WEEKLY EDITORIAL RECAP

Convention chaos

The question posed by one reader — “If the Democratic Party can’t successfully stage a convention in a city that hosts hundreds of conventions a year, how will it fare at something really complicated, like running our country?” — is not entirely fair.

Local Clark County political conventions, for either major party, have tended in the past to be sparsely attended events …

But County Chairman John Hunt and other local party leaders claimed they were expecting more than 7,000 people at their convention at Bally’s Saturday. They’d certainly seen an unprecedented 117,000 party members flock to local high schools for their Jan. 19 precinct caucuses.

But after booking a room that held only 5,000 people, turning away thousands of delegates and offering no streamlined procedure for recognizing and seating even those delegates who had registered in advance, the party’s local leadership appeared Saturday to be asking, in effect, “Come on, you didn’t actually believe a word we said, did you?”

The close-fought nomination battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama brought out thousands more activists than the room could hold. And most showed little patience with the traditional lineup of “me-too” speeches by local political luminaries.

There’s a positive aspect to all this. The close-fought Democratic nomination battle has energized participation at precisely the level any party leader dreams of, in an era of dwindling electoral participation.

But by 4 p.m. Saturday — nine hours after many delegates showed up and started forming their lines — both the Obama and Clinton organizers had had enough, calling for the convention to be adjourned till sometime in March or April, in hopes of sending a more representative and carefully counted delegate slate to the state convention in Reno on May 17. So now they’ll have to do it all over again.