Happy Campers in Boston

...It gives us a chance to hang out—a professional reason-to-be, something to do...

...What is less often noted, though it becomes increasingly obvious, is that as the party conventions grow wan and meaningless, drained of all surprise and news value and practical importance, they have been kept alive by the second convention, the journalists' convention, which in contrast grows larger, more elaborate, and more robust every four years...

...The parasite has consumed the host...

...Unlike, say, Irish step-dancers or amateur chefs, reporters and pundits who cover politics have built their lives around an interest that almost nobody else shares...

...Last week, when you watched the network or cable coverage, the trend became plain...

...This was by far the nicest interview I've done so far," wrote one blogger—on Monday morning, before the convention had even begun...

...It was only natural that in time we would seek out one another's company, and delight in it, and grow dependent on it, and eventually, as now, create opportunities to indulge it where none existed before...

...This fact alone made the straw poll an enjoyable story to cover, but more important, the event fell at a point in the election cycle—months before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary—when reporters and pundits were growing cranky and impatient...

...The websites suddenly bristled with copy...

...Under the brilliant Midwestern sun, with the stink of manure rolling in from the fairgrounds and from the alfalfa fields beyond, all 25,000 votes were cast and tabulated (there are half a million Republicans in Iowa), and the reporters combed through the results before delivering the verdict...

...We were lonely...

...Six hundred reporters and pundits descended on Ames like a cloud of yellow jackets...

...And such happy campers...

...It was a blast...

...Complaining about the empty ritual of the press complaining about the "empty rituals" that conventions have become has now become, if you'll pardon the expression, an empty ritual—and soon enough complaints about complaining about the complaints will be declared an empty ritual, and so on and so on, in the endless refractions that carom through punditry's postmodern house of mirrors, where all commentary is about other commentary...

...It's like going back to summer camp," one pundit said...

...It had no intrinsic significance...

...The journalists, of course, were writing stories about the new presence of bloggers at the convention...

...Political journalists require constant stimulation...

...As a measure of opinion among Iowa Republicans, the straw poll's sample was too small to be reliable...

...Yet I noticed something curious in the convention blogs, during those jam-packed few hours before I stopped reading them altogether...

...Huddled together in the Fleet Center, conveniently herded into their own seating section, thinking and tapping away, they served the larger goal of giving mainstream journalists a story...

...It's important to remember that, since its beginning in 1979, the straw poll had been nothing but a lark, a summer diversion for local Republicans who, while they were at it, might raise a few dollars for the party...

...Blogs Give Unedited Convention View," said the Kansas City Star...

...The straw poll was conceived as a fundraiser for the state Republican party, and it ran concurrently with the Iowa state fair, a colorful spectacle that, in the daily experience of a typical national political reporter, is as exotic as a circumcision rite in Borneo...

...Then it was time for the caucuses...

...I'm not the first to have noticed that nowadays, when a political party convenes for its quadrennial gathering, there are actually two conventions going on: the traditional convention of perhaps 4,000 party activists and a much larger convention of 15,000 political journalists...

...And every four years, one is wrong...

...The Ames straw poll was important after all...

...But journalists do now determine its pace, the shape of its narrative, its climaxes and longueurs— everything but its final outcome, which, like a last redoubt, has been left in the hands of voters...

...They will make it happen again in New York City four weeks from now, and then again four years from now, and eight...

...Millions of Frequent Flyer miles were languishing, unused...

...And yet—well, I'll be damned—it turned out all the reporters and pundits were right...

...It doesn't really matter—just so long as they're together...

...BY ANDREW FERGUSON Arlington, Virginia Every four years, one thinks: Now they've done it, they've gone too far, this will be the last one, it has to stop now, they can't go on like this a moment longer...

...Conventions, primary debates, straw polls— no matter how ridiculous as objective events, they offer solace in what can be a lonely life...

...Settled before the camera, or gathered in the press tent, these happy campers could have been anywhere...

...the course of the campaign had been altered irretrievably...

...They were off...

...Its results carried no official weight...

...This tale-of-two-conventions is now commonly recognized...

...seething pejoratives) is matched only by the intensity with which they insist on covering them...

...Those candidates who had been declared endangered, who had to do well in order to, um, do well, failed to meet "expectations...

...Every national political reporter knows the drill...

...They were not deterred for long, needless to say...

...Everybody got to be together again...

...So the conventions will go on and on, long after their usefulness has been exhausted...

...And as these convention-blogger stories piled up in the establishment press—there were several dozens of them by midweek—the real purpose of inviting bloggers to the convention suddenly became clear: They were there to be interviewed...

...Both conventions fulfill the customary social and business functions of such gatherings, as surely as a meeting of the Shriners would, or the annual convention of the Direct Marketing Association: The participants hang out, gossip, drink, spend expense-account money, "make contacts," do a little work, eat better food than they would at home, skulk through the occasional illicit sexual liaison, and gather scraps of information that may later prove useful...

...Web Loggers Get Their Credentials," said the Baltimore Sun...

...He will sniff at how "substance free" the conventions are, he will roll his eyes at the inflated claims of party publicists, and then he will mow down his grandmother if she stands between him and the chance to get a good hotel room adjacent to the convention center...

...It's not hard to understand how we got here, how politics became a slave to the tyranny of journalism...

...And the verdict was grim...

...From what I've gathered over the last few years, clicking randomly from one blog to another, it is the job of a blogger to record his every neural discharge, faithfully and minutely, leaving no thought unpublished, no matter how uninteresting...

...Bloggers think and think and think and scribble and scribble and scribble, and yet at the Democratic National Convention, perhaps for the first time in their lives, they found themselves in a situation where, by general acclamation, there was nothing to think about...

...So we made something happen...

...What significance it came to possess had simply been bestowed by journalists who had gotten sick of sitting at home...

...They started to think about why there was nothing to think about, and that was all they needed...

...The restaurants in Ames are terrible, of course, but it's not like we were paying for it ourselves...

...As a result, soon after the straw poll, Quayle and Alexander dropped out of the race for president...

...Convention Bloggers Feel Their Way," wrote the Associated Press...

...In 2004 the traditional chorus of complaints has swelled with a fresh set of high, piping voices...

...I first noticed this strange tail-wagging-the-dog development in 1999, when a previously unnoticed event called the Ames (Iowa) straw poll unexpectedly, after twenty years of insignificance, assumed cataclysmic importance in the race for the Republican presidential nomination...

...who else, after all, would care enough about the American political process to hijack it...

...The indifference Americans feel for politics deepens every day, further driving the political journalists back on their own resources...

...The disdain that political journalists express for modern party conventions (not only "empty ritual" but "staged," "choreographed," "infomercial," and all the other Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Graphoma-nia reclaimed its throne...

...I'd be tempted to say that journalists have hijacked the American political process, except the phrase makes the thing sound too sinister...

...Nothing much had happened, politically, for what seemed like an eternity...

...If there was a common thread running through them it was a casual mention by the blogger of being interviewed by mainstream journalists...

...Indeed, their lack of objective significance is quite beside the point...

...They do go on...

...The process itself now proceeds, as it were, at the pleasure of the journalistic class...

...Suddenly it was understood that, as a matter of "expectations" and "conventional wisdom," the Ames straw poll was "make or break" for several Republican candidates, including such party stalwarts as Dan Quayle and Lamar Alexander...

...We missed one another...

...They go on because this is all for them—for, by, and about journalists...

...Instead of the convention, what you saw was the same people saying the same things they'd been saying all year, in Manchester and Des Moines and Columbia, South Carolina, talking and explaining to the audience the ramifications of what they weren't showing you...

...This too was a nice representation, in miniature, of some larger phenomenon...

...They go on not because they have to but because they want to...

...The corporate AmEx cards were burning a hole in our pockets...

...No delegates to the nominating convention were selected...

...These were the bloggers, nearly a hundred of them, or so I heard, who were granted press credentials and workstations and who arrived in Boston and set to work with the earnest, insouciant enthusiasm of the hobbyist, which is their chief charm...

...A national political convention is now an extension, an outgrowth, of something much more consequential and, from the journalistic point of view, necessary: The political conventions exist for the journalists who cover them...

...At the DNC, It's a Blog-eat-blog World," said the Christian Science Monitor, unappetizingly...

...It was a nice representation, in miniature, of the phases that mainstream political journalism has gone through over the last two generations, as conventions deliquesced from robust tribal gatherings to hollow "Up With People"-style stage shows, swarming with an ever larger host of reporters who've come to write about how little there is to write about...

...The journalists had cud to chew over for months...