[This is an online-only, totally-must-read feature by Paul Constant called "Stuck in a Room with Mitt Romney" about the last four days in Tampa, Florida. — Eds]
- Thanks to the RNC, the streets of Tampa now resemble the interior of the Tampa Bay Times Forum.
The Tampa Bay Times Forum is basically one gigantic roach motel. You can get in, but you can’t get out. And once you’re inside, there is nothing intuitive about where you should go. One narrow escalator provides service to the whole sixth floor. The elevator banks are small and make strange connections between floors—you can go from the third level to the fifth level on one set of elevators, but you have to walk in circles to find an elevator that will take you the extra flight up to the sixth level, where the print journalists have been stashed, far away from the view of cameras and delegates. Some stairwells end in flat concrete expanses with no doors at all.
So I’m wandering around this place, in the first days of the Republican National Convention, where Mitt Romney will soon accept his party’s nomination to run for president.
Along the walls of the convention center, you’ll find the usual concession stands (a hot dog and fries costs $11, and if I told all the Republicans who grumbled about the high price of food that this was pure capitalism at work, I’d probably have my eye blackened a dozen times over) and bunkerlike bathrooms and gift shops you’d expect in an environment like this. But for the Republican National Convention, management has added a feature to the stadium: prayer rooms. Big signs out front trumpet the PRAYER ROOM, which is protected from the echo of the hall outside by a flimsy curtain. Inside, it’s just a boring room, with a card table and some seats, some depressing fluorescent lighting, slatted walls that were probably meant to hold sports team merchandise, and bright blue carpet adorned with the White Power–looking logo of the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team.
One man inside the prayer room looks at me expectantly when I poke my head in. He’s a bit deflated when he sees that I’m not the leader of a parade of believers. “I thought there’d be a bigger group in here,” he says, shaking his head. “There was a whole prayer group here yesterday, all day long.” Now it’s just he and I.
