I suppose I’m devoting a lot more attention to campaign minutiae than warranted. But I rarely do this, and it’s kind of fun. So here’s one more post on the great “packing” controversy.
I got an interesting letter from a McCain supporter who was called on by the campaign to meet McCain as he arrived at CPAC. This fellow said he and a group of about 100 McCain supporters did in fact cheer McCain as he passed through the hotel lobby. At that point, this guy and his fellow McCain supporters were actually kept out of the ballroom, which was full by then. So here we have a case where the McCain campaign clearly did bring in supporters, but actually couldn’t get them into the room.
I don’t doubt that McCain’s campaign urged his supporters to show up and greet the senator. That’s what campaigns do. But in what sense is this “packing?” As I’ve said, Romney folks or other flat-out McCain opponents could have come early and stayed as well. Probably a lot of them were disheartened after Romney withdrew and just left or didn’t focus on staying to hear McCain. Who can blame them?
Another factor is probably the sheer size of the conference. While I was waiting for McCain, one of the speakers said there were 6,000 people at CPAC. No way that room could hold all of them. Yet it’s pretty obvious that a great many of those 6,000 attendees would have wanted to see McCain. It was knowing that the room was unlikely ever to be able to take everyone at the conference that made me show up early. So it seems that out of the many people inevitably locked out of the main room as overflow, some worried that they were being intentionally excluded. Well, no doubt McCain wanted his folks there to greet him, but anyone who really wanted to hear him and boo could have gotten there early and stayed if they’d wanted to. And some of McCain’s own organized supporters were just as clearly kept out of the room as McCain opponents.
So what we’ve got here looks like a lot of excited McCain supporters understandably eager to cheer their guy, a mixed group of folks with the forethought to get an early seat, and a large number of inevitable lock-outs from all camps. And again, the discouraging news earlier in the day for Romney supporters probably kept their numbers down. I guess we’re ultimately seeing a complicated mixture of good campaign organization, the emotional dynamics of a dramatic day, and the problem of a room that could never hold the huge number of people who would ultimately want to be in on an historic moment.