Delegate Sandy Rosenberg's Diary from the 2000 Democratic Convention

Sunday

On the Main Street lot created by movie mogul Harry Cohn, long before
Columbia Pictures became Sony Pictures and long before anyone either
mentioned or dreamed that a Jew could run for national office, more than a
thousand Jews reveled and kvelled this Sunday afternoon, on the eve of the
Democratic convention where Joseph Lieberman will be nominated for Vice
President of the United States.

Arab Americans protested outside. A combined Klezmer and Mariachi band
played inside. Cabinet Secretaries spoke. "Italian Americans are relishing
in your joy," said Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo. Lay and professional
leaders of the sponsoring Jewish organizations introduced the federal and
statewide elected officials who didn't speak.

And finally, nearly an hour later than scheduled, Senate candidate Hilary
Rodham Clinton addressed the crowd. "The President, Al Gore, and Joe
Lieberman have changed the Democratic Party," she said. "The Vice President's
bold and courageous choice of Joe Lieberman is also very smart."

She was followed on stage by the President. As he was being introduced
to the crowd, he and his wife scanned the crowd for people they knew. "How
profoundly grateful I am for the support I've received since 1991 from the
American Jewish community," began Mr. Clinton.

In 1970, when law student Clinton volunteered for State Senate candidate
Lieberman, "I was especially impressed that he had been a Freedom Rider in
the South. Joe is brilliant and a little bit of an iconoclast. His
selection is a living embodiment of America's continuing commitment to build
one national community."

"Other Hollywood Jews effaced their Judaism as a means of being
accepted," writes Neal Gabler in An Empire of Their Own, How the Jews
Invented Hollywood. "[Harry] Cohn more than effaced it; he exhibited active
contempt toward it, as if it were something repellent."

Those days are long gone among Jews of prominence. Nonetheless, in the
week since the Lieberman selection, some have expressed concern that a Gore
loss would now be blamed upon the Jews.

The Democratic ticket played extraordinarily well on the Main Street
movie set. How well it will play on the Main Streets of Middle America will
determine if Joe Lieberman returns to the Senate as a member, or its
presiding officer.

On a lighter note, Kweisi Mfume was on my flight to LA earlier today. "I
read a good quote of yours recently," he says to me.

"What I said in the Jewish Times about the contrast between Gore
selecting Lieberman as a running mate and the Republicans' professing
diversity by having performers on the stage at their convention?" I ask.

"No, not that," he says.

"Oh, my quote in the Sun about the Oriole trades?" I suggest.

"Yes, that's it."

Monday

So, what's a nice Democratic boy like you doing in a place like this?

I could write that as I was about to leave the Richard Nixon Library and
Birthplace yesterday afternoon, that's what the Associated Press photographer
asked me. But it would be wrong.

There was a photographer. He was doing a story about Democratic
Convention delegates visiting the Library. And when he asked why I was
there, I said, "I wanted to get a sense of how Nixon portrays his legacy."

Presidential libraries are not the place to go for an objective analysis
of an individual's time in the White House. For that, you should go buy a
book. With that in mind, some thoughts on the Nixon Library.

Mr. Nixon was an active player on the American political scene for nearly
thirty years, not counting the post-Watergate period. He told Khrushchev in
the kitchen debate that "your grandchildren will live in freedom," and he was
right. His opening to China marked a major strategic shift in American
foreign policy. It is clearly the foreign nation closest to his heart. Far
more display is given to his visits there than to any other country.

Significant attention is also paid to the Middle East. Nixon's decision
to airlift more supplies to Israel during the Yom Kippur War than the
Pentagon wanted to send is highlighted. Golda Meier is one of ten world
figures who meet Nixon's criterion for great leadership: Did they make a
difference? Statues of each of the ten are prominently displayed.

He sought a major reform of welfare in 1969, but it died because of "lack
of support from the so-called ‘social welfare' lobbies and the Congress,"
according to a display. Having written my college thesis on this
legislation, I would have added that Mr. Nixon was unwilling to expend any
political capital on this matter when conservatives also raised objections to
his plan.

Watergate, however, is the most striking example of how history is
rewritten at the Library. In "Never Give Up," the biographical film at the
outset of my tour, the narrator says of the second-rate break-in at the
Watergate: "The President knew nothing about it. His aides became involved
in the cover up." Similarly, the exhibit on Watergate begins: "Nixon
acknowledged inexcusable misjudgements, but political opponents ruthlessly
exploited these mistakes."

Senator Sam Ervin is described as someone who "just nine years earlier
would have denied blacks equal protection of the laws." Senator John
Stennis, asked by the White House to verify its transcription of certain
audio tapes, is a "respected Senator," despite having voted the same way on
civil rights. (Speaking of which, a 1957 letter of praise from Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. is prominently displayed, but there's no mention of Nixon's
Southern Strategy, which transformed Dixie into a GOP electoral bastion.)

At the Democratic Convention last night, I pass by David Eisenhower, a
respected historian in his own right, but don't engage him in conversation.

Not much to add about the Clintons' speeches, except to note that as the
huge video screen at the Staples Center showed the President striding through
the back corridors on his way to the podium to give his address, all I could
think of was the video in which Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones do much
the same before they appeared on stage at the MCI Center in their most recent
farewell tour.

A final note on the day: On a bus to the post-convention reception at
Paramount Studios, a farmer from Missouri is sitting next to me. "A week
ago, I was on a cruise," he relates. "Some Jewish people were sitting at our
table when we first heard about the Lieberman selection. They got excited."

"Everybody got excited," responds an African-American sitting next to us.


Tuesday

The Convention tonight was devoted to the Kennedys and to the social
issues that dare not
speak their name at the Republican convention. Caroline Kennedy related that
"a day didn't go by without someone saying to me or my brother, ‘Your father
inspired me to do public service.'"

In a video of John Kennedy's acceptance speech in LA 40years ago, the
nominee said: "My religious affiliation is not relevant." Said Senator
Kennedy from the podium tonight: "How proud President Kennedy would be of the
new barrier of bigotry we're breaking down with the nomination of Joe
Lieberman."

Family was the most frequently used word in the speech by Elizabeth
Birch, head of the nation's largest gay rights organization. Said Kate
Michelman of the National Abortion Rights Action League: "The work of 100
years could be undone in one day - Election Day." Jesse Jackson spoke of a
ticket that has brought together "the sons and daughters of slavemasters, and
the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors."

On my way out of the arena, I run into a lawyer friend. He soon stops to
chat with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a VP notgonnabe. "How do you
know him?" I ask. "I vetted him during the VP selection process but had
never spoken to him until now."

Some historical footnotes: The exhibit at the Nixon Library on his Senate
race against Helen Gahegan Douglas includes the pink sheet of campaign
literature that Nixon used to link the "Pink Lady" with the lone Socialist
member of the House of Representatives by listing instances where the two had
voted the same way.

In 1972, my first year at law school, I went to a campaign rally in a
public school in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Sargent Shriver, by then
George McGovern's running mate, was the featured speaker.

A host of elected officials and dignitaries was introduced. The last was
Helen Gahegan Douglas. The crowd rose as one, a heartfelt standing ovation.

I'm re-reading Teddy White's The Making of the President 1960.
Describing the October 1959 meeting where John Kennedy and his top advisers
plotted strategy for the Presidential campaign, White notes that John Bailey,
the Democratic Party boss of Connecticut, was a leading member of the group.

Yale student Joseph Lieberman would later write his senior thesis about
Bailey. It would be interesting to know what he wrote about Bailey's role in
the election of the nation's first Catholic President.

Wednesday

Joe Lieberman entered the convention hall to the theme from "Chariots of
Fire," the story of a man who would not run an Olympic race because it fell
on his Sabbath. Moved by the moment, I reached over two rows of people to
clasp Myrna Cardin's hand. Both of us cried tears of joy. [Myrna Cardin is
the wife of Ben Cardin, my friend and former colleague in the House of
Delegates, now Congressman from the 3rd District of Maryland.]

"Is America a great country?" Lieberman began his speech. On this night,
in this hall, it most certainly was.

"We have become the America that our parents dreamed for us," he
continued. Nonetheless, that civil rights was the first issue discussed by
the nominee in his speech reflects the concerns raised by some African
Americans about his stance on affirmative action. Nor was it an accident
that Lieberman was introduced by an Hispanic Congressman, Robert Menendez,
and a hero of the civil rights movement, Congressman John Lewis. ("From my
lips to God's ears," intoned Lewis. "America is ready for Joe Lieberman.")

For some time now, I have felt that if this election turns on perceptions
of personality and integrity, the Republicans will win. If the focus instead
is on where the candidates and their parties differ on the issues, the
Democrats will win.

In his speech, Lieberman concentrated on those policy differences, most
notably on health care and budgetary policy. He praised Al Gore "for his
honesty, his integrity, and his strength of character."

So did two of the people who gave nomination speeches for the Vice
President: Tommy Lee Jones, the actor and Harvard roommate, and Karenna Gore
Schiff, his daughter and recent graduate of Columbia Law School. (I trust
her moot court argument there dwelt more on the facts and the law than did
her stories of fatherly concern for his first born tonight.)

Whatever the outcome in November, Lieberman's nomination is another
substantive step in the direction of inclusion and tolerance. Tonight was a
time to revel in this moment.

Thursday

Al Gore was not wooden tonight.

He entered the arena like a prizefighter, wading and high fiving his way
through the crowd. He did not deliver a rhetorical knockout punch, but he
did pick himself off the floor for the remaining rounds of the Presidential
election.

He sought to distinguish himself from the man whose crown he seeks to
gain: "Now we turn the page and write a new chapter." "I stand here tonight
as my own man."

Without being sharply negative, he drew differences between himself and
the other challenger: "The 62 cents and change a working class American
would get each week from the Republicans' tax cut is not the kind of change
I'm working for."

Like a State of the Union address, he personalized issues by pointing out
people in the audience whose cause he would champion. And he sought to
neutralize the personality issue by declaring, "The Presidency is not a
popularity contest."

A concluding thought: For most of my generation, blatant anti-Semitism is
something we have read about, but not directly experienced. American support
for the State of Israel is a given. A visit to the Skirball Cultural Center
this Convention week was instructive in that regard.

"In the United States, prejudice of minorities is rejected," reads the
display on Purim. The emphasis is on the American ideal, where such
intolerance is not officially condoned. The Holocaust is depicted but not
the KKK. (This week, the editors of The New Republic wrote in a similar
vein: The American challenge is that this is the place where Jews and other
minorities "must learn to take yes for an answer.")

What struck me the most at the Skirball was the account of President
Truman's decision to recognize Israel within minutes of the declaration of
the state by David Ben Gurion on May 14, 1948.

Several days before, Clark Clifford, at the request of the President, had
made the case for doing so at a meeting of national security advisers.
Secretary of State George C. Marshall objected. General Marshall informed
the White House that he would not express his misgivings publicly a bare two
hours before Ben Gurion declared the State of Israel in Tel Aviv.

I do not mean to equate Gore's selection of Lieberman with Truman's
decision to recognize Israel. But bold actions by individuals can make a
difference. The historical significance of what we have witnessed this week
will not be known until November 7.