GOP has spoken, and it's rejoinder time for Dems

WASHINGTON — On the opening day of the Republican National Convention, party Chairman Reince Priebus said the American people "need to prosecute the president on what he promised and what he delivered." And this past week in Florida, the GOP tried to do precisely that.

Speaker after speaker took to the stage to make the case that Barack Obama was guilty of overregulation, abuse of power, dishonesty, wanton spending and class warfare. The recommended sentence: no more years.

In the legal world, the prosecution has a true advantage. It gets to make the opening statement and the closing remarks. But this isn't court; it's politics. And now it's the incumbent's turn.

Between now and when the Democrats open their convention in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday, the American public gets to reboot and cleanse its palate. There's time for a Labor Day cookout, maybe even a trip to the movies. And the Democrats, says media strategist Fred Davis, have "room for minor adjustment" to the case they want to make.

"I'd always rather be the last car dealer you visit and the last convention you watch," says Davis, creative director for the 2008 GOP gathering. "Because the first guy is out of mind already."

The time between conventions is always an odd moment in politics. The challenger has thrown down the gauntlet, usually very aggressively, and the champion — in this case the incumbent — must figure out how to stand his ground. And now there is this pause between the two events, a brief limbo afforded for everyone — the Republicans, the Democrats, the electorate — to process it all and figure out what might come next.

In the National Football League, they flip a coin to see which team will receive first and which will kick. New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick says his decision often depends on "what the wind is going to be." About 60 percent of the time, the coin-toss winner opts to receive, and about the same percentage of those teams go on to win the game.

But the order of the national party conventions is effectively preordained.

The tradition since 1932 has been that the incumbent's party convenes second. That worked out great for George H.W. Bush in 1988, not so well four years later. In 2008, the Democrats were set to convene first, in Denver, when the GOP learned ahead of time that the other party was planning elaborate staging, with Grecian columns.

"John McCain asked for and got a very spartan set that he thought was fitting for the time," says Davis, who worked for the GOP nominee. "A simple black stage with one giant TV screen."

When the Democrats heard about the GOP set, Davis says, they "dramatically reduced the opulence" of their own backdrop. Still, he says, "even in its scaled-down nature, it was big and elaborate and grand."

The conventions weren't always back to back like this. They used to be about a month apart. In recent decades they have been derided as mere coronations, with the nominee ordained long before the opening gavel crashes down.

But as sterile and orchestrated as these gatherings have become, author Norman Mailer once wrote, they remain a reminder "that politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people." Our politics, Mailer wrote, "still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen" rather than being handed down from the aristocracy.

There's not much difference between the conventions when it comes to how much thought people put into them. A Pew Research Center survey out this week found that only 44 percent of adults cared what happened at the Republican convention, and just 43 percent gave a hoot about the Democratic confab. Among independents, interest was about 7 percentage points lower.