CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--The first three days of the Democratic National Convention are telling us some things about the new generation of leaders, but they are unintentionally showing us how the political world – more and more equivalent to the media world – has evolved.
The Covid-19 crisis forced the political system to change faster than it would have otherwise, but the important point is that there is a new artform that was mostly ready and is rapidly maturing. At the local level we call it the Zoom meeting. At the level of the Democratic National Convention, it’s a whole new way of doing things that actually works better than the old style. People get to participate from their own living rooms or from an open field, or from a beach in the Pacific, and it works just fine.
No roaring crowds, though.
At some level, we miss the cheering and laughing, but they had also become tedious and (let’s admit it) boring. They dragged out the proceedings without adding meaning or content. And let’s admit one other thing – lines that are written into speeches to function solely as applause lines are recognized as such. And truly great lines that get interrupted by sustained applause are themselves downsized by the delay.
This convention has managed to deliver a wider variety of talk, pictures, and people in a shorter interval. Pundits universally praised the roll call of states, a seeming requirement in the nomination process (I don’t see why it has to be) that used to drag on forever.
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to make a decision. If we want to be able to communicate through public meetings as we once did, we have to find an alternative methodology. In the case of a national political convention, it wouldn’t have been possible in the old days of the smoke filled room where people actually got together to make decisions – decisions that had not yet been made.
But in those days, one reason for the fact that the nominee had not already been picked was that there wasn’t a national primary system. Political parties had representatives from rural states and big city machines and splinter groups, and they fought it out. Some conventions went many ballots before they could reach a decision on who their presidential nominee would be. The record was set in 1924, where it took 103 ballots to get a nominee.
That hasn’t been the case for decades now. What’s left is the husk of the real convention. Even the party platform is carefully negotiated in advance. The remainder of the modern convention is (as everyone has been pointing out to us) a public relations extravaganza. It’s not worthless – quite to the contrary – it’s the chance for the nominees to present themselves to the American people in the way they would best like to do so.
So this week, in a convention that was supposed to take place in Milwaukee, the most important players have been in Delaware and Pennsylvania. Biden and Harris have been at a nearly empty auditorium, and Obama spoke in an otherwise empty space.
But it didn’t really matter, did it? We the audience were able to listen to Obama, and it was without interruption or clamor. Harris delivered her speech without having to deal with clapping or cheers, and it didn’t seem to get in her way.
The lesson of 2020 is that modern internet video allows people from all over the world to interact, and equally important, to be seen by millions of others.
An aside:
Had the original convention gone on as planned (without the viral pandemic to get in its way), there would have been ten or twelve thousand people coming to Milwaukee. It would have included thousands of delegates (who actually had no real decisions to make) and more thousands of reporters and videographers.
I would like to mention a talk I heard about dealing with global warming back in June of 2019. One of the speakers pointed out that the more famous people in academia spent a lot of time flying around the country giving talks at other universities. He suggested that we could save a lot of carbon emissions by sharing our thoughts online. Isn’t that exactly what has happened here? It’s true that a few thousand people did not get to sign up for their official convention badges, and they missed the caucuses and parties. But they also saved the atmosphere from all the carbon emissions that would have occurred had they made all those airplane flights.
And this savings in airplane fuel and automobile exhaust is happening all over the country and all over the European continent.
What of the content?
Obama’s speech was, I think, one for the ages. Maybe I just miss having an intelligent, educated grownup around during these past four years, but I think that this one ought to end up in the books on speech making. Let’s look at the heart of the speech:
“I have sat in the Oval Office with both of the men who are running for president. I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies. I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.
“But he never did. For close to four years now, he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.
“Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t. And the consequences of that failure are severe. 170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs gone while those at the top take in more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.”
Obama didn’t just reveal the true Donald Trump. He shamed him. As one colleague pointed out, it was like parents talking to their disappointing child about unwise judgments he had made.
Obama also did his best to make Joe Biden into a credible candidate. We’ll see how well Biden himself makes that work.
One further point about Obama’s speech that goes beyond the convention and belongs in a museum. Over the past few years, we have had to admit to ourselves the faults and failures in our nation’s original Constitution. It defended and enshrined slavery, the fault that has sometimes been referred to as our nation’s original sin. But Obama explained in careful detail how the rights of a few were expanded over the years into the rights of the many, and in so expanding itself, the Constitution is something we can all be proud of.
“I’m in Philadelphia, where our Constitution was drafted and signed. It wasn’t a perfect document. It allowed for the inhumanity of slavery and failed to guarantee women – and even men who didn’t own property – the right to participate in the political process. But embedded in this document was a North Star that would guide future generations; a system of representative government – a democracy – through which we could better realize our highest ideals. Through civil war and bitter struggles, we improved this Constitution to include the voices of those who’d once been left out. And gradually, we made this country more just, more equal, and more free.”
It is a paragraph that can rightly be included in school history books.
The Vice Presidential nominee
If my memory serves correctly, we are now at the third woman nominee for Vice President of the United States. Of the two previous nominees, one was a Democrat and the other a Republican, and neither was elected. Kamala Harris appears to have the best chance so far, considering that unlike the others, she is a member of a ticket that is currently well ahead not only in voter approval but in important swing states.
What I remember of her presidential campaign was her first debate attack on Joe Biden for his long ago failure to support racial bussing in the public schools. I don’t think it damaged Biden, considering the historical context of forced bussing at the time. It did help Harris in the polls for a brief period of time, but it didn’t last.
The rest of the presidential primary race showed Harris to be competent and intelligent, not to mention quick on her feet as we would expect of a former trial lawyer/prosecutor. But she didn’t have what it took to carve out a special spot for herself, probably because the rebel’s spot was already held by Bernie Sanders.
I think it’s clear that Harris will do fine in a debate against the current Vice President. Like I said above, she was a prosecutor and knows not to get caught off guard. She also seems to know how to make a crowd like her, as she demonstrated in her acceptance speech.
The pundits suggest that Joe chose her as the nominee who is most likely to help him win.
But there is one other issue. Kamala knows her way around the Senate. You have to look back to former senators John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and yes, Joe Biden, to recognize that presidential candidates sometimes recognize the desirability of having an insider working the levers.
In the event that the Democrats take the presidency, hold the House, and win a narrow majority in the Senate, it is going to require strong leadership to maintain winning margins on contentious issues. This reminds me of a moment during one of those interminable Democratic presidential debates. At one moment, Kamala interrupted the others – I don’t even remember what the issue was – and everybody else shut up. It was only momentary, but it was electric, and it demonstrated that at least for the assembled Democratic candidates, Kamala Harris was looked upon as a natural leader.
Not somebody who could lead, given a lot of practice, but a natural leader already.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
