Yup. I was there today.
I managed to get invited to the Republican Youth Convention even though I'm about as Republican as...well...any other hippy on the street.
So here's what I saw:
Security was tight as hell. They've got the roads blocked off like two blocks in every direction from Madison Square Garden. The entire NYPD is in that area, I think. And lemme tell you something, those cops are all bored as hell. I heard that a bunch of the arrests tonight were people who hadn't done anything wrong at all. The cops are just looking for something to do.
The actual convention inside was crap. It was entirely party rhetoric... Some guy from the WWE spoke, as did the Bush twins, Ari Fleischer, Jason Sehorn and his wife, and some other important people.
There were three lively parts to the day.
One was after the twins finished speaking. One or two guys ripped off their shirts and started yelling pro-Kerry cheers. Instantly, everybody was cheering "four more years", etc. A million cameras came out of nowhere to capture the guys on film as they were swarmed by Young Republicans and were then dragged out by security.
Two was when the group I was with was taken upstairs to be interviewed by one of the networks. The cops there decided that we "were in an unauthorized zone" and "didn't have permission to be there" when the guy we were with had his press credentials and we had our security badges. The cop had to call his supervisor who then said we had to go back downstairs where we were told we couldn't go back inside because we had ventured into an "unauthorized" zone. After talking to the group leaders for a while and getting just about every detail about their lives except for their pets' names and their credit card numbers, we were allowed back onto the floor and told not to move a muscle or else we'd be expelled and have our tickets taken away. The convention ended soon after that anyway.
The last thing was that on the escalator coming down from my failed interview, I walked right past Andre from Outkast. It was cool.
So there's the live report. Hope y'all enjoyed it.
