Forty years ago, some Americans had to fight to get into a national political convention. Today, people fight not to get into the convention but into the constellation of corporate-sponsored parties surrounding it.
Sunday night in the heart of Boston's theater district, we stood in a crowd outside the ultra-hip Roxy nightclub, watching as limousines, town cars and cabs disgorged hundreds of revelers streaming inside for an exclusive $600,000 party featuring the Neville Brothers. The party, honoring the "Blue Dog" caucus of conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives, was paid for by about 30 corporate sponsors, including the Altria Group (the parent of Phillip Morris), Comcast (the cable giant), ConocoPhillips (the oil conglomerate) and Microsoft. We didn't get in.
A few blocks away at the state Capitol, we were allowed in by representatives of the Congressional Black Caucus who were honoring the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. In 1964, Hamer bravely led a delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, N.J., where they challenged the seating of an all-white slate of Mississippi segregationist Democrats. At the statehouse party, 14 surviving members of the MFDP were toasted.
But even here, corporate money added an incongruous note. Alongside a pencil-and-ink portrait of Hamer, the daughter of sharecroppers who risked her life and was brutally beaten for her civil rights activism, were banners prominently displaying the logos of Lockheed Martin and Verizon, the companies that underwrote the event.
In the wake of the new ban on "soft money" enacted as part of the McCain-Feingold law, which prevents the national political parties from accepting unlimited contributions from special interests, corporate cash has instead been pouring into the coffers of the nonprofit host committees for the Democratic and Republican conventions. Despite McCain-Feingold, these donations are still completely unlimited.
Together, the two party committees are expected to raise more than $100 million from private sources -- more than 12 times as much as they raised in 1992. Here, as in the presidential fundraising race, the Republicans are in the lead, expecting to raise $63.6 million to the Democrats' $39 million. And that doesn't even count the millions more that have been spent on hundreds of private parties.
