Marc Cooper: “Premier Package donors get a comped hotel room at a Denver hotel, two credentials for the convention hall, two tickets to a party honoring the House Democratic leadership, two tickets to a VIP presidential election briefing election, two tickets to a congressional “late night” event, but only one ticket to a private party honoring that nice lady who fights for us regular folks 24/7, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House. Premier Package cost: a mere $155,000.
Which is amusing, yes. I imagine MoveOn.org will be there en masse. (I pick on you, MoveOn.org. So semiotically rich.)It was a wonderful dream, their version of Obama. But was it any different than the “Revolution?” I mean, The Revolution, by which means we were going to “bring it all down” in the Sixties? Just as a matter of routine, you understand.
Guess. Try hard.
You have to be young, very young—and protected. And no one was more protected in their dream than Hippies. Ever. We were so many, and if you lived in San Francisco or Berkeley, the system certainly worked. We had home-baked bread delivered to Berkeley households from a commune in the City, we had a milkman with real milk.The UPS guy also delivered dope, so handy.
After the Revolution. The idea was that in our remarkable numbers—hell, it we could stop Troop Trains, if our more radical sisters and brothers could fuck up the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. bomb the Capitol building, the Pentagon and State Department (yeah, you read that right, wimps.) … what couldn’t we do?
I don’t know. It just seemed like turning the government into a shambles was going to happen, a natural progression from wearing what precisely we liked—or nothing at all—and not failing to notice how readily American society split: hip or not. So how much of a leap was that? Guys carried Mao’s Red Book and read excerpts aloud to lucky you. (Um, the Women’s Movement hadn’t exactly happened yet.)
Marc Cooper: But mostly, I’m staying away precisely because this year’s Democratic nominee is by far the most attractive since I started convention-going in the Reagan-Mondale era and, frankly, I don’t want to be reminded of what kind of fellow-Democrat company he keeps. Obama might be my candidate, but the Democrats are certainly not my party.
Oh, honey, nobody’s your party, not if you have any critical thinking skills at all.
The liberal think tanks, the unions, the usual suspect progressives, are all going to be in a lathered frenzy of panels, presentations, talks and seminars foaming in and around the convention center, and convincing themselves they are now somehow driving the party. They might as well be scheduled for Sunday night on Mars.
It gets ironic:
There’s insufficient space to parse through the entire list of DNC ’08 corporate sponsor. But while you’re watching some Dem or another rail from the podium about the sinister influence of lobbyists and special interests, you might want to keep handy this mini-list of convention sponsors:AT&T, Qwest, Comcast, Motorola
Medtronic, Lilly, AstraZeneca, Merck, United Health Group
US Bank, Wells Fargo, State Farm, Allstate, Visa
Lockheed Martin
Coca-Cola
Molson Coors
Recording Industry Association of America
Read Cooper, should you hunger for the gruesome details.
Why are there lobbies, in a democracy, Daddy?
