Convention Notes, Day One

The first day of the Philadelphia conventions (Republican, Shadow Republican, and straight anti) was the hundred percent legal one. The Republicans, who will have a hard time filling three days with something remotely televisable, are still putting the First Union Center in order. The Shadow Republicans set off this morning in the Annenberg Center, half an hour late, but that is par for such enterprises. The myriad organizations making up the real opposition were largely united in Unity 2000, a "permitted" march and rally on the divide of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. (You hear the words "permitted" and "unpermitted" a lot here, and no one has to ask, "Permitted by whom?")

The town of Philadelphia has long ceased being a location for the movie The Philadelphia Story, with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn as Philly aristocrats. It is also no longer the place whose mayor had a block in his own town bombed by the military. It's somewhere in between now, though closer perhaps to the town of the bombing. It's the first place after many years where I've seen men picking up cigarette butts from the sidewalk. Both the Shadowers and the radicals are organizing tours through the local slums; the radicals calls them "reality tours," the Shadowers, "Urban Renewal Challenges" or some such name. There you have the difference between the two in a nutshell: a not-quite-convincing or convinced upbeat "all will be well if only -- " and a true radicalism as I for one hadn't heard on an American street since the great anti-war demonstrations of 1972.

The first day of the Shadow Convention left me, I have to admit, unmoved. For all the mystique and star quality Ms. Huffington is supposed to have -- and must have to get away with the most miraculous conversion since Martin Luther -- she came across as a somewhat shrill speaker whose passionate words remained remote and unspontaneous, not helped by a Greek accent lacking the charm of Melina Mercouri's. The featured event, however, was keynote speaker Senator John McCain, who had the rather hopeless task of explaining why he would also speak at the real Republican convention, who focused on "elections and money" only, and called on us to support George W. Bush, the true "reform" candidate. His pet metaphor is the "iron triangle" (we got it several times), a triangle of money, lobbyists, and ... legislation. The year 2000 conservatives then are "compassionate," "reformers," and/or rejectors of legislation: a whole grab bag of oxymorons.

After all that, it was a relief to arrive at the rally of the Unity 2000 people although they were massed under a broiling sun, surrounded by dozens and dozens of cops and a fume-spewing traffic jam. Speeches about all our ails: education, child poverty, police brutality, the drug war; fierce speakers, an audience of all the usual suspects, with all the usual signs; many young people. It could have been Lincoln Park, Chicago, August 1968. It is encouraging to think that the spark of that time has been kept alive all those years. There was even a sense of humor as good as Abbie Hoffman's, as in a brochure called "Renewing America's Porpoise," which describes how Governor Bush is going to slow down these animals with lead weights so that they "leave no child behind." But the idea that nothing has really changed much in thirty-two years and that we have to fight all the fights all over again, is not encouraging. But when the unpermitted events start, we will see how close or how far we are to 1968.

Mr. Koning is on special assignment this week for TomPaine.com, where this article first appeared.