Anyone who insists there's no difference between our two political parties should be made to attend their conventions. Even the high-dollar wing-dings thrown by the same lobbyists and law firms at both conventions look and feel different depending on whether it's D's or R's who are knocking back the drinks. And when you're actually inside the convention halls, looking down on a sea of delegates, you never have a nanosecond's doubt, no matter what or how much you may have imbibed, about which convention you're at.
That's because Democratic conventions are among the most integrated gatherings in America, and Republican conventions, not to put too fine a point on it, are all white. The transition, for people who attend both conventions -- chiefly, journalists -- is always a little jarring, and this year, it will be more jarring than ever, inasmuch as the conventions come back to back, inasmuch as the Democrats will have a black nominee and the Republicans a white one.
Conventions, after all, are a gathering of tribes. A century ago, nearly all the delegates at both conventions were likely to have been white males who drew most of their income from their work in politics. But Democratic conventions were national reunions of Irish and Italian Catholics (among others), while GOP gatherings were overwhelmingly Protestant. But beginning with the 1972 convention that nominated George McGovern, large numbers of blacks and Latinos -- and equal numbers of women and men -- filled the Democratic delegates' seats. The Republicans played catch-up with the Democrats on gender equity, but as their party moved steadily rightward and became more Southern at its core, each successive convention looked even whiter than its predecessor. Or maybe it's just that the Democratic conventions looked more diverse. Either way, to hop from one to the other, as I've been doing now since 1992, feels like you're looking at two different countries.
For the past several conventions, the Republicans have sought to disguise their whiter-than-white essence with their speakers list. This year, according to the list their National Committee put out last week, their featured speakers will include former Treasurer Rosario Marin and former Lt. Gov. Michael Steele of Maryland, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida. Back at their 2000 convention in Philadelphia, seemingly every African American in Texas who'd ever had a pleasant encounter with then-Gov. George W. Bush was trotted out to attest to Bush's liberality on race. The point of the blackface act wasn't, and isn't, really to delude blacks into thinking they have a home in the GOP but to convince a certain credulous swath of old-line Rockefeller Republicans -- the Christie Todd Whitman, Lincoln Chaffee set -- that there was still room for them in the modern Republican Party.
Until this year, the contrast between the two conventions provided no more than a backdrop against which the real conflict between the two parties played out. This year, though, the color of the two delegations, along with what I anticipate will be the age difference between the two parties' delegations as well, is very much part of the main narrative. Like the election of 1860, which saw America divide along regional lines, and the election of 1928, which saw it sundered by religion, this year's contest seems elementally one that pits the multiracial, multicultural America of the future against an older, whiter America that fears that future and seeks to affirm the past. The newness and the oldness of the two nominees overlap and complement their blackness and their whiteness and are reflected in the demographics of their supporters, both in the nation at large and at the conventions in particular.
The smarter Republican strategists, Karl Rove above all, have long sought to keep the GOP from becoming the old white party. They have read the census projections; they understand that whites will cease to make up the majority in this nation by mid-century. In the long run, the Republicans cannot survive as an all-white party -- but elections are not waged in the long run. The current election comes at a time when the Republicans are wholly out of ideas and identified with massively unpopular policies. It comes at a time when the Democrats have gone and nominated a youngish black man who brings America's multiracial future smack into the present. He can be defeated only by stoking fears about that future, by keeping it at bay. Old and white may be a prescription for long-term doom, but it might just be enough for the Republicans to hang on by their fingernails this time around.
It's the Pete Wilson story, the Pete Wilson curse, gone national. In 1994, Wilson, California's Republican governor seeking re-election, had had a lackluster first term and was trailing in the polls. He turned the election around, however, by his support of Proposition 187, a ballot initiative which banned undocumented immigrants from receiving public services -- even when that meant keeping uncodumented children out of school. That November, 187 passed and Wilson won re-election. And since then, California's huge and growing Latino population, now one-third of the state, has turned its rage on the Republicans, naturalizing, registering, and voting in record numbers for Democrats, turning California into the bluest of states. At the time, a handful of Republicans cautioned that Wilson might doom their party to permanent minority status by his brand of identity politics. They were right -- but the only way Wilson could win in 1994 was identity politics.
And so it is for Republicans today. Old and white, they cannot, in the long run, prevail, but old and white are really the only themes that work for them this year. McCain knows nothing about computers. He still is fighting the Cold War. But he and his party stand against a new order on behalf of millions who fear they will be even more displaced by and in a new America that doesn't look or sound like the one they've known.
The Democrats will look very much like that new America when they gather in Denver. The following week in St. Paul, Republicans will be white -- and in the long run, as vibrant -- as a ghost.
Editor-at-Large Harold Meyerson attended the 1968, 1980, and 1984 Democratic conventions as a liberal activist and has covered the two parties' conventions as a journalist since 1992.
