If you’re wanting wonkish analyses of each speech, blogged in realtime, you’re definitely in the wrong place. I tend to go for the grace notes, the odd telling details, the small moments of serendipity…and so far, I’m just not really finding them. (Yeah, I had a strange day yesterday, but that wasn’t really about the convention so much.)
Protesters — often a treasure trove of odd telling details — are mostly noticeable for their absence. Don’t get me wrong, there are various things going on around town, but you have to know about them, search them out. This is not an in-your-face protest year. A friend of mine suggests that most of that energy is being reserved for New York, and he may be right. The main group out on the street as one approaches the convention hall in the evening is the Larouche people. There are desultory protests in the “pen”, but that’s a shockingly depressing situation. My camera battery died before I could get any pictures (did I mention that the Nikon Coolpix 3200 blows chunks and only a complete moron would ever buy one?), but “pen” is not an adequate description — it’s a cramped space under an overpass, thoroughly fenced in and covered over the top with some sort of netting, so the effect is that of animals in a cage.
This is not your father’s free speech zone.
More tomorrow, if I see anything interesting. Or maybe Bob wants to chime in. Watching this thing on tv, like most of you, I suspect he has a less myopic view of things than those of us here on the ground.