RNC Postmortem: Republicans head home after last day of convention in Tampa, Florida

Yes­ter­day was the final day of the 2012 Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion in Tam­pa, Flori­da. Here are a few part­ing thoughts on the con­ven­tion from The Seat­tle Times‘ Jim Brun­ner, The Stranger‘s Paul Con­stant, and oth­er jour­nal­ists who were in town cov­er­ing the con­ven­tion from a nation­al perspective.

Paul Con­stant has an essay in The Stranger sum­ma­riz­ing his time in Tam­pa, called Stuck in a Room with Mitt Rom­ney. It’s an extreme­ly well-writ­ten piece which gives a feel for what Tam­pa was like dur­ing the RNC. Con­stant does­n’t just describe the cityscape and the scene inside the Tam­pa Bay Times Forum — he blunt­ly describes the mood and freely shares his impres­sions of the del­e­gates them­selves. Read­ing it, I almost felt like I was there (and glad I wasn’t).

Here’s an excerpt:

All the talk about patri­o­tism, about sup­port­ing the troops, is just lip ser­vice. This is the most unpa­tri­ot­ic crowd I have ever been a part of. What they are against is com­mu­ni­ty. Every sen­tence is devoid of empa­thy. Every fin­ger-wag is aimed direct­ly at an Amer­i­can who can’t afford health insur­ance, who hasn’t had a raise on their min­i­mum-wage job in four years. Even as they rail against a state­ment that the pres­i­dent nev­er real­ly made, they are talk­ing about tear­ing Amer­i­ca down and leav­ing some­thing mean­er and greed­i­er in its place. They’re radicals—radicals who’ve gone over the edge and are try­ing to make their rad­i­cal­ism mainstream.

Yikes. If Paul is going to Char­lotte next week to cov­er the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, I hope the Democ­rats can show him a bet­ter time.

The Tam­pa Bay Times has a whole set of post­mortem pieces in today’s paper (and online). Stephanie Hayes has a recap of Meghan McCain’s birth­day par­ty for her dad, colum­nist Sue Carl­ton asked if the peo­ple of Tam­pa could have their city back, and Eric Deg­gans reflect­ed on how social media made the 2012 RNC dif­fer­ent from past con­ven­tions. The paper also took the trou­ble to ask depart­ing del­e­gates from oth­er states what they thought of the Bay Area, and con­clud­ed that Tam­pa had received mixed reviews.

Seat­tle Times reporter Jim Brun­ner tweet­ed last night that Repub­li­cans did­n’t make use of all of the dec­o­ra­tions ordered for the con­ven­tion. He post­ed a pic­ture on Twit­ter show­ing thou­sands of bal­loons still in the rafters. Brun­ner has yet to file a post­mortem-style piece on the con­ven­tion for the Seat­tle Times, but if and when he does, I’ll update this post with a link (or anoth­er edi­tor will).

Politi­co’s Ken Vogel man­aged to secure some time with right-wing bil­lion­aire David Koch and found out that Koch is (gasp) for mar­riage equal­i­ty — as is Clint East­wood, who stole the show last night dur­ing prime­time with his bizarre stunt in which he pre­tend­ed to have a con­ver­sa­tion with an imag­i­nary Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, por­trayed by a chair. Koch told Vogel “I believe in gay mar­riage” and also sug­gest­ed he would­n’t be opposed to cuts in the defense bud­get, unlike Mitt Rom­ney, who has indi­cat­ed he does­n’t want to reduce mil­i­tary expen­di­tures by one penny.