Greetings from the floor of the convention! I'm sitting under the sign for the New Mexico delegation. I've been here since Thursday, when there was still exposed plywood, angry drills and guys with lots of tattoos yelling at each other about forklifts.
In the workspace there's a sign that says: "Watch Out for Forklifts." I never knew they were so stealthy. (Drought, debt, hurricanes, and now we have to worry about forklifts? Dark times.) Having spent so much time in the hall, I've come to the conclusion that the convention stage is destiny.
There are a dozen or so high-definition screens wrapped in warm-looking wooden frames. They float in the air, offset from one another as in part of a mobile you might buy in the gift shop at Fallingwater. Everything on the stage has had the same applied black-walnut wood surface poured over it -- the lectern, the stairs and the desk, which looks like it needs a receptionist to welcome you for your weekend at the mountain lodge.
Bob Schieffer said the whole business looks like a Swedish spa. I think it looks like the basement movie room of a dot-com mogul who has just had a very successful IPO. You can watch the 49ers game and play Diablo 3 at the same time.
Convention planners have tried to do with the stage what they're trying to do with Mitt Romney: warm up a cool medium. The monitors are high-tech and passionless. They're so sharp they hurt your eyes. Wrapped in the wood, though, they take on a more comfortable feel. Or at least that's the gambit.
To some, this will seem a stylish mix of new technology wrapped in a warm traditional look. To others it might be discordant, like those hideous amalgams you see in Sky Mall: Hide your television remote in this authentic-looking replica of a first edition of "Great Expectations"! Wrapping the cool technology in the dark wood may neither comfort nor inform.
This convention is an exercise in packaging Mitt Romney in a similar way. Voters haven't found him likable or approachable. In the latest NBC poll, when voters are asked which candidate cares about average people, Romney loses to President Obama by 20 points. He's probably not going to fix that, but Romney aides concede that their candidate has to cross a threshold to allow people to feel OK with handing him power. The bad economy and their unhappiness with Obama have voters ready to leave him, but they've got to feel a little better about Romney to make the leap.
Although the Obama campaign is trying to argue that this is a Romney reinvention authored by Hollywood, we don't know that yet. Simply trying to highlight your candidate's best qualities is hardly an act of phony make-believe.
