The Republican National Convention was supposed to be a celebration. A chance for the party and its host city to show themselves at their best.
As all eyes turn to the GOP convention in Milwaukee, a look back at 2008 in St. Paul
A very different catastrophe — a hurricane — dampened spirits at the 2008 Republican Convention in St. Paul.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
July 15, 2024 at 7:08PM
But catastrophe overshadowed this one, with fear of worse to come.
It’s worth revisiting the last time the Republican National Convention came to the Twin Cities. It was Sept. 1, 2008, and a thousand miles south of St. Paul, Hurricane Gustav was slamming into the Gulf Coast. The storm tore a path from the Caribbean to Michigan and killed 153 people. All the years of planning, all the balloons waiting to drop from the Xcel Energy Center rafters collided with fears of being caught on camera in shallow celebration while people suffered in the storm’s path and thousands protested in the barricaded streets outside.
“We’ve been planning this party for two years! Could you at least stay till dessert?” Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman wrote as the national media slipped out of town and President George W. Bush announced he would skip the convention and head to Texas. “We’ve already confiscated many buckets of urine! Hey! Come back! Please?”
By the time the convention ended on Sept. 4, 200,000 balloons had dropped on schedule. U.S. Sen. John McCain accepted his party’s nomination. Eight hundred people had been arrested through clouds of tear gas that choked the city and cost St. Paul more than half a million dollars worth of police overtime. And Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin taught America the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull. (Lipstick?)
All of this pales in comparison to an assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life. There aren’t enough balloons in America to make the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee feel like a celebration. There’s only the dull, small relief that a 20-year-old with an AR-15 didn’t destroy even more lives.
Minnesota’s delegates put on a smile and boarded buses to the convention, because giving up in the face of threats of political violence would be giving in. And Milwaukee put on its best face, determined to shine for a president who called their hometown “horrible.”
Most states have never had a chance to host a national political convention.
“Minnesotans who know their local lore can attest that national political conventions can go sadly wrong, to the lasting detriment of cities that host them,” Star Tribune columnist Lori Sturdevant wrote in 2008, looking back to the underwhelming convention Minneapolis hosted in 1892.
“Minneapolis was still a young city in 1892. It had 24 hotels, but only one, the West, was up to top East Coast standards,” she wrote. “The city’s restaurants included a few kitchens set up temporarily for the convention. One had a menu consisting entirely of pork and beans.”
But don’t say the conventions never gave us anything. Some good lingers long after the last balloon and tear gas canister has been swept away. The Twin Cities stationed a thousand free loaner bicycles around the region in 2008, and planted the seeds for Nice Ride and all the ride shares that followed.
The 1892 Republican National Convention was the very first to allow women to participate as delegates. And it was in Minneapolis that Therese Alberta Jenkins of the state of Wyoming became the first American woman to cast a vote for president.
A reminder — in a bad time, at a bad convention — of better days ahead.
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