JOHN BRUMMETT: Convention intervention

Chris Burks, the lawyer for the Arkansas Democratic Party, explained to me Tuesday that the Democratic National Convention offered only a "limited right of expression."

It wasn't an open public forum. It was a closed organization's event.

Frank Klein, owner of a canoe-rental business in Mount Ida and a Bernie Sanders delegate, apparently sought to exceed the limitation. He transgressed either simply by holding a sign opposing the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, or by being agitatedly uncooperative when convention officials asked him either to take down the sign or quit moving about or to be generally more compliant. It depends on the person telling the story.

So the state party denied Klein his delegate credentials last Thursday morning. That meant he couldn't take his seat down front with the Arkansas delegation for Hillary Clinton's big speech that night. And that sure enough agitated him, as attested by a phone video shot by a New Mexico delegate who was standing by when the credentials were denied.

Klein said on the video that he was being denied free speech as well as the opportunity to exercise his responsibility to duly represent Sanders voters in the 4th Congressional District of Arkansas. He steadily raised his voice, understandably.

Tippi McCullough, a Hillary delegate, said she was alone on an elevator with Klein on Friday morning. She said he told her to convey to the delegation his apology--for being loud, not for his point of view or passion.

It bears mentioning that the video reveals Klein wearing a T-shirt saying "FU," a play on the initials of Frank Underwood, the lead character played by Kevin Spacey in the television series House of Cards.

Klein told me he wasn't seeking to convey an attitude by that T-shirt. He said he'd run out of clean shirts by Thursday and that some promotional group had handed out those T-shirts to delegates the day before. He put his on for breakfast Thursday before he had any idea he was about to be denied credentials and captured in agitation on a phone video.

The matter bears exploration for its greater revelatory value about the nature of party conventions. It also is instructive in the tension between the Clinton clique that controls the party and the Sanders delegates who, like Klein, often were new to the process and resentful of the usual politics of conciliation.

The Arkansas delegation was conspicuously down front, owing to Clinton's having passed through the state from 1974 to 1992.

"I would not be forthright," Burks told me, if he denied that state and national party officials wanted the Arkansas delegation "to put the best foot forward" Thursday night for Clinton's big speech.

Party officials thus were worried about any possible and conspicuous protesting activity in the Arkansas delegation.

They were making a TV show. The starring cast was set. They didn't want any rogue extras messing up the shots.

Klein said party officials objected to his anti-TPP sign on Wednesday night and were agitated that he refused to put down the sign when ordered. Burks said party officials weren't concerned so much about the sign itself as they were that Klein wouldn't cooperate when they asked him to stop raising it.

What that means--it seems clear--is that the Arkansas party served the national party's and the Clinton campaign's interests. It did that by fading the heat to keep Klein off the floor on the biggest night, thus removing even the possibility that, sometime during Clinton's speech of her life, cameras might switch to some contentious scene down front in one of Hillary's three home-state delegations.

Klein was not denied free speech. No one put him in jail. He is free to say what he wishes, as he did to me by phone Tuesday morning--by saying there is collusion between the media and the Clinton campaign; that he may vote for the Green Party candidate because of the way the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee treated Sanders and his supporters; that he thinks the DNC rigged primaries for Clinton, and that he is uncertain of Clinton's sincerity in now changing her position to oppose the TPP.

It comes down to this basic truth: Last Thursday night was the Democrats' and Hillary's meticulously scripted television program. A late edit of script required that they stifle a Sanders delegate from Arkansas, a delegate they feared. That they did so both offends sensibilities and makes practical sense.

Let's all try to go forward with two valuable understandings.

The first is that a national political convention is not a free-expression zone, but a TV infomercial, less for the party than the party's candidate.

The other is that Frank Klein of Mount Ida is fully free outside the controlled television set that was the Philadelphia arena--when back in the vast and beautiful open spaces of America--to speak and vote as he pleases.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 08/04/2016

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