Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin and assorted party functionaries will be in town this week as they consider Boston to host their 2028 convention.
They will be expertly guided around the Athens of America by a gaggle of our top politicians, which is too bad.
It would be better for all of us if they got lost.
We realize attention spans are shorter than ever these days. But it’s only been 22 years since the Democratic Convention last invaded North Station, not long enough to erase the memory of what a waste of time it was. The Menino administration predicted the thing would generate $154 million in economic benefits to the metro area; a follow-up study by a local think-tank pegged the actual number at less than ten percent of that.
As the late great Bob Uecker put it in the movie “Major League” describing a pitch five feet off the plate: “Juuust a bit outside.”
Even before the road-closing, local-business-damaging nightmare on Causeway Street, Boston’s seemingly insatiable desire to prostrate itself on the altar of a mega-project of dubious economic merit was drawing eye-rolling online comment. “Boston has the saddest inferiority complex I've ever seen,” wrote one poster on a lengthy 2003 thread discussing the phenomenon. “Its leaders are obsessed with becoming ‘world class.’”
And now they’re back at it again, shoveling free meals into the DNC visitors and twisting themselves into knots trying to justify the looming fiasco of the World Cup soccer matches, just weeks away now from paralyzing Foxboro-area traffic and epically ripping off the suckers who want to see it live. To what end? “If history is any guide, the 2026 World Cup will likely deliver a mixed outcome for host cities: Clear benefits for specific sectors like hospitality and entertainment, but ambiguous — even negative — returns” overall, says a recent report from the American Hotel Lodging Association.
Sounds like international soccer’s trademark move - a flop. No doubt, it’s a thrill for local soccer buffs to have the games here, especially if their ancestral homeland is part of the mix. But the cost of actually attending is so prohibitive, most of them will be watching on TV, and probably not thinking gee, it’s great to live in such a world-class place.
Did we learn nothing from the saga of Boston 2024, the effort by local elites to burden the city with a summer Olympic Games that routinely costs host cities billions in overruns? The World Cup and the national party conventions may be a treat for the high-rollers and bigwigs who hob-nob with each other in the luxury boxes, but they do nothing for the rest of us.
What a great look DNC Boston 2028’s exclusive soirées and disruptions of normal life will be for a party staking its hopes on public anger over Republican disregard for their economic well-being. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed in a 1957 sermon, “some people try to overcome their inferiority complex by turning to or fleeing to a world of fantasy and daydreaming and the world of illusion.”
During her ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton liked to push back on Trump’s core message by saying “we don't need to make America great again. America has never stopped being great.” The same could be said of Boston, a perennial top ten destination for international tourism with a triple-A bond rating that is home to the nation’s best seafood, sports fans and wise-asses.
To hell - or Atlanta, same difference - with the Democratic Convention. As that online critic of Boston’s inferiority complex put it: “I could never figure out exactly who they were chasing.”
