(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
The passengers on the streetcar inching along in downtown Cleveland, the waitress in the corner lunchroom, the riders on the train to the city's far suburbs-they're all nervous.
The waitress, who served some colleagues and me as the news broke of the murder of three Baton Rouge policemen, was visibly upset and all but trembling about the coming four days. The passengers on the streetcar, one of whom worked a few blocks from the Quicken Loans Arena, site of this week's Republican convention, segued from what they feared would be the near impossibility of getting around town, or just to work, during the convention to the general apprehension of what hell might break loose. The riders on the train to the 'burbs alternated between excitement and presentiment.
Cleveland is not an armed camp-at least not visibly, at least not yet. Despite laws permitting open carry of weapons near the convention site, there was, to my knowledge, just one report of a civilian brandishing a rifle here Sunday, a 57-year-old white guy claiming his turf in Public Square at the center of town. Happily, I suppose, nobody riled him.
But Cleveland, for all its sprucing up, is very much a barricaded camp, with tall iron fences going up on street after street in the downtown area, past which only credentialed delegates, muck-a-mucks and journalists can proceed, and guns are forbidden. Bikers for Trump and the New Black Panthers, however, have promised to show up outside this perimeter, fully armed.
In the wake of the Baton Rouge shootings, the head of Cleveland's police union
called upon Ohio Governor John Kasich to ban guns from the city for the next four days, but the governor's spokesperson replied that Kasich has no such powers. T
he police union head equated the situation to banning the shouting of "Fire!" in a crowded theater-Supreme Court Justice Olver Wendell Holmes's famous illustration of a statement that falls outside the First Amendment's protections-but we don't have a similar judicial diktat on what instances fall outside the Second Amendment's presumed protections, and it's not clear who would invoke it even if we had. As has been widely reported, the city and the Secret Service have banned tennis balls and squirt guns from the city center, but has been powerless to block anyone carrying an assault weapon.
Meanwhile, the racial gulf separating Republicans from urban America was on stark display this weekend. It's not just that Republican delegates, reflecting their party's demographics, are almost universally white. It's also clear that the 3,000 local volunteers the party recruited to guide delegates and journalists as they navigate the city also reflect the GOP base, racially and generationally. Though Cleveland is a heavily African American city, the guides are overwhelmingly white, and though standing on street corners offering directions is a young person's job, the GOP official in charge of the volunteers was quoted in Sunday's Plain Dealer that two-thirds of them are over 40. That's today's Republican Party.
The police presence around downtown is heavy and diverse. Secret Service agents were present at the media check-in (for the first time in the dozen-plus conventions that I've covered), and regular cops, private security guards and some other police whose uniforms suggest they're neither private nor local are all over the city center. The 500 cops whom the Cleveland department assigned to the convention perimeter beat have been augmented by 2,000 other officers from different departments. Like the city, the police are mix of white and black; only the Republicans stand out for their conspicuous whiteness. You can tell the players without a scorecard-not a happy development in a country that either runs on tolerance or doesn't run at all.
With former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani scheduled to speak tonight, the convention will almost surely begin not just with law-'n-order demagogy but also grim warnings that whites now must live in fear, due to the indifference to their plight of mainstream liberals and the black establishment, both personified by President Obama. This was never going to be a convention aimed at bringing America together, but it's now likely to rip it apart.
This story has been corrected to indicate that the head of Cleveland's police union was the person who equated the city's situation to banning the shouting of "Fire" in a crowded theater.
