INTRODUCTION

Party nominating conventions no longer receive the highly-rated gavel-to-gavel coverage that characterized them in the “golden age” of television. However, even as the party conventions have lost much of their grip on public and media attention, convention keynote speeches still catch the public eye. Because of the prominence and prestige attached to such speeches, party officials traditionally use the spotlight to advertise the party's core values and especially to showcase up-and-coming political stars (Coleman, Cantor, and Neale 2000). For example, in 1988, relatively unknown Texas State Treasurer Ann Richards vaulted from obscurity to the Texas governor's mansion after criticizing George H.W. Bush in her keynote as having been born “with a silver foot in his mouth.” Even more auspiciously, in 2004 Democrats used the keynote to boost the senatorial campaign of a then-unknown Senate candidate named Barack Obama. Following Obama's speech, Republican Party officials considered a range of speakers for their convention's keynote and announced that their choice was Zell Miller, a relatively obscure Democratic senator from Georgia.

If the traditional functions of the keynote speeches are to highlight party values and raise the stock of promising new candidates, why would Republicans choose to feature a Democrat who was on the verge of retirement – a speaker who had, in fact, given the Democratic keynote in 1992 for then-Governor Bill Clinton?