The Wake

“Obama, McCain are dead even [in Minnesota],” reads today’s top Star Tribune story. Perhaps this is because the Republicans have a natural poll advantage by setting their convention one week after the Democrats, as many pollsters have argued. They attribute the recent McCain/Palin surge to something akin to the natural guide of the poll’s invisible hand. Judging from my personal account of events of last week at the RNC, an explanation of John McCain’s poll surge makes more sense in terms of artificial mechanisms rather than sheer, tested logic.

Flash back to Thursday, Sept. 5. I’m inside the Xcel Energy Center trying to catch John McCain’s acceptance speech, walking in the hallway upstairs from the arena. The cool breeze of outside air from open doors makes the setting feel like I’m at a Wild hockey game. Code Pink dissenters who creeped into the building and shouted disputes during McCain’s speech are being escorted out (“Please don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static, heh heh heh heh!”).

As journalists and bloggers skewer after the Code Pinkers, I make my way down the stairs and get about two feet away from the floor. Delegates and partisans aliek are chanting “USA! USA!” as an eldery woman to my right leans over to her husband with a disgusted look on her face. “How did they get past security?” she asks in a disgruntled voice.

Code Pink attempts to crash the convention one last time

At this point, I’m close to the floor in the stairway trying to watch the speech in peace. “Get out of the way! You have to keep moving!” an ABC photographer says to me. At first I’m intimidated and start to move, but then realize that the photographer has no real power over where I choose to stand. I make a quick note in my notepad; “The photographers are bitches.” McCain, talking about Sarah Palin, just got done saying, “I’m very proud to have introduced our next vice president to the country, but I can’t wait to introduce her to Washington.” Then, taking queue from his major opponent, McCain says something to the effect of, “Change is coming!” Alaska delegates start chanting the inspirational lines, “Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill!” All are aware that the U.S. is too great a country to change its satisfying consumer habits.

From there McCain’s speech barks a lot of familiar yawns and splices an evocative retelling of his POW years in Hanoi somewhere in the middle. A woman affiliated with the Republicans sees my notes on the ABC photographers and chuckles. “They are, aren’t they?” I say to her.

When the speech is over and a rousing applause follows, it’s clear that the crowd represents a minority of the country’s voters. After all, 80 percent of the RNC delegates approve of Bush’s job while 28 percent of the public thinks the same.

With that nod in my mind, I sneak to the floor without proper credentials and see half a dozen students chanting, “Students for McCain! Students for McCain!” Then three Jews respond by shouting, “Jews for McCain! Jews for McCain!” MTV’s Sway is in the middle of the floor trying to mack on some younger female Republicans. CNN, BBC and PBS all have booths, but course most people crowd around Fox News, where insider-turned-pundit Karl Rove is being interviewed.

In retrospect, nothing out of the ordinary happened, at least inside the convention. So it’s hard to figure out why the RNC helped McCain/Palin become as popular as Obama/Biden. Maybe I shouldn’t underestimate “the Sarah Palin phenomenon,” but the Strib poll says that more than 66 percent of the state believes Joe Biden is prepared to take on the role of vice president, compared to the 43 percent that said the same of Palin.

We’ll just have to wait and see if the poll corrects itself.