What if they gave a national political convention, and no one cared?
That kind of sums up the reaction in Long Beach, which hosted the National Reform Party convention last week. Though the bash generated a few headlines, it was expected to have little impact on the city’s economy and nowhere near the public relations clout of the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. About 3,000 Reform Party delegates showed up in Long Beach to duke it out inside the behemoth convention center by the sea. It was nowhere near Long Beach’s biggest convention of the year; the Gutenberg Festival, a convention of printing firms held in April, drew 10 times as many people and had double the impact on the city’s economy. Of course, the Gutenberg Festival, which generated about $5 million for California’s fifth largest city, didn’t quite get the press coverage of the Reform Party brouhaha. “We know that C-SPAN is covering it and 300 journalists,” said Linda Howell-DiMario, president and chief executive of the Long Beach Area Convention & Visitors Bureau. Compared to the Democratic National Convention, that seems like small potatoes. L.A. has 15,000 journalists and 10,000 delegates in town this week, who will add about $135 million to the local economy. Some think the Reform Party convention might have had a bigger economic impact if party officials hadn’t spent months bickering over where the convention was going to be held. Even six months ago, Long Beach officials weren’t sure whether the Reform Party was coming to town or not. One party faction was determined to hold the convention in Minnesota while the other faction opted for Long Beach. The on-again, off-again, on-again Reform Party convention was still confusing some Long Beach business owners in the days before its arrival, with some still unaware that it was coming to town. “They’re not coming to Long Beach,” said restaurant owner Enzo De Muro, two days before the convention started. When informed that the delegates would indeed be showing up, the owner of L’Opera, one of downtown Long Beach’s ritziest restaurants, noted that they wouldn’t be impacting his business that much. “With 3,000 delegates, it’s not that much,” De Muro said. Same goes for Long Beach’s famous ocean liner the Queen Mary, which has 365 hotel rooms and several restaurants on board. “The Reform Party convention hasn’t had that much impact on us,” said Lovetta Kramer, spokeswoman for the Queen Mary. A few journalists were staying on board, she noted, but no delegates. The Reform Party convention did provide a nice windfall for the cash-strapped Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, which was rented out for at least $8,000 to host a catered dinner for 500 Pat Buchanan delegates. The delegates were scheduled to hold their dinner inside the aquarium’s Great Hall of the Pacific, the size of an entire football field. And they were to have the run of the entire aquarium during the party.
As small as the Reform Party convention was, it did generate some national media attention for the city that sits in L.A.’s shadow. “With the Reform Party convention in town, Long Beach pops up on the radar screen along with Philadelphia and Los Angeles as one of the hosts of three party conventions,” Howell-DiMario said. The Reform Party delegates also made headlines by sticking with their internecine battles pitting Buchanan delegates against ardent supporters of the party founded by Texas billionaire Ross Perot. Jokes were flying that you needed a football helmet to survive inside the Long Beach Convention Center. Long Beach was even mentioned on newspaper comic pages across the country. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau, creator of “Doonesbury,” penned a series of comic strips last week about the character Duke trying to sneak inside the Long Beach Convention Center, where Nazi-like guards were on duty. Long Beach couldn’t buy publicity like that.
