Hello, Columbus

Why Democrats should take their convention to central Ohio (and no, it’s not for electoral votes)

Columbus, Ohio skyline. (joseph a via Flickr)

I can’t for the life of me figure out why either political party really wants to have a convention anymore. What used to be a national drama filled with intrigue and soaring oratory is now more scripted and less watched than an episode of “Resurrection.” Maybe if they promised to let an anaconda swallow the nominee, we’d have something.

But conventions, like phone books, just keep coming whether we want them or not. And sometime in the next few weeks, leading Democrats will choose the city where they’re expecting to host Hillary Clinton’s coronation in 2016. It’s down to three contenders: New York, Philadelphia and Columbus.

To me, this isn’t even a close call. If you want to memorialize the last century’s economy and ideological orthodoxies, stick close to the Amtrak lines that connect New York and Philly. If you want to understand what urban America might yet become, then follow the freight lines to central Ohio.

To be clear, I have nothing against either of the two larger cities that are dying to host the convention. We know the whole Philadelphia routine, because that city has hosted one party or the other no fewer than five times in the last century — most recently the Republicans in 2000. Visit the Liberty Bell, eat a few cheesesteaks, run drunk and screaming from a giant Ben Franklin mascot who looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow man in a three-cornered hat. No new ground to break there.

New York would locate the convention in Brooklyn, which has re-emerged in recent years as the country’s vibrant epicenter of literary and cultural hipsterism. Which might recommend it as a cool convention site, were it not for the fact that Brooklyn is also the epicenter of liberal self-satisfaction. If smugness had even a subatomic weight, the entire borough would be sitting at the bottom of the East River.

The most obvious argument for Columbus is strategic. A lot of people in politics persist in believing that holding your convention in a battleground state will somehow increase your chances of winning it in November — a theory that probably goes back to the days when yard signs were thought to be crucial.

What is true, though, is that the site you choose for your convention can say something about the kind of party you want to be and the kind of country you want to build. In 2004, for instance, Republicans went to New York to underscore the threat of global terrorism, while the Democrats’ choice of Boston underscored the bedrock democratic values they considered in peril. In recent elections, both parties have embraced cities — Denver, Tampa, Charlotte — that embody the nation’s rapidly shifting demographics.

In this way, Columbus represents a far more interesting choice than either of the other finalists. It may not have Philadelphia’s history or Brooklyn’s music scene, but it’s well on its way to becoming something like the Philadelphia or Brooklyn of the next American age.

Greater Columbus has netted north of 85,000 new jobs since 2010 — in science and high-tech manufacturing, in finance and insurance and education. It’s the kind of diversified economy cities and states will need to have to weather shocks in the new era, and it’s the reason unemployment in Columbus has dipped to under 4 percent.

And if you’ve spent any time in Columbus lately, you know why people want to work there. Starting with the trendy area known as Short North, Columbus has been busy capping highways, greening bridges and generally reimagining old neighborhoods.

The ghostly downtown shopping mall (where I once had a credit card canceled immediately after buying a pair of sneakers, because American Express assumed some thug must have stolen my card) has been razed to make room for a civic space that looks like a miniature version of Chicago’s Millennium Park. The riverfront’s been rebuilt with pathways, cafés and playgrounds, and soon the Scioto River itself will be deeper and more navigable, making way for new attractions.

Columbus has built-in advantages that most overlooked cities don’t. It has one of the country’s leading research universities in Ohio State, a recession-proof industry in the state government, and a great location at the center of an urbanized state.

But Columbus has a few other things that seem all too rare in modern American cities: strong leadership and a business community that doesn’t shirk its civic responsibility.

You could make a compelling case that Columbus’s mayor for the last 14 years, Michael Coleman, is the best big-city mayor in the country. (I once asked Coleman if he might consider some kind of exchange program whereby he could run Washington, D.C., for a while. He didn’t say no.) The city’s first African-American mayor, Coleman is a Democrat who shares the social progressivism of colleagues in Washington, but he’s also an unapologetic pragmatist who’s proud of his close ties with the largely conservative city fathers.

Even the ardently Republican Columbus Dispatch got behind Coleman’s plea, after the financial collapse of 2009, to raise the city’s income tax by half a point. That risky move, which the voters had to approve at the ballot box, enabled Coleman to maintain basic city services without derailing crucial longer-term investments — something very few cities were able to do.

Rather than rail against Republicans in the statehouse or the big banks that employ a lot of his residents, as some Washington Democrats like to do, Coleman seems to focus relentlessly on the kind of urban renewal that will make Columbus attractive to the next generation. “We’ve worked really hard at delivering an economic strategy for millennials,” he told me recently. “We used to be a brain-drain city. We’re now a brain-magnet city.”

Perhaps all of this has something to do with why voters in Columbus and its outlying suburbs still believe enough in politics to engage as listeners, and not simply as reliable partisans. As Coleman puts it: “Northern Ohio is about getting out the vote. Southern Ohio is about getting out the vote. Central Ohio is about persuasion.”

And this is precisely what Democrats will need to do if they want to win a third consecutive White House term in 2016: persuade. Columbus showcases the kind of vision for governance they need to embody. It’s not about a battle of supremacy between one set of talking points and another; it’s about having a genuine, longer-term plan for transformation and demonstrating that government can actually execute it.

Skeptics of Columbus point out that Republicans have decided to hold their own convention in Cleveland, and it makes no sense for both parties to occupy the same state when there’s a whole country out there waiting to be colonized. This isn’t actually unheard of; both Richard Nixon and George McGovern were nominated in Miami in 1972. But that’s beside the point.

If they really wanted to be visionary, Democrats would seize on that contrast to send a message about modernity. Leave the nostalgia to Republicans who will talk about all the shuttered factories up north. A few hours down the highway, a more hopeful future is taking shape.