- Chip Weiner
- Newt speaking at the RNC on Thursday night before his encounter with a damp reporter.
I'm not sure what was my highlight of the last night of the RNC: crashing the Republican pool party and being the only one to jump in — full dress — or giving Newt Gingrich a sopping hug afterward.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
***
For the preceding week of the Republican National Convention, I'd covered the activity surrounding the Tampa Bay Times Forum, embedding myself in the radical and not-so-radical movement that was protesting, among other things, the lack of food in their makeshift camp off Florida Avenue. I reported on their many protests so much that they eventually kicked me out of a super-secret activist meeting. I apparently didn’t know the secret handshake, and my knowledge of animal-friendly, organic, gluten-free, soy-based, non-fat, no-foam, sugar-free Venti political opinions is, admittedly, very limited.
So, on the last day of this media-saturated, money-drenched circus, I decided to go inside the belly of the beast and meet the Republicans I had heard so many bad things about. Did they really kill and eat babies born out of "legitimate rape?" Did their leader actually strap a dog to the roof of a station wagon on a family vacation? (The latter, as it turns out, is true.)
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2012.
