During the first democratic nominating convention I attended in 1976 (I was a delegate in 1974 but that interim convention was only about rules changes), I recorded my impressions on an unwieldy tape recorder which I later transcribed, word for word, on my typewriter.
Today, waiting in O'Hare airport for my connection to Denver (during a three-hour layover) to attend the 2008 Democratic Convention, I am sitting against the wall with seven other people, each of us in our own little cubbies which hold our computers on narrow shelves, attached to the world through the airport's wireless system.
Times have changed. Newspapers are slowly ceding territory to bloggers, and I have become one of them. Cell phones of course did not exist, the correct change for phone booths was vital; and standing in line was par for the course. What hasn't changed?
In 1974, we nominated Jimmy Carter. I remember leaving the convention the night of Carter's acceptance speech; the man from Plains, Georgia, with the toothy grin. I was floating through the crowd out to the exits, smiling at everyone, propelled by a feeling of euphoria that I had never experienced before. Carter would change America, bring old fashioned honesty into politics, (this was after Watergate) and he--a southerner--would mark the end of racism.
I was high on rhetoric. Four days of speeches had pumped through my veins. The speech I remember best, however, was the benediction, given by Martin Luther King's powerfully built daddy. His deep preacher's voice roared over the crowd making a believer out of me, a Jewish woman from Burlington, Vermon who could not help but shout "Ahmen!" He gave us a chance to mourn his son's death, and a chance to believe that the forces of evil that had enabled his assassination were now defeated. As we walked out into the night, it was a new day.
Later in the early hours of the morning, we walked the streets of New York, talking to everyone, shaking hands, laughing at people wearing ghoulish Nixon masks. I can still see a young African American man, wearing a white suit, who greeted us in front of the Stage Delicatessen on 6th Avenue. He turned to me and said, "Tonight, I feel that the constitution and the Declaration of Independence were written for me."
Another image that stays with me is seeing Jesse Jackson, sitting on metal square box, sureveying the departing crowd--his body language seemed to say, wait until next time.
Next time came and went--with Dukakis leaving the convention hall filled with the taste of victory, which the polls told him was assured. Next time came with the nomination of Bill Clinton from a place called Hope, Arkansas. Again, the specter of racism had been pushed back, as only a southerner who had grown up with it, could do. And there was Ron Brown, the charismatic African American star who burnished not only his own image, but that of the young soon to be elected President Clinton.
At each convention I listened to the speeches which declared what we must do to become a more egalitarian society, a society that provides opportunity for all--so many speeches that sometimes I could predict the next sentence that would come out of the speaker's mouth. What I could not predict, was that an African American man would become the nominee of his party.
It is one thing to speak for, stand for, and work for equality. It is another, to personify equality itself by one's place on the podium--not on the side flanking the nominee, like Ron Brown, not in the background, like Jesse Jackson--but center stage, like Barack Obama.