Whither speakest thou, O John?

Until Franklin Roosevelt went to Chicago in 1932 to accept his party’s nomination for the same position no candidate had actually traveled to his party’s convention to accept the nomination. But after 1932 such a trip and speech became an unwritten requirement.

In 1960 Democrats from across the republic convened at the Los Angeles Sports Arena and held a convention, nominating John F. Kennedy as their presidential candidate.

The Democrats decided that it might be time to try something new, so they moved the last session of the convention where their nominee would deliver his acceptance speech to the Los Angeles Coliseum, home at the time to the Rams, Bruins, Trojans, and Dodgers. They calculated rather cleverly that more people can get into football stadia than in basketball arenas. That proved right.

However, nobody has seemed to think the same way since then. Acceptance speeches in both parties are still given to the smaller crowds of partisans that arenas allow. [Actually, in 1988 the entire Republican convention which nominated George H.W. Bush was held in the New Orleans Superdome and there was some embarrassment caused by vacant seats.]

That is, until this year. Now for the Democratic National Convention in Denver Barack Obama will move his acceptance speech to a corporate-named football stadium.

The next question that might come locally is whether the GOP and McCain might try a similar stratagem.

The only football stadium around here large enough to accomplish the purpose would be the Humphreydome in Mpls. It looks like the Republicans will pass on the opportunity to go there. I am sure that this would make all those who have been working on logistics and security happy. Moving the show to Mpls. might give us a little more peace a day sooner, but they would still be clogging things up quite a bit.

I also imagine that Republicans fear exactly who would be in the audience at the Humphreydome. They might not all be cheering masses.

And they probably prefer the more intimate atmosphere of a corporate-named arena to that of a stadium named after Hubert Humphrey.

But let's keep our eyes open.