US: The biggest commotion behind the scenes at Madison Square Garden on Monday evening was caused by the media throng that enveloped Michael Moore and his bodyguards when he arrived with press credentials around his neck, writes Conor O'Clery in New York
The anti-Bush documentary-maker had been commissioned to write a column for the daily newspaper USA Today, he explained, but disbelieving officials refused for a while to allow him to take a press seat.
Astonished delegates gathered round to see their burly, unshaven nemesis, some taking pictures. "He's a trouble-maker and he's here to make trouble," complained Republican Party consultant David Welsh from Pittsburgh.
Later he conceded that Moore had a right to be there and told me: "Actually, I want to get his autograph for my son Peter - who goes the other way from his father." Moore was eventually allowed to take his seat high up in the gallery and remained there largely unnoticed until Senator John McCain, unaware that the maker of Fahrenheit 9/11 was present, attacked Moore in his speech.
The decision on Iraq was between war and a graver threat, he said, and no one should be allowed tell them otherwise, "and certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls." Fingers pointed and heads craned towards Moore and a derisory chant went up of "Four more years!" The documentary maker doffed his red baseball cap and laughingly held up two fingers and mouthed the words "Two more months!" Moore said that he believed the Republican Party's leadership knows America is filled with RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) and that most Americans are much more liberal than the delegates gathered in New York.
"The Republicans know it," he said. "That's why this week we're seeing gay-loving Rudy Giuliani, gun-hating Michael Bloomberg and abortion-rights advocate Arnold Schwarzenegger."
Senator McCain got a huge reception from the 5,000 delegates for his support for the President's "necessary, achievable and noble" military venture in Iraq. He is probably the most popular politician in the United States, certainly with the media.
His birthday party the previous evening in La Goulue on Madison Avenue was attended by the heavyweights of the fourth estate, including NBC's Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert, ABC's Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters, CBS's Mike Wallace and Dan Rather, CNN's Judy Woodruff and Jeff Greenfield, MSNBC's Chris Matthews and PBS's Charlie Rose.
Johnny Apple of the New York Times, with whom McCain sometimes stayed in Saigon before he was shot down over Hanoi, wrote that at the party the senator was privately vehement in his denunciation of the Swift Boat ads questioning the war record of his friend John Kerry, and that he would ask the President again to denounce them.
The Kerry-baiting continued on the floor of the convention where a Virginian delegate, Morton Blackwell, handed out band aids with purple hearts on them to mock the alleged superficiality of injuries received by Kerry - who still carries shrapnel in his body. The anti-Kerry veterans claim two of the wounds for which he received Purple Hearts were scratches, requiring only band-aids. The 250 bandages Blackwell gave out came with the message: "It was just a self-inflicted scratch, but you see I got a Purple Heart for it."
After dozens of delegates started wearing the bandages on their chins and foreheads, Party chairman Ed Gillespie spoke to Blackwell who agreed not to distribute any more, said Republican spokesman Jim Dyke.