Though much has been made of the Democratic Party’s choice of Denver as host to its 2008 nominating convention, the move to target a different group of voters isn’t the party’s first in contemporary politics.
Twenty years ago, the Democrats held their convention in Atlanta, at least in part to reach out to Southern voters.
Shirley Franklin, the mayor of Atlanta and a co-chairwoman of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, said in a recent interview in Denver that she sees parallels.
Atlanta, like Denver, had only one unionized hotel and had to negotiate with unions, traditional Democratic supporters, to keep the peace.
And Georgia, like Colorado, isn’t a guaranteed bloc of voters for the party.
Besides the traditional big-city choices, Franklin said, Democrats “also need some of the interior cities in more unlikely places, like Colorado and Georgia, to take the national stage and talk about national policy from our vantage point.”
As a chief mayoral aide during Atlanta’s hosting of the 1988 convention, Franklin said, she made key contacts and relationships with business leaders and political leaders that helped her rise through the ranks.
Franklin spoke with optimism about the chances a convention gives a host city while she shuttled between a Democratic National Convention Committee volunteer effort with the Denver Rescue Mission and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s summit on homelessness Nov. 16.
“When Atlanta won the convention in 1988, we were considered kind of the last choice going into it,” Franklin said. “But planning for the convention helped to galvanize the community in a way that we made new alliances, new friendships and new relationships that now carry forward in other things we do.”
Franklin credits the convention with spawning the idea to restructure the city’s housing projects, which drew international attention eight years later when the 1996 Summer Olympic Games came to Atlanta.
“It’s amazing. You have a deadline and it’s, ‘Lights. Cameras. Action,’ ” Franklin said. “It’s amazing how your differences disappear.”
Atlanta is well-recognized for joining its public housing authority with the private sector to tear down its crime-ridden inner-city projects and rebuild them as mixed-income showcases that transformed how public housing is being done.
Though critics argue that the model displaces a large percentage of the poor the projects were meant to serve, Franklin and other champions of the model say that the total number of clients being served doesn’t diminish and that the new neighborhoods are revitalized and provide more opportunities for the low-income residents who remain.
And though Atlanta officials later drew criticism for engaging in some of the same lavish gift-giving to International Olympic Committee members that tarnished Salt Lake City’s bid, Franklin credits, in part, the success of the political convention with gaining the Olympics, saying the experience instilled in civic leaders a “can-do” attitude.
“We were able to say we had a successful convention, so we could add to that experience and successfully bid for an Olympics.”
In Denver, Franklin said, Western issues will be the focus of some attention, but she expects the party will have to speak beyond the issues of any one region.
“We need to be who we are and talk about the issues, and the issues, I think, for the most part, are universal,” Franklin said.
“But we don’t need to be so sanitized that it’s a Denver convention that could have been anywhere. The music, the visuals, the speakers, the program needs to reflect the place as well as the party.”
Staff researcher Barry Osborne contributed to this report.
Chuck Plunkett: 303-954-1333 or cplunkett@denverpost.com
