Over at Swampland, Mike Murphy writes:

[M]ost of the delegates doing all this "I'm just not ready yet to put on an Obama t--shirt" talking to the media have - sorry - no real power. There is a huge mythology about "organization" but 85% of it is just fantasy. A year ago we all heard about Hillary Clinton's big edge in "organization" and her fearsome "machine." But who has the nicer hotel rooms here in Denver now? It's a message, money and media game these days; true organizational power died with Boss Pendergast.

Murphy makes a good point. It is easy to overestimate the power of party "organizations" during a week like this. But they are not what they used to be. Many of them are not much of anything at all.

And why should they be? A hundred years ago, there were no televisions and no public opinion polls. Yet Americans still politicked. How'd they do it? Manpower managed by organization.

But the times have changed. Today, the way to campaign goes something like this: hire a bunch of experts to make you look good on TV for the voters that your other experts told you to persuade. Rank-and-file partisans are not really part of the equation anymore. Even if there might be some utility to mass-based organizations, campaign finance rules are such that the parties can't afford them and all the ads.

As I've said before, these conventions are antiquated - they are holdovers from an older era. The only reason they happen today is that they are advertisements that the candidate doesn't have to pay for himself. In other words, a clause or two in our inefficient campaign finance laws keeps these things afloat.

The state and local party outfits that populate the convention with delegates no longer serve the functions they once did, but they are still around, still organizing just enough to send delegates to the quadrennial convention. People at this convention, even the ones who look like average voters, are not average. Their experience with politics is lived via a party organization that their friends, neighbors, and coworkers wouldn't even know exists were it not for their involvement.

What do the parties do now? The party as a whole has several vital tasks: (1) campaign on behalf of its candidates; (2) legally launder money from one committee to another; (3) establish formal and informal "rules of the game" to manage political ambitions (e.g. the "invisible primary" that selects which would-be nominees are viable and which are not viable); (4) promote a party message or theme; (5) form and manage legislative caucuses.

The people you see on the convention floor really have little to do with any of this. Ditto the local party organizations, the few that are are actually left. The state parties do participate in the money laundering game and the support of candidates for state offices. But they aren't what they used to be. The power center of the American political party is now Washington, D.C., the hub of a largely informal network that connects candidates, professional advisors, and donors. Most of the delegates on the floor aren't part of that world.