PHILADELPHIA—I want to make one thing clear. I’m not here in the City of Brotherly Love to be objective. This is a combat journalism situation, and I will be wearing my "Flip Flip Flip-A-Delegate" Sanders button at least until roll call this evening.
This professional decision is entirely in keeping with the mood on the streets. How woke is my Philly? Let me count the ways. Yesterday I saw a cleric of some obscure occult sect in purple vestments carrying what looked like a candelabra. He was blessing people outside the City Hall subway stop, imploring them to "Avoid binary thought!" I gave a dollar to a college kid playing "This Land is Your Land" on a banjo outside AT&T Station near the Wells Fargo Arena. I had an oyster and cocktail lunch with two leftist friends, both of them locals, who would as soon smash your Warby Parkers as even consider voting for Hillary. Solidary is solidarity. Got it?
Describing the Democratic National Convention as a logistical mess would be misleading. Lazy people make messes. Getting inside the arena is a 30-minute groan-inducing hassle because that’s how the Party wants it. When your driver attempts to drop you off in a wasteland of a parking lot somewhere off 95, he is told to turn around and take you to another one that has been designated as the media drop-off point. From there you walk for what seems like two miles past a series of entrances and exits and wait to be told whether you will be allowed in.
A police officer wearing a Georgia Bulldogs championship ring was totally on the level.
"Not gonna bullshit you," he said. "Secret Service set this thing up to walk the hell out of you guys." When you finally get in and find yourself about to pass out in the 100-degree heat, you can reward yourself with a $6 bottle of orange Gatorade. They should at least give away water if they don’t want journalists being carried out on stretchers—oh wait.
Yesterday’s Free Beacon Mobile HQ was at a Chili’s on Filbert Avenue near City Hall. I had four Coors Lights in the bad AC. I wanted my Philly comrades to meet me there, but, as befits opponents of capitalism, they preferred a more refined setting. If you want the best cocktail in Philadelphia, head over to the 114 South 12th Street for a Dr. Neville. Lillet Rose, grapefruit liqueur, and Peychaud’s. If you come between 5:00 and 7:00, it’s only $6. Thank goodness I found my friends before the storm that broke out sometime after 5:00. There was a flash flood warning, and journalists working in the tents outside the arena were told to vacate because the lightning made it unsafe for them to be there.
When the storm finished I headed for the train station at City Hall, where I met a Sanders supporter from a local pastry shop who was handing out free cinnamon rolls. Because I had passed up the oysters my friends were enjoying, I accepted and gobbled it down with as much dignity as I could muster sitting next to a man who was puking. Then I had a delicious thought: What if Bernie’s people passed around spiked drinks and baked goods all over the city with powerful psychedelics in a last-ditch effort to put their man over the top? What would happen at roll call if the delegations from New York and California and half of Clinton’s 602 super delegates announced that they were feeling the acid Bern? It was a beautiful dream for the five minutes it lasted, but it disappeared as soon as I realized that, apart from being slightly stale, my cinnamon roll was an ordinary one.
Paul Simon has never been able to sing "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and he certainly can’t do it now. The enthusiasm for his painfully bored rendering at the arena last night was as hard to understand as the loud whoops—mostly on Twitter rather than in the arena itself—for Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren’s equally tedious speeches.
I had only two goals on the floor of the convention: showing solidarity with my man Bernie and picking up a souvenir for the Free Beacon office. It will certainly be something to be able to tell my grandchildren that I was there just behind the Iowa delegation in Philadelphia on that stormy Monday long ago the night that democratic socialism in America died. The five-foot-high cardboard M I C H E L L E placard I nicked from the floor before the female rabbi spoke will look nice next to my desk. I hope to pilfer more stuff throughout the week.
After leaving the arena, I rode back with colleagues on a shuttle bus bound for some of the hotels located near the airport. We were sitting in front of some extraordinary people. My favorite was the hippie Ohio delegate asking a 20-something activist and recent Purdue graduate about his job: "How does one become an actuary?" he asked with wide-eyed earnestness. We ended the evening back at the Hampton Inn pool, where we smoked sadly in the blue light with no music. The party situation in Philadelphia is not what it was in Cleveland to say the least. Apart from some comic-book retrospective tonight, I haven’t been invited to a thing since the shindig with Manafort at the fighting hall on Sunday night.