Cleveland: A Destination?

While listeing to WCPN this morning, a local caller gave his opinion on the discussion of the Medical Mart + Convention Center.

It went something like this:

“No one is going to come to Cleveland for a convention. If I lived in another city, I’d never come here. We need to stop talking about a Convention Center, and start thinking in reality.”

Do you think Cleveland is a destination location?

What about all the conventions that currently come to Cleveland?

Why do Clevelanders think that people don’t want to come here? Why would we chose to live here, and yet think if we didn’t we wouldn’t come visit?

Why do we not want people to come visit?

This kind of attitude goes back to my comments about Cleveland’s negative self-image problem.

I just don’t get it.

Cleveland’s Self Image Problem

I was reading the Clevelandada blog today, and I was struck by his post “Provincial.”

There is a generational negativity in this town. When someone moves here, or is looking to take a job here, most of us ask, “why do you want to move here?”

We live here. Why do we live here? What has kept us in town? Our generational negativity?

I’ve been reading a few blogs that are starting to raise the question, why are we all so negative about Cleveland?

If we all hate it so much, why is everyone still here?

I think it is the mindset of the locals. We’ve grown up with despair, jokes about the damn river, the punchline of the world, and we’ve fallen into this horrible self-image problem.

But if you sit and think about it. Cleveland, of course has its problems (I am not making a case that it is perfect here, and that is a utopia the rest of the world has yet to discover), but we aren’t much different than other cities.

First, we need to get over ourselves. Cleveland is not a mecca. But it can certainly be a destination. No one in this town plays up the strenghts. All anyone wants to promote is our short-comings… what other city does that?

We have more golf courses per square mile than Orlando, FL. We have one of the most amazing, and underused public park systems. We have a lake front with endless possibilities. We have an enormous selection of ethnic restaurants and markets.

Individually, we can’t fix the big problems. But we can at least promote what we have. Talk it up. Come up with a simple idea (visit downtown once a month for dinner, a comedy show, a concert, to shop) and execute. When you’re done, tell someone else. Take them with you.

It all won’t change in a day, but if talk about and use what is great about Cleveland it won’t disappear, others will see what you see, and maybe, just maybe, we can stop being the but of our own jokes.

Poll: A Surprising G.O.P. Edge for ‘08

This is a headline from Time.com.

When you have to clarify the year of the election, perhaps the poll is a bit premature. If I were called and asked who would I vote for in the next Presidential election, I think my response would be: “No clue.” I have 19 months to decide.

19 months. 1 year and 7 months. That’s 586 days from today.

I think there are more pressing issued to deal with today, than what people think about an event in 19 months.

Most polls, including the headline I stole from a Time magazine article, include Rudy Guliani. He hasn’t even announced he’s running for President, and yet you are asking people if they will vote for him in 19 months?

Not a single primary has occurred. The conventions haven’t even gotten their money yet (that was included in the pork-filled Iraq War funding bill that includes all those time lines for withdrawal that our elected officials spent so much time crafting, and pork-filling so our “well-respected” President can just veto the damn thing, thus wasting more time in DC… more blah, blah, blah, less action)… I digress…

So from here on out, I am not discussing the 2008 Presidential election. Not until the above headline can be run without the need to specify the year.

That will be 278 days from today.

To Quote Teddy:

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
– Theodore Roosevelt