Erin Dady, marketing director for the City of St. Paul and a lifelong Democratic activist, admits to a certain “disappointment” last year when she learned that the Republican party had edged out the Democrats in announcing the Twin Cities as the site of its 2008 national convention. But Dady now concedes that hosting the Republicans has become a strategic blessing for St. Paul’s Democratic political leadership.
“It gives us focus. We’re not concerned with the show that is going on inside the arena,” she says. “We can focus on what goes on outside the arena.”
What she means is this: For four days, beginning on Labor Day, 45,000 people—30,000 Republican conventioneers and 15,000 members of the media—will descend upon the Twin Cities. Inside the Xcel Energy Center, delegates will officially anoint a GOP presidential candidate. Outside the arena, conventioneers will be spending money, and media will be blanketing the world with stories from and about Minnesota.
Lobbyists, political operatives, big-name CEOs, executives from virtually every business-related association in America, high-dollar GOP contributors, and, of course, every prominent Republican politician in the country will fan out over the Twin Cities, spending lavishly on the accouterments of a four-day schmooze-fest. Hundreds of contract carriers will transport attendees between 17,000 hotel rooms and the Xcel Energy Center daily, with side trips to innumerable breakfasts, luncheons, formal dinners, dances, and receptions.
Some of those events will offer the standard rubber-chicken fare that people associate with politics. But many, many more will feature an elegance that is unconstrained by budget.
“Money will be no object for many of these events,” says Dina Beaumont, a veteran Washington, D.C.–based event planner who has managed projects at the past five GOP national conventions. “There is probably no four-day period in modern America in which a higher-level cross-section of serious decision makers all gets together in one spot. And their primary purpose of being there is to network and to be seen.”
Every convention includes competition to see who will host the “biggest, splashiest party,” Beaumont says, or who can boast the most exclusive guest list.
The splashy end of the party spectrum is almost guaranteed to include at least one $1-million-plus megaparty headlined by an A-list country band and featuring a dozen buffet lines that would be the envy of the folks at Caesars Palace. At the exclusive end will be intimate after-midnight “smokers,” where the most sought-after guests fondle expensive cigars and sip 20-year-old Scotch.
