Seems like Cruz went against his party mainstream last night. Surely this was to be expected, and not in the best interests of the party’s desire to appear to be unified.
Who gets to decide who the speakers are at the party convention?
Traditionally the nominee, but the convention is run by a committee that can set the rules. Trump invited all of his primary competitors to speak.
Let’s move this to Elections.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I imagine they contract out the sound, but I hear Yamaha and Bose are pretty good speakers.
There are 2 stories going around:
Either Cruz screwed the RNC by giving them an advance copy of a different speech than the actual one that he surprised them with,
or
The RNC & Trump knew in advance what Cruz was going to say, and organized the delegates to boo him when he said it, to make it look like the party was united (except for Cruz).
Personally, I think the second is more likely to be correct: that response on the Convention floor looked too organized to be spontaneous, and Trumps’ twitter comment afterwards seemed planned.
As I understood it, Cruz had to be allowed to speak under the rules because he won enough states.
As for the booing being planned, conventions these days are usually carefully stage managed collections of speakers praising the candidate. If Trump’s people
planned on having a major player refuse to endorse the candidate and getting boos, they are idiots (which in no way says this isn’t true.) Remember Clint and his chair 4 years ago? That was considered a fumble, but a minor one reflecting more on Eastwood than on Romney. If the chair stood for Romney however …
I don’t remember the source (I think it was former RNC head Michael Steele) but, when Lewandowski was fired, some previous guy with convention experience was talking on the radio about how this would be especially hard for Trump’s campaign since Lewandowski was responsible for setting up convention speakers and you weren’t going to get major celebrities to appear with three week’s notice. Which obviously appeared to be the case if you compare Trump’s claims of what the convention would be like versus the caliber of speaker we actually saw.
I don’t know if there’s any forced slots (had to allow Cruz) but it sounded as though 95% of it is up to the nominee’s campaign.
The same guy who picks the amplifiers.
The presumptive nominee runs the whole shebang though Cruz may have gotten his time in exchange for not allowing his name to be placed in nomination.