I didn’t watch all of last night’s kickoff of the Democratic National Convention, but as a media veteran fascinated by these grand affairs, I felt the need to check in every once in a while. As the speeches kept piling up after getting off to a late start, there was part of my broadcaster’s brain that kept thinking, “This is running long, and they’re going to push President Biden out of prime time in most of the country.”
As it turned out, by the time he took the stage around 10:35pm (which is considered late night here in the Midwest), his speech was anticlimactic. Yes, he was in the same Forceful Joe mode as when he gave his State Of The Union address earlier this year, with only a couple of slips of the tongue. It was nothing like his debate disaster, but everything he read off the teleprompter sounded like the exact same wording from when he was campaigning in the first half of this year.
Frankly, he was more than a little boring. And I thought it unseemly that he was the one who had to recap his many presidential achievements. Considering Kamala’s campaign theme is to be forward looking (“We’re not going back!), Biden’s retrospective of his three and a half years in the Oval Office didn’t work for me. I also wondered whether — during the four and a half minute ovation he received before he even began speaking — he was thinking to himself, “Where was this outpouring of love from my party six weeks ago when I was still the nominee?”
Fortunately for the Dems, they had a roster of very good speakers in the primetime hours before Biden appeared. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become a total pro who knows how to work a crowd. So does Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas. Both of them are especially adept at social media and clips of them probably went viral minutes after they left the stage. I was also very impressed by Hillary Clinton, who sounds so much better now that she doesn’t have to test every word she says with focus groups.
By week’s end, the roster of speakers at the DNC will have included three former presidents (Bill, Barack, and Joe) and a former presidential candidate (Hillary). Compare that to the RNC’s gathering, where not only did no one mention George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Mike Pence, they were nowhere to be seen.
After Biden’s speech, I turned on MSNBC in time to catch Lawrence O’Donnell making an interesting point about how we got here.
He said the path to Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee actually goes back twenty years to when John Kerry chose Barack Obama as keynote speaker at the 2004 convention. While Kerry lost to Bush 43, Obama was so impressive and telegenic that he was able to beat John McCain four years later — and chose Joe Biden as his running mate. After Biden’s eight years as Vice President, he didn’t run against Trump in 2016, but when he did in 2020, he chose Kamala Harris. Now here she is at the top of the ticket.
Meanwhile, on the GOP side, Trump has said the choice of a Vice President doesn’t matter at all. Unless you need someone for your rabid cult members to try to hang from gallows they’ve built outside the Capitol, of course.
The most moving part of the DNC proceedings was dedicated to Reproductive Rights, personified by Amanda Zurawski, Kaitlyn Joshua, and Hadley Duvall — three women who bravely shared their personal stories of trauma. The first two had nearly died because from pregnancy complications in red states where legislatures have banned abortion (even when the life of the mother is endangered).
As for Duvall, she talked about being raped and impregnated at age twelve by her stepfather. Because it was ten years ago, at a time Roe v. Wade was still law, she had options. But a tween girl who suffers sexual assault at home today would have no such choices in twenty-one states. Duvall’s most moving line referred to Trump calling the Roe reversal a beautiful thing: “What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child?”
Because Trump keeps taking credit for putting justices on the Supreme Court who overturned what had been considered settled law, and a large majority of Americans are pro-choice, it’s very smart from a branding perspective for Democrats to invoke the phrase “Trump Abortion Ban” as often as possible.