Presidential nominating conventions enjoy icon status in American political culture. Images of intense floor fights, protests outside convention halls, vigorous intra-party debates over policies, platforms and strategies, and occasionally even physical confrontation — as when Dan Rather was
famously punched while reporting from the floor of the 1968 Democratic Convention — have all traditionally symbolized the vibrant and sometimes disorderly and tumultuous clash of ideas that fuel any healthy democracy, and in particular serve as an important reminder of the fruits of the free speech and free assembly rights which the Founders guaranteed in the First Amendment. Conventions are, at least in theory, a once-every-four-years opportunity for Americans to assemble and debate critical issues as they select the standard-bearer for their political party.
But such democratic energy and free-wheeling political debate at conventions is now confined to the distant past, part of our national lore but not our current reality. For the last two decades, political conventions have become, by design, far more akin to meticulously choreographed television spectacles than democratic venues in which political disputes are vented and resolved. Inside the convention halls, spontaneous moments, let alone unscripted expressions of unapproved viewpoints, long ago ceased to exist. Those have been replaced by campaign-approved scripts, scheduled down to the last word and second in accordance with poll-tested themes and the prime-time television schedule.
During the last several nominating conventions, the areas outside the convention hall have become increasingly subject to the same degree of micro-control as events on the inside. With each convention, the physical area of extreme control expands to a larger and larger perimeter. Justified by resort to the same rationale used to suppress liberties in general — vague invocations of "security" — both political parties are now able to relegate dissent, protests and disruptions to unseen and highly controlled environments, far removed from the conventions themselves and far out of sight from delegates, political figures, and the establishment media outlets which televises the convention.