Word: shadowing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...easy getting a political convention off the ground--especially when the convention is not really a convention but a "shadow convention," and especially when the politics being convened is not the old-fashioned kind but a new, revolutionary kind of politics that will "transcend the old categories of left and right." Arianna Huffington has been learning this lesson the hard way all summer. While Americans across the country--hundreds of them! maybe thousands!--eagerly await the twin spectacle of the Republican and Democratic conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, the syndicated columnist and former Newt Gingrich confidant has been trying...
...exploding in ways I could not have imagined," Huffington says, riding through downtown Philadelphia a few weeks before the Republicans are scheduled to arrive. Today she has already held a press conference, visited two newspaper editorial boards, met with a dozen area activists and scouted the arena where the shadow revels are to be held. But the complications never let up. An aide's cell phone beeps, and he hands it over. "Bill Bradley," he says. Bradley has unofficially agreed to appear at one of the shadow conventions...
...spectrum, from the center to the center left. "Transcending the old categories of left and right," after all, is a favorite rhetorical trope of liberals who are tired of being dismissed in a political culture that makes "moderation" the pre-eminent virtue. Ideological taxonomists will find the lineup of shadow convention speakers--from Jesse Jackson to Paul Wellstone--eerily predictable and not particularly transcendent. All that's missing is a candlelight vigil for the Scottsboro Boys...
...monochromatic ideology of the shadow conventions has proved to be self-reinforcing as Republicans get skittish about signing on. John McCain will open the gathering in Philadelphia with a call for campaign-finance reform, but--here as elsewhere--not many of the party faithful will follow him. Jack Kemp, originally publicized as keynoter, withdrew from the conventions last week. "Jack just feels this isn't something he's comfortable participating in," says a spokesman. "The more he looked into it, there just didn't seem to be the balance and the genuine debate he'd been hoping for." Kemp...
...anticipates yet another new politics, born of a wide and deep disgruntlement with the status quo. Her evidence for the coming revolution is thin. The low voter turnouts she and her shadow conveners bewail as signs of disgust might just as plausibly be taken for the sleepy indifference of a fat and happy populace. But her larger charge--that the two parties, in thrall to a self-satisfied elite, have become homogeneous, to the detriment of a robust political debate--is far more plausible. Anyone who doubts it should be forced to explain the difference between George Bush's "compassionate...