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Campaign Crawlers
Conventional Wisdom
Tampa becomes a living cliché, as it prepares — with dread — for what it asked for.
TAMPA — Clichés are hackneyed and well-worn phrases we’ve heard too often. But that doesn’t mean they don’t contain some wisdom. The operative one for Tampa this summer is, “Be careful what you ask for — you may get it.”
Tampa got it all right. But as the city ties itself in knots trying to prepare for the Republican National Convention here in late August, many locals are wondering if it’s too late to pass this hairball off to some other unsuspecting city. The whole business reminds me of Mark Twain’s take on being tarred and feathered: “Except for the honor, I’d as soon skip it.”
But Tampa rushed in, where angels had enough sense not to tread. So skipping it is no longer an option. In 2009 and 2010, Tampa city fathers and mothers duked it out with Phoenix and Salt Lake City for the honor of hosting the convention. After August 30, when 5,000 delegates and alternates, 15,000 journalists, and perhaps as many as 30,000 hell-raising demonstrators have departed what’s left of the city, it may not be altogether clear who “won” this competition. (When this contest was going on, I was pulling for Tampa to take the silver.)
Boosters, the political class, and those in a position to turn a few bob from the festivities are always trying to get big events for their cities. The economic impact and the “exposure” make these circuses beneficial for all, they croon. These claims are highly suspect. I’d be hard pressed to put my finger on any way my life is better because Tampa has hosted several Super Bowls.
And putting on a national political convention, Tampa’s political and law enforcement officials are learning to their sorrow, is a lot more complicated, dangerous, and a damn sight more expensive than putting on yet another Super Bowl. The complications keep multiplying, like clowns popping out of the little car at the circus. And the cost of the affair is beyond operatic.
Downtown Tampa will essentially be in lock-down for the melancholy four days. While the party that purports to represent the American bourgeoisie makes its case for how it will put the country back in business, downtown bourgeois will have a difficult time conducting any business at all. Auto-sclerosis alone, caused by cars, cabs, buses (oh my lord, the buses), and street cars schlepping thousands of conventioneers, journalists, cops, and demonstrators around would be enough to make normal business extremely difficult. Add roving bands of demonstrators and the chaos, fear, filth, and noise they bring with them, and downtown Tampa, other than hotels and restaurants, becomes a free enterprise-free zone for the duration of the free enterprise party’s stay.
The biggest convention wildcard, and the biggest expense by far, will be attempting to control and pick up after thousand of vandals that we insist on calling by the cuddlier name of demonstrators. Estimates of how many demonstrators will invade Tampa start at about 10,000. But some predict as many as 30,000 lawless resolutes will show up to raise hell, break stuff, intimidate conventioneers, disrupt, and generally trash the place and the event. Tampa has set up specials areas and decreed rules for demonstrators. But hard-core demonstrators have no respect for rules and will do as they damn well please.
The federals will spend $50 million in tax money for security for the convention. Much of the $55 million the local host committee has promised to raise (whether they will be able to meet this goal in this economy is an open question) will be spent on security. Every fourth person in downtown Tampa in late August will be a cop of some sort or a demonstrator. It’s a melancholy measure of how scratchy our politics, and more importantly our culture, has become when the city hosting the national convention of one of our major political parties has to spend more than a half million dollars on 1,400 gas masks. Tampa taxpayers are justified in wondering how much of the tab for all this destructive mayhem they will be obliged to pick up.
One of my hopes for convention days is that our local thieves, villains, and petty crooks do not have a field day plying their own dark trades once they realize how totally tied up the local cops are keeping junior bankers separated from anarchists.
Perhaps what is most remarkable is that all this expense, anxiety, and heartache must be endured merely to accommodate four days of orchestrated political speeches so boring that half the delegates won’t show up for them, and that the television networks will largely ignore (unless the candidate or some party official says something that can be turned into a negative story). The only hope of any real news coming out of the convention is if Mitt Romney holds off announcing his VP pick until then.
One of the booster’s dreams is that the thousands of journalists in town that week and with little political to write about will write glowing stories of how swell Tampa is, leading those not already privileged to be here to conclude what a great place Tampa would be to live or to operate a business. This demonstrates the boosters’ inclination to go with hope over expectation.
I was born in and have lived a significant part of my life in Tampa, and so am familiar with its many charms. But there are snakes in this garden as well. And national journalists, already cranky at being obliged to attend for four days to conservative Republicans that they don’t like, are just as apt to write pieces even snarkier than this column as they are to praise Tampa.
This has already started. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart will broadcast from Tampa during the convention. In announcing this the show’s producer told the local daily, “We look forward to enjoying the beaches and the exciting nightlife. Plus we assume this counts as a visit to our grandparents.” Very droll. Florida’s age demographics are not as different from those of the rest of the country as they once were. But Stewart’s job is to be funny, not right.
Another target of opportunity for journalists wishing they were elsewhere and looking to get even is Tampa’s brutal August weather. Even if there is no hurricane in residence or bearing down on the city — August is mid-hurricane season hereabouts — moving about in Tampa during the day in August requires a tolerance for temperatures in the mid-nineties. Walking outside at night is like dog-paddling through warm onion soup. Conventioneers let out on the town at 11 p.m. should not be surprised at temperatures still at 85 with saturation humidity. (Miami resident Dave Barry once suggested the legend on Florida license plates be changed from “The Sunshine State” to “It’s NOT a dry heat.”)
OK, perhaps I’m just a worrier. Perhaps things will be relatively calm during the convention and Mitt Romney and whoever he chooses to run with him will be given a good send-off into the general election campaign (this assumes Mitt has a coherent message by then). Perhaps Tampa will enjoy many of the benefits boosters promised as a result of landing this pearl beyond price.
But let’s not rule out the possibility that the folks in my home town will, after the fact, be envying the care-free days being enjoyed by the good burghers of Phoenix and Salt Lake City while we’re sweeping up glass and calculating how much this political rodeo and masa-cree is going to cost us. And also wondering who on earth brought this thing down on us, and what were they thinking.
About the Author
Larry Thornberry is a writer in Tampa.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (28) | Leave a comment
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Aristocat| 6.1.12 @ 6:44AM
Larry, you are a grouch...And you're not a funny grouch like Dave Barry. You're a boring grouch.
Appleby| 6.1.12 @ 7:13AM
I am always glad that Toronto is turned down for every major event it has begged to host -- Toronto cannot handle an ordinary weekend in summer, far less the Olympics, as the G20 Summit proved, we hope, once and for all. The Convention held in Atlanta brought an uptick in the number of prostitutes in town, and inspired our then-mayor Andrew Young to refer to the Republicans as "Smart-Assed White Boys" which inspired an entire line of merchandise from same. After that, when we were awarded the Olympics, I took my nephew to Toronto for two weeks and we enjoyed the few summer sports we actually care about and avoided the hoorah including, of course the Bomb.
Good luck, Tampa, and I hope the army of kiddies banging on pots with spoons will leave you a city to clean up at the end of the hullabaloo.
ggoblue| 6.1.12 @ 7:35AM
stewarts job is to be funny? i thought he was paid to be an asshole. if he didn't have colbert backing him up he would be the biggest asshole in history.
Cobalt| 6.1.12 @ 7:59AM
Jon Stewart is not funny, but his show isn't as bad as Saturday Night Live.
Louis Jenkins| 6.1.12 @ 8:20AM
Don't know which will leave the convention goers more ragged out. The humidity or the long speaches. Maybe it won't be as bad as our dear writer speaks of. Afterall, the heat combined with humidity doesn't give inspiration to the demonstrators.
TrueBlue | 6.1.12 @ 2:07PM
Probably the best result is that the heat and humidity are so high that the demonstrators don't show.
Von Mises Jr| 6.1.12 @ 8:48AM
Sweet Irony.
Florida has twenty-nine (29) electoral votes at stake as a tossup state. After Obama's OWS crowd rips up the place and beats up some grandmas as they did at the AFP convention in DC, we can put it in the Republican column.
Florida effectively will negate New York's twenty-nine electoral votes. The other two biggest states are CA with (55) and TX with (38). With Florida in the GOP column, the liberals monopolizing of CA and NY is virtually negated.
Looks like CA and NY will have to find some other way to close their budget deficits and debts than using two of the biggest states to implement statism.
Al Adab| 6.1.12 @ 11:24AM
Exactly so. OWS is fully preparred to disrupt the convention. It will not be pretty. In '68 I was at the Miami convention where the streets were covered with "proteaters" read rioters,. A waitress in one of the coffee shops we frequented watched events on the streets with tears in her eyes. "I reminds me of when Castro came, " she explained.
Von Mises Jr| 6.1.12 @ 10:21PM
In 68, we lived near Newark where they burned their own neighborhoods. They should have planned the Convention near DC.
Appleby| 6.2.12 @ 6:59AM
They did that in Atlanta, too. There was a trenchant moment shown on the news that I wish could be exhumed and put on YouTube: a Black woman screaming "Why don't we go burn down Buckhead (where the wealthier people lived, and me) instead of our own neighbourhood?"
The answer was a terse, "They shoot back."
Von Mises Jr| 6.2.12 @ 12:27PM
My neighborhood is replete with ex-military, hunters, martial artist and outdoorsmen. They stay in places like NYC where you find metrosexuals and cowardly liberals that they know that they can intimidate. And the fools burn their own neighborhoods simply because they are stupid.
Skippy| 6.2.12 @ 2:21PM
Florida is a "carry" State.
Stock up on ammo.
JimH| 6.1.12 @ 8:49AM
As a current resident of Tampa Bay and a former New Yorker I can say that Tampa has an obsession to be taken seriously and regarded as a major city. This explains its attempts at bringing the GOP convention and fortunately unsuccessful attempt at the Olympics here. It is really trying to punch above its weight in handling events of this size.
Obadiah Plainman| 6.1.12 @ 2:40PM
A fair point. Especially when you consider that Mickey stole much of the thunder over on Orlando and FL's growth in general has been disseminated among many major cities in the state. Yet in sports terms, it's still considered a "small market" (whatever that means) and, not unlike some Rust Belt cities, it has some peculiar inferiority complex.
grant1863| 6.1.12 @ 9:59AM
Larry,
the biggest wildcard is whether a hurricane came rambling through or like so many others just shows up in the Gulf.
As a Tampa resident at first I was excited to have the convention come here perhaps able to see or meet some national figures first hand. Now I don't care even dread it. Found out from a friend who's an off duty deputy, they're going to make a lot of them work for free while pocketing the money for other projects. Think I'll watch it on TV at Tampa Humidor smoking a cigar. Come up and join us.
Cobalt| 6.1.12 @ 11:29AM
Some large cities no longer want, or need, to host the Democratic or Republican National Conventions. These conventions are very expensive to host, a pain in the rear-end and places like New York and Los Angeles don't really need the exposure.
On the other hand, cities like Charlotte and Tampa are delighted at having been selected to host a national political convention, this time anyway.
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2012 Democratic National Convention Responsibilities
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Petronius| 6.1.12 @ 11:41AM
Palm Beach would be in bad form but that town keeps the trash out. The Republisnobs wanted to come here when Shameful was Mayor and his aides threw them out of city hall and told them not to come back. "We're All Democrats here!" was the parting shot. They couldn't try Texas. Bush country is right out. The other choices, Phoenix in August? Hotter still. And Sheriff Joe doesn't like the Feds. Salt Lake? out of the question even after Mitt made it. And the bar tenders from the beltway would have to be flown in to mix the martinis. The only place the GOP could convene and have no trouble would be Branson, Mo. where they sell anarchist hunting licenses, but the local cuisine is not to their taste. Mcmuskrat ain't kosher. The one place the RINO's would be right at home and perfectly appropriate would be Deadwood S.D. They deserve the salutation of "hey cocksuckuh", every time they appear on the streets. And they could buy up the cliffs in the area where they can each have both their faces carved. Is this a great country, or what?
satan| 6.1.12 @ 2:17PM
Pure poetry, Petronius. Nicely done!
Obadiah Plainman| 6.2.12 @ 11:18AM
Point of correction: SLC has some fine bars and some good mixologists, not to mention a thriving microbrew and craft beer scene.
SeniorD| 6.1.12 @ 11:56AM
Went to school at the University of Tampa in the early '70s. Worst problem back then was the ever present urban outdoorsmen constantly panhandling the students.
The city would do better with the Convention than with the decrepit site it used to be.
satan| 6.1.12 @ 2:13PM
I think Larry needs to get out more. The average demonstrator today is his age. I've been demonstrating since 1962, am now 71 y/o and very fastidious about my surroundings. His gratuitous insults to me and my compatriots marks him as an ignorant man.
satan| 6.1.12 @ 2:19PM
That also applies to the others of you pimping the same tired stereotype of the smelly hippy.
Otis, my man!| 6.1.12 @ 3:59PM
Yes, well at age 71 I'm sure you've had time to have at taken at least one bath by now.
Skippy| 6.2.12 @ 2:25PM
And proud that you haven't matured a day since then.
You greyhaired hippies don't run near as fast as the OWS youths, so put your flak jacket on backwards.
AllantheK| 6.1.12 @ 4:14PM
"The biggest convention wildcard, and the biggest expense by far, will be attempting to control and pick up after thousand of vandals that we insist on calling by the cuddlier name of demonstrators." Why can't these children receive as they sow? They come to steal, kill, and destroy, should they not receive rubber bullets. These (rubber bullets) are far less damaging than what they do. It's time to repay these deviants for what they demand. Destructive force demands retaliation. Freedom of speech is not in destroying property.
Ruckweiler| 6.1.12 @ 10:33PM
There won't be the rampant political violence on the streets of Charlotte when the Democrats have their convention, want to bet?
Skippy| 6.2.12 @ 2:26PM
That's because Tea Partiers have jobs.