By Robert
Reich
Trump’s pending coronation is unsettling many Republican
leaders – prompting Republican national chairman, Reince Priebus, to warn them
that “if we don’t stick together as a party and stop her, then the only
alternative is to get comfortable with the phrase President Hillary
Clinton.”
That’s about as enthusiastic an endorsement Trump is likely to
get from the Republican establishment.
It’s also unsettling many other Americans, some of whom will be
demonstrating in downtown Cleveland to protest the nomination of a man who
has gone out of his way to denigrate Latinos, blacks, Muslims and immigrants.
But barring a miracle, Trump will be nominated
anyway.
So will Clinton, whose nomination isn’t going down easily with
many of Bernie Sanders’s supporters, even after his endorsement of
her.
So why have the conventions at all?
First, because they’re perks awarded to people who worked hard for candidates during the primaries — just as top sales reps in companies are awarded trips to national sales conventions.
Delegates will have fun and spend
money, which hotels and restaurants in downtown Cleveland and Philadelphia will
sop up like dry sponges.
They’ll enjoy circulating on the convention floors for five or
six hours each night exchanging gossip and business cards, hugging old friends
and meeting new ones, and taking selfies.
And they’ll feel important when they hear party leaders, heads
of state delegations, members of Congress and occasional celebrities tell them
how critical it is to defeat the opposing party in November, how strong their
nominee will be, and what makes America great.
Second, the conventions generate prime-time TV infomercials
featuring celebrities, heroes and former presidents (Bush 1 and 2 say they
won’t appear at the Republican one) and, most importantly, the nominee on the
last night.
All will speak about the same three themes, although Trump will
talk mainly about himself. These segments will be produced and directed by
Hollywood professionals and marketing specialists whose goal is to get the
major networks (or at least CNN, Fox News and MSNBC) to project stirring images
into the living rooms of swing voters.
The third reason for these conventions will be hidden far away
from the delegates and the prime-time performers: It’s to ingratiate the big
funders — corporate executives, Wall Street investment bankers, partners in
major law firms, top Washington lawyers and lobbyists, and billionaires.
The big funders are undermining our democracy but they’ll have
the best views in the house. They’ll fill the skyboxes of the convention
centers – just above where the media position their cameras and anchors and
high above the din of the delegates. And they’ll feast on shrimp, lobster
tails, and caviar.
Each party will try to make these big funders feel like the VIPs
they’ve paid to be,letting them shake hands with congressional leaders, Cabinet
officers and the nominee’s closest advisers, who will be circulating through
the skyboxes like visiting dignitaries. If they’re lucky, the big funders will
have a chance to clench the hand of the nominee himself or herself.
The three conventions — for delegates, for prime-time audiences
at home and for big funders — will occur simultaneously, but they will occupy
different dimensions of reality.
Our two major political parties no longer nominate people to be
president. Candidates choose themselves, they run in primaries, and the winners
of the primaries become the parties’ nominees.
The parties have instead become giant machines for producing
infomercials, raising big money and rewarding top sales reps with big bashes
every four years.
That Donald Trump, the most unqualified and divisive person ever
to become a major party’s nominee, and Hillary Clinton, among the most
qualified yet also among the least trusted ever to become a major party’s
nominee, will emerge from the conventions to take each other on in the general
election of 2016 is almost beside the point.
ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor’s Professor of
Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at
the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in
the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten
most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written
fourteen books, including the best sellers “Aftershock, “The Work of
Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent,
"Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American
Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary,
INEQUALITY FOR ALL.