A report in the Dallas Morning News Tuesday morning might be interpreted as the latest example of RNC "sour grapes," but the upshot is this: the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau has bought ads at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport that will be in place for the RNC to remind arriving delegates where they could have been celebrating a Trump nomination.
“We’re poking a little bit of fun, not so much in the choice, but in the destination,” said Noelle LeVeaux, marketing director for the Dallas bureau (making a distinction that, for Scene, remains unclear).
LeVeaux told Scene that though the design for the ads have yet to be finalized, the plan is that they'll run from two weeks prior to the convention to one week after.
The Hopkins tourism jab arrived in a larger piece about how Dallas is coping with the fact that the RNC selection committee picked Cleveland over the Texas City.
The consensus down in Maverick town? Cleveland had an undeniable political edge — Texas is reliably conservative; Ohio is the quintessential battleground state — and though Dallas might have had the logistical leg up, the Selection Committee was making a strategic calculation when they picked Cleveland.
The Morning News reporters noted that Cleveland has proven itself a "formidable" fundraiser, but the report spent most of its ink outlining the various locations of far-flung hotels where delegates will stay during the convention. The crew from Oregon will reportedly be staying in Akron, for instance.
In contrast, the Dallas pitch for the RNC included a pledge that 90 percent of the available hotel rooms would be within about a mile of the convention site.
“We are markedly a much better convention city,” said Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. “That’s not disparaging Cleveland. It’s just a fact of what’s better and what’s worse," (making a distinction that, for Scene, once again, is just extremely unclear).
David Gilbert would call all this a matter of perspective. His feathers got ruffled, big time, back in April when an editorial in the Kansas City Star expressed gratitude that the potentially volatile 2016 convention had gone to Cleveland and not KC, another finalist.
Dallas, however, still harbors resentment. But David Gilbert won't be bullied. When asked about the Dallas ads at Hopkins, he told the Morning News:
“If that’s how they choose to spend their money, that’s fine,”
