Let me see if I've got this straight. They don't go inside the convention to hear the speeches. They watch them on TV, outside, in the parking lot. They spend money and time to set up a moblie war room with satellite vans and communication.
Basically, they are taking up parking spots in the parking lot, spending a bunch of time and money to do something that could just as easily get done from their news studio, while watching the convention from their television. Kind of redundant, don't you think?
The RNC isn't a news channel or organization. They want to be able to directly hand press releases in the parking lot to the reporters covering the convention. And maybe get interviewed in the process.
The Democrats are going to do it, too, and have done it since 1992 (that I know of), if not earlier.
http://www.npr.org/politics/convention2004/diary.html
<fieldset class="dategroup"><legend>September 2, 2004</legend>
The Art of the 'Spinja'
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Texas delegate Pat Peale wears a purple heart band-aid on her chin on the first day of the Republican Convention in New York, Aug. 30, 2004. · Reuters
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The Democrats have set up their war room in a building owned by the union UNITE! · Mike Pesca, NPR
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Signs adorn the Democratic war room in New York. · Mike Pesca, NPR
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By Mike Pesca
A dozen opposition researchers sitting at a dozen lap tops working on a collective dozen hours of sleep couldn't have invented anything juicier than what was handed to them by Virginian delegate Morton Blackwell on day one of the Republican National Convention.
Blackwell thought that a good way to illustrate his belief that John Kerry exaggerated the severity of his war injuries was to make adhesive bandages with little pictures of hearts on them. The hearts were purple. Get it? Purple hearts.
In case delegates missed the Voltairian political wit, a message accompanying the bandages read, "It was just a self-inflicted scratch, but you see I got a Purple Heart for it."
If war reveals character, the immediate and overwhelming response to the band-aid affront revealed the character of the modern political war room. Bright young Democrats saw the purple hearts on TV and called out to Charlie Rangel, the Democratic representative from Harlem and Korean War Purple Heart recipient to denounce the band-aids. CNN ran with it. The president's press secretary was questioned about it. Soon Republican chairman Ed Gillespie had a nice chat with Blackwell and an end was put to the adorned adhesive bandages.
This is how opposition research works --
when it works. The "war president" on the Republican side and a war hero who's "reporting for duty" on the Democratic side each have "war rooms" doing their bidding. The war rooms, a subset of the "rapid response teams," are made up of mostly twenty-somethings who've memorized impressive swaths of the Congressional Record and also have, as they say, the gift of Google.
These warriors of wonkery, these stealthy "spinjas" fight it out in the media trenches mostly by hissing like wounded game cats at the slightest hint of offense. In Boston, the bloody shirt was waved, lowered to half mast and then waved some more over what the Republicans called anti-Bush "hate speech;" or what anyone who's ever rented "Sister Act II: Back in the Habit" might call a moderately unfunny Whoopi Goldberg joke.
A month later and band-aids weren't simply bad attempts at prop comedy that only a few hundred Americans would have known about -- they were "outrageous and disgraceful" according to Democratic Party spokesman Matt Bennet.
But while both the Democrats and the Republicans war rooms are on a desperate mission to find umbrage wherever it may lurk, there are telling differences between the two.
The Democrats have set themselves up in a sprawling space in a building owned by the union UNITE! There's a 25-by-75 banner adorning the building that announces the presence of Kerry loyalists inside (note to Republican war room: I checked -- the banner was installed by union workers). But in Boston, the address of the Republican war room was a secret shared with reporters only off-the record; giving the place the feel of a Dick Cheney-undisclosed-location starter set.
The main purpose of the Republican war room in Boston seemed to be to hold news conferences and issue a nightly press release rebutting the major points of each evening's speakers. Here in New York, dozens of volunteers pack the halls, t-shirts and posters are handed out, and almost a hundred workers busily crank out the responses.
Then there's the signage. The Republicans went Spartan Chic: big posters on the walls with the claim that John Kerry was the most liberal senator. A ranking of all the other liberal senators hung to the right of Kerry. (For a war-room type rebuttal of the relevancy of this claim
click here. )The Democratic war room, on the other hand, had as many talking points on the walls as there were planks in their platform: war casualties, unemployment figures, gasoline prices… I think I saw
Rocky Colavito's lifetime fielding percentage up there. Then there were the little details, like computer home pages. About a third of the computer screens at the Republican shop were on the Drudge Report; the Democrats seemed to all be on Hotmail, or some other email home page. The Republicans handed out fake dollars with pictures of George Soros. The Democrats, just like with the band-aids, showed the good judgement to leave the prop comedy in the capable hands of
Carrot Top.
A lot of what I saw in each war room fit in with the so-clichéd-it's-true stereotypes: Republicans as models of button-down, perhaps even relentless, efficiency; Democrats as more loosely organized. Democratic spokesman Matt Bennet said he expected to get less media attention for his war room than the Republicans got for theirs in Boston, but he was pretty fair about his analysis.
He reasoned that in Boston, the Republicans' rapid response team was the only alternative story to the convention. Here in New York, protesters clashing with police have pushed the Democratic war room that much further from the front page. Speaking of which, yesterday the NYPD released video of a suspect assaulting a policeman; and protestors have been posting video of the police on line. It seems that a form of opposition research has reached that conflict as well.<!--
Related NPR Stories:
Nearly 1,000 Protesters Arrested in NYC
Taking Stock of Convention Protesters in New York -->
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