SLC Bids For 2024 GOP Convention
– By Ed Kociela –
Every four years, the political parties release the animals from the zoo and send them on a field trip to some big, glitzy city where they can rock and roll all night and party every day as they affirm the party’s candidate to run for the White House.
They call them conventions, which is really only a polite term for the debauchery that takes place when these politicos get a hall pass to hobnob with fellow delegates miles from home. These conventions are notorious for smoke-filled rooms where oily fat guys with smelly cigars make the deals that build the foundation of the party platform and anoint the candidate who will carry the banner into the electoral fray while the delegates engage in a rock star kind of debauchery – booze, bribes and hookers ala carte – as they represent their friends and neighbors back home. It’s akin to a Led Zeppelin tour, leaving havoc in its wake.
These conventions promise big bucks, in the millions and millions of dollars, to cities that host the conventions, and Salt Lake City wants its share of the pie, looking to land the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Salt Lake City is hardly the kind of place that resonates as Ground Zero for such behavior. The liquor laws are quaint, the clubbing doesn’t quite measure up, and the body shops in Utah are, for the most part, places where you can get the dents in your car straightened out.
That doesn’t seem to slow the city’s pursuit of this revenue-rich event.
“There hasn’t been a Republican National Convention west of the Mississippi River since 1996 when it was in San Diego,” Carson Jorgensen, chairman of the Utah Republican Party, told the Salt Lake Tribune.
Yeah, but you can get a decent dirty martini in San Diego, or you can stop in at a California cannabis dispensary for a sweet hit of Blue Dream.
Salt Lake City was one of three finalists to be the host city for the quadrennial GOP dustup in 2012, losing out to Tampa. Jorgensen says a reason Salt Lake was not selected then was a lack of hotel rooms close to the convention site.
“This event is larger than many people realize. We need almost the same capacity as the Olympics,” Jorgensen said, adding that the city could expect in the neighborhood of $250 million by hosting the GOP.
I’m not quite sure what happened to all of those rooms that housed the crowds when the city hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics, but apparently, they are gone.
The competition is pretty tough. Salt Lake City would have to beat out Las Vegas, Kansas City, Houston, Nashville, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee, which are in the bidding, and Phoenix, Columbus, and Atlanta, which are rumored to be ready to toss their hats into the mix.
I don’t know about you, but when it comes to finding a place to party, I would be hard-pressed to find a city better than Las Vegas or Nashville. I’ve run amok in Houston, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta, which pretty much rock, too. We also know that Milwaukee would be great because of its proximity to several national breweries (Schlitz, PBR, and Miller) and Kansas City would offer a plethora of great ribs and blues joints. Columbus and Phoenix wouldn’t hold much promise in my mind. One would be too homespun, the other too damned hot for a summertime convention. Besides, Arizona is not as solidly red as it once was.
“We’re one of the few red states in the Intermountain West right now,” Jorgensen went on to tell The Trib. “It’s almost all blue around us. The GOP is really paying attention to the West right now because every state is going to matter in 2024.”
Utah, with its “Let’s go, Brandon” posturing, would be a good fit for a Republican Party convention. Except that the location of a political convention often helps strengthen the party’s standing in that particular state. Would the GOP award the $250 million windfall to a place where you could pretty well mail in the 2024 results at this point, handing over its six Electoral College votes to the GOP? Not really the best place to drop that chit.
As the virtual conventions proved last time around, political conventions are fairly useless at this point, anyway. In fact, party reforms in the early 1970s have pretty much made the convention obsolete. By the time the delegates hit the host city, there is little surprise or drama attached to who will win the nomination because by then, somebody has emerged as the favorite and the others, in the name of party unity, have yielded their delegates. We will never see a convention such as the one put on in 1924 when it took the Democrats 103 ballots cast over 17 days to name John W. Davis, a West Virginia congressman, as their standard-bearer. The days of the brokered convention are long gone. I mean, basically, what we get today is a week of daylong commercials touting the candidate and cultured ads pushing the party platform.
That doesn’t mean that the conventions lack color.
You will still see the delegates congregate in a large hall with their goofy hats and homemade signs roaring and stomping their approval as shill after shill takes the stage to lend their endorsement. We have ranged from the ridiculous – remember Clint Eastwood scolding an empty chair? – to the sublime, like Sen. Frank Church’s keynote speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.
The smoke-filled rooms are a little different these days as they now don’t do much other than determine who will get a cut of the campaign donation pie.
But, the delegate partying will go on, guaranteed.
Whether it takes place in Salt Lake City or elsewhere, of course, remains to be determined. But, if I was going to place a bet, I would lay good money on Las Vegas, with Kansas City my best guess as the dark horse in this race. I would book Salt Lake City as a pretty heavy longshot.
I mean, this is a national political convention, not a stake dance.
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