For Charlotte elites, hosting the DNC isn’t about showcasing the city as a tourism destination or a world-class up and comer, as it would have been a decade ago. It’s about proving Charlotte is still relevant at all — and not falling to pieces, an impression some national media coverage has left. With its teetering international financial center status in question, devastating articles like this (Washington Post: This is the bust in the boomtown that banks built) have left Charlotte reeling.
So far, things aren’t going exactly as they’d hoped. Let me translate this Charlotte Observer piece.
But they won’t say how far along the Charlotte host committee is in raising the required $36.6 million to pay for convention costs.
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They are way behind raising the money, obviously, especially given that the GOP has already reported its $15 million take in Florida for their convention and most Democrat host committees have already raised $15 million by now for past conventions. That they can’t report a similar figure yet is a crushing humiliation for the uptown crowd, or what is left of it, which prides itself on its ability to raise big bucks, above and beyond what cities the size of Charlotte normally can.
But who is largely in charge of raising the money? That would be Dan Murray, a guy so connected he lost his last race for Mecklenburg County Commission. He’s no dummy, having graduated from Harvard. He’s a surgeon with OrthoCarolina, where he is also CEO. But does he have the connections in and out of Charlotte to pull this off, especially, again, given that he couldn’t even win his last county commission race? Take a look at the host committee list and ask yourself if most of these people do. A third of them aren’t even publicly presentable on a national stage. As in, you wouldn’t want them to talk for more than 20 seconds — or at all — if the nation were watching.
Heck, our mayor, Anthony Foxx, may look impressive in a suit, but he has barely held a real job outside politics. This is normally the kind of deal we’d turn over to the corporate suits here and they’d handle it brilliantly. But with their involvement banned — and questionable that they’d show up this time even if they weren’t banned — the “B” team is, well, a serious cut below.
What this also shows is that without the corporate fundraisers from the three big corps around here writing big checks, there isn’t much of a charitable base around here.
And they can’t even do things the Charlotte way, where they hit up the contractors who will be doing the work for the costs of stuff like bond campaigns, because the DNC is bringing in big labor from other states to do much of the big work with temporary for-show partnerships with local firms who aren’t doing the bulk of the work.
Two of the three construction firms the DNC picked to do millions of dollars of work on the convention center are from out of state. No one will say what percentage of the “high paying jobs” Mayor Foxx has bragged about will be union labor — or from out of state. So there is no one from around here to hit up for money.
Whatever the case, the committee is supposed to be disclosing its progress in monthly fundraising reports, but hasn’t.
“At this point, we’ve decided we’re not ready,” host committee CEO Dan Murrey told the Observer when asked again recently how much money the group has raised. “I think we’re doing great.”
I’m sure they’ll eventually pull it together. They always do.
