• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, August 13, 2024

What’s the better time period or batting order for a political convention?

Some might argue that a convention held closer to Election Day is positioned to be better remembered in the 2-3 months until November than a convention held a month earlier.

Or are these summer TV events just Short-Attention Span Theater, to be forgotten days later -- just like everything else that passes before our eyes in both short and long form?

Next Monday, the Democrats settle in for their four days of prime-time promotion on TV -- August 19-22 -- as they mount their quadrennial national convention in Chicago.

The Democrats’ get-together comes roughly a month after the Republicans held their nominating convention in Milwaukee July 15-18.

Where the Dems are concerned, there could be a downside to being the later convention. The hyper news media has been warning of violent protests outside the United Center over the issues of the day that have animated angry anarchists and others for months and even years -- Israel/Palestine and race, to name two of them (but mostly the war in Gaza, it seems to me).

The issue with the protests is one of optics. Chaos is not a good quality for a political convention. 

Chaos is the opposite of the picture of social and party unity that a political party tries to choreograph for these prime-time TV events.

From a television standpoint, rioting is so much more dramatic and telegenic than static political speeches. 

Drama outside the venue could draw media attention and cameras outside, neglecting the convention inside. Pictures of the chaos would be vividly remembered long after the oratory has been forgotten.

I can see it now: The networks mounting simultaneous split screens of rioting outside the arena and the acceptance speeches of vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz on Wednesday and Kamala Harris on Thursday.

How dramatic or violent these protests would be, or if they materialize at all, will not be known until next week.

In fact, they might not occur at all or, at the very least, fail to provide the dramatic pictures the TV newsers crave.

It should go without saying, but the star of the Democrats’ show will be Kamala Harris. She will close the convention on Thursday night with her acceptance speech. This is always the grand finale of political conventions.

Trump’s acceptance speech on July 18 ran for 90 minutes and lasted to well past midnight on the East Coast. It was the longest acceptance speech in modern, presidential-election history. 

Even more than its contents or delivery, the length of the speech was sleep-inducing. Harris would do well to bring her speech in a lot less time than that. 

C-Span screenshot above: Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally Saturday in Las Vegas.