 2008

Roger McShane

"Americans have a remarkable talent for creating transparently pointless political rituals", writes The Economist's Washington, DC bureau chief. He takes in the media circus of the Democratic National Convention ... 

Americans have a remarkable talent for creating transparently pointless political rituals. The most pointless of all is the "spin room". The first thing that journalism's finest do after every debate is rush off, notebooks in hand, to a special room where the candidate's surrogates brief them about how well their man (or woman) did. Dennis Kucinich is building up unstoppable momentum! Tom Tancredo has the Republican nomination in the bag! The spinmeisters manage to impart all this nonsense not just with a straight face but with a look of complete sincerity.

The big question hanging over the next two weeks is whether the conventions are the most transparently pointless rituals of all. It has been decades since anything was actually decided at a convention. They have degenerated into little more than prolonged infomercials designed for prime-time television.

Every single one of the thousands of journalists here knows how the week will unfold already. Hillary Clinton will make a rousing speech about how wonderful Barack Obama is. Mr Obama will make a wonderful speech about how wonderful change and hope are. And the Democrats will pull ahead in the polls. Why endure the misery of a four-hour flight when you can just stay at home and watch the whole thing from the comfort of your La-Z-Boy recliner?

This complaint is not without merit. I have already passed a lot of time with journalists that I regularly pass a lot of time with in Washington, DC. I am preparing to go to seminars on how Mr Obama will govern that will be presented by policy wonks from the Brookings Institution, which is a few hundred yards from my office. Washington has arrived in the Rockies and is doing what Washington does best--talk to itself.

Even so, there remains something exciting, at least for people in the commentary business, about the sight of thousands of people gathered together to participate in a political ritual, however hollow. You get to stay up late and drink too much while discussing the minutiae of electoral maths--and people actually seem to be listening. And when you wake up in the morning there is a huge package of convention bumph waiting outside your hotel door.

The ever-industrious National Journal not only provides a glossy magazine containing everything from a poll of insiders to no fewer than three articles by the brilliant Ron Brownstein; it also produces a daily newspaper analysing what has gone on. There is even a political crossword for hard-core obsessives. "No hiccups so far", reads one headline, which is all to the good, since, at the time when the story was filed, the convention had not even got underway.

The convention also gives you a chance to meet real live Democrats en masse--people who live far beyond the Beltway but nevertheless care enough about politics to devote a chunk of their lives to getting their candidate elected (such as the women interviewed in the video below). One Denver-bound Democrat I met at Dulles airport was wearing a T-shirt that read "Kill ‘em all--let God sort ‘em out". (The TSA officials waved him through security without raising an eyebrow.) Denver has also witnessed a minor riot involving professional malcontents such as Ward Churchill and Cindy Sheehan.

But for the most part everybody seems disturbingly nice. Nobody complained about the 90 minutes it took for United to offload our baggage (they blamed lightning). Nobody seemed in the least put out that there were no taxis around for another half an hour. Everybody seemed to be delighted to be here--and delighted to be taking part in a history-making event. I overheard three young people discussing whether they should meet up at the black-Jewish mixer, the Hispanic-Jewish mixer or the black-Jewish-Hispanic mixer. They decided, in the spirit of black-Jewish-Hispanic unity, to go to all three.

(This column is part of a week-long diary about the Democratic National Convention, published on Economist.com.)