RNC Day One: Political messages, pepper spray and street theater

Nothing about this gig has moved ahead according to plan: The opening day of the 2008 Republican National Convention didn't feature the expected full-blown gung-ho GOP messaging bonanza.

While the Republicans found it awkward to trumpet themselves during a hurricane, permitted marches and a wide variety of protester street actions unfolded chaotically, as police from across the country and organized protesters sparred across downtown St. Paul. A blast of unruly political messages mixed with the law's efforts to maintain the sense that they had the "upper hand."

The major permitted peace march and the inventively entertaining -- but certainly unpermitted -- marches, mixed with attempted street blockades, turned the usually dead-quiet downtown St. Paul environment into a truly strange, turbulent mixture of law enforcement and protesters.

Despite the narrow slice of the scene rebroadcast for consumer television (FOX News, lacking GOP filler, resorted to dwelling on actor Jon Voight), the marches and protests contained an impressive spectrum of political messages, addressing global wars, America's economic turmoil and the frustrations of the widest possible span of groups.

All that drama -- an unprecedented scene in Minnesota -- got boiled down in the usual way in TV coverage, as our colleague Kendall Anderson at Finance and Commerce alludes to. The media's darling, the iconic "anarchist" archetype, as usual got the big bloc of attention. The broken windows at Macy's became the staple momentary highlight of "bad guys outside the Xcel bubble," while the vast majority of peaceful protesters got just a fraction of the coverage.

Police forces got aggressive with pepper spray, tear gas and other techniques. At the Capitol, one experienced DFL activist told us that gun target lasers had been turned on him at a park earlier, and even that a sniper on top of the Central Library had "lit up" passersby with a targeting laser. The abrupt presence of Minnesota National Guard at innermost security points (read: Mickey's Diner) lent a weird martial atmosphere to this strange day.

(It has to be recalled that the city of St. Paul was extremely reluctant to permit political marches for the RNC in the first place; this left only one official permitted march, dubbed the "Coalition to March on the RNC," confined to back-and-forth on one narrow street as the sole legitimate option for anyone who showed up to see what all the fuss was about.)

Noted journalist Amy Goodman got arrested (with a bloody nose) and accused of conspiring to incite a riot. Other legal observers were also detained, but their network of supporters was able to put enough pressure on the police to get them released right away. Arrested protesters got charged with dozens of felonies, gross misdemeanors and misdemeanors -- the strongest message really available to law enforcement.

A variety of videos of key turns in this drama made it to the Internet. The leader of Communities United Against Police Brutality, Michelle Gross, released her personally recorded cellphone video of the Ramsey County Sheriff's raid on the "Convergence Center" on Smith Avenue. Gross' garage was raided by unknown actors on Friday night, while she was detained at the Convergence Center raid.

Videographer Eileen Clancy from i-Witness, one of the subjects of the weekend's raids (which resulted only in detainments, not arrests), also got a video released about her experience, shot from inside the house as the raid unfolded. [MOV file-big]

The big SEIU-sponsored Labor Day concert at Harriet Island ended in something of a mess, as many regular concertgoers got swept up in mass arrest attempts (which generally became short-term detainments, a major pattern of law enforcement activity widely underreported in the media).

Interestingly, Ron Paul supporters in town for their own rally didn't like the scene, since it seemed, as one put it, like the way the United States will be five years from now, after the economic collapse kicks in. (They weren't big supporters of the "direct action" style protesters, but as staunch Constitutionalists, they also tended to believe that freedom of assembly had certainly been abridged before their eyes.)

The first day of the RNC -- it was a complicated scene, and a weird headache for everyone involved. One St. Paul police officer, tasked within the Xcel, told us that it was really just "another day."