Images of Republican conventions—confetti flying, balloons drifting toward the ceiling, and delegates, festooned with campaign buttons, straw hats perched atop their heads, waving placards as they parade around the floors of huge convention halls to demonstrate for their favorite presidential candidates. I can picture perhaps half a dozen conventions, no more. I see them first in color, gaudy, red-white-and-blue spectacles nominating Bob Dole in 1996, George Bush in 1988 and 1992, and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Then the conventions change to black-and-white—my father held on to our old Zenith long after everybody else in the neighborhood had bought a color set. In black-and-white I can go back as far as 1964, calling to mind grainy images of the liberal sophisticate, Nelson Rockefeller, being booed as he attempted to address the convention, which rejected Rockefeller to nominate the rough-hewn conservative, Barry Goldwater, instead. Before that? The conventions begin to flicker, shifting from our family television set to newsreels that I must have been forced to sit through in a high school history class.
