Due to a conflicting prior commitment, the Liberal Ironist will not be able to live-blog Night 4 of the 2020 Democratic National Convention. The Liberal Ironist will post a response blog after Night 4 of the DNC has concluded.
What makes the 2020 Democratic National Convention original and remarkable? There have been so many features not only of “ordinary Americans” but of Americans who have not traditionally have been underrepresented or not represented–and of vulnerable Americans–that we have a national party convention with an unprecedented theme of people speaking from the heart. That’s the slightly unsettling effect of this year’s Democratic National Convention: It’s less of a pageant than these conventions always have been, and even the pageantry features less professional actors than would usually be the case. It’s an interesting change.
11:11 pm: In keeping with an informal tradition, following the conclusion of the Vice Presidential candidate’s speech, the Presidential candidate walks out to the stage to greet her.
11:08 pm: Senator Harris wisely gives a shout-out to the new generation (Millenials and Gen-Zers) of voters and politicians who have emerged since 2017 to take up the cause of social justice and accountable public service. Yes, more of that (and of them), please.
11:00 pm: Senator Harris observes that Black Americans and Latino Americans have disproportionately suffered illness and death from the COVID-19 illness due to institutional racism and the failure to provide public goods and health benefits to White and nonwhite Americans at a common rate. One effect of the brazen and constant racism of the Trump Administration is that it has swept away any cause for reservation that Democrats in politics may ever have had for speaking indirectly about the fatal effects of White racism in America.
10:59 pm: Senator Harris addresses herself to parents and teachers struggling with remote learning which Trump’s willful failure to contend with the present pandemic virus has made necessary: “you know that what we’re doing right now isn’t working.”
10:56 pm: Senator Harris attributes her decision to become an attorney, a district attorney, Attorney General of the Republic of California, and a U.S. Senator from California, to her belief “that public service is a noble calling, and that the fight for justice is a shared responsibility…”
10:53 pm: Senator Harris opens her acceptance speech with a reference to trailblazing and trend-setting women in public life. She ends the list with her mother, an immigrant from India, who had to raise Kamala and her sister as a single mother from the time that Senator Harris was 5 years old.
10:47 pm: With the striking of a very large gavel, 2020 Democratic National Committee Chairman Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MI) makes Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA)’s nomination as Joe Biden’s running mate official. Congressman Thompson is Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee; he seems to be skilled in the art of wielding a gavel to bring deliberations to a conclusion.
10:44 pm: “This Administration has shown that it will tear our democracy down, if that is what it takes to win. So, we have to get busy…” –President Obama
10:41 pm: President Obama recalls the recent passing of Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), a marcher with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. President Obama observes that Black Americans in the Jim Crow South had as much cause to be cynical about American constitutionalism and democracy as anyone, but that rather than be cynical about it, they took extraordinary measures in order to compel America to embody its principles more fully than it had before.
10:37 pm: President Obama addresses himself to undecided and uncommitted voters: Trump and the Republicans already know that they won’t win majority support from Americans, so they are counting on Americans’ cynicism to get them to sit out this election, and they are going to great lengths to inconvenience and burden voting in order to suppress turnout. President Obama urges Americans not to let these people take their democracy away from them.
10:31 pm: President Obama observes that Vice President Biden understands Americans’ loss of their livelihoods from his experience of his father’s loss of his job when Biden was a child, and that he understands the many Americans currently confronting the loss of a loved one from the deaths of his first wife and child in 1972 and the death of his son Beau, himself a rising star in Delaware politics, from brain cancer in 2015. President Obama remarks that Vice President Biden–and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris–understand Americans’ vulnerabilities and challenges because of experience, and care about addressing them.
10:29 pm: “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job, because he can’t–and the consequences of that failure are severe.” –former President Barack Obama says that Donald Trump has utterly disappointed the one hope that he had about him, specifically that he would come to take the Presidency seriously once he occupied that office.
10:23 pm: Former President Barack Obama is quoted as having said (at a rally in Wilmington, Delaware for then-Senate candidate Chris Coons on October 15, 2010) that choosing Senator Joseph Biden to be his running mate and become his Vice President was “the single best decision I have made.” I agree; Joseph Biden was an excellent Vice President, advisor to the President, and advocate for President Obama’s agenda.
10:20 pm: “Our economic system has been rigged to give bailouts to billionaires and a kick in the pants to everyone else.” –Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Senator Warren recounts a compelling personal story about how her Aunt Bea’s willingness to move into her home for 16 years to care for he children was the only way that she was able to remain in the workforce. Senator Warren reminds us of how Americans are unable to attain their goals for education and work because the United States is benighted in its lack of readily-available or affordable child care for working parents.
10:15 pm: During an extended segment featuring small business owners trying to stay in business in the face of the brutal economic headwinds created by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a farmer says of Trump and farming, “No, he has no idea about any of this stuff.”
10:06 pm: There is a genuinely provocative and effective video that features then-Senator Biden listening to the testimony of a woman victimized by domestic violence. People forget how Conservative the politics of the 1990s were–and in that toxic political environment, Senator Biden was able to pass the Violence Against Women Act, which is apparently too liberal for today’s Republicans, on a bipartisan basis in 1994.
10:02 pm: Women survivors of domestic violence and their advocates refer to their brutal experiences and to what they know, against the backdrop of the Violence Against Women Act–cosponsored by then-Senators Joe Biden (D-DE) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT)–which was renewed by the Democratic House of Representatives in April 2019 but allowed to languish without passage in the Republican Senate with no input from Trump; currently, the Violence Against Women Act has been allowed to lapse by Republicans and Trump.
9:59 pm: Speaker Pelosi gets right to what I want her to talk about: The House of Representatives passed a $3.4 trillion emergency economic and financial relief and stimulus bill, the HEROES Act, in mid-May…and have waited until now, mid-August, for Senate Republicans and Donald Trump to agree to any kind of a relief bill that they can even pass through the Congressional chamber they control. Speaker Pelosi can talk at length about Trump’s and the Republicans’ failure to govern, because the House of Representatives has passed scores of bills on which the Senate has simply failed to act, and for which Donald Trump has doubtlessly been characteristically been grateful for the opportunity to duck the question of whether he would support Progressive but popular legislation.
9:57 pm: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) gets her cue to speak at the same time that her speech is announced by voice-over. It’s not substance, but it’s fair to observe that the transition to a all-remote national party convention still isn’t seamless in its process.
9:52 pm: “Remember: Joe and Kamala can win the Election by 3 million votes and still lose. Take it from me.” –Secretary Clinton
9:48 pm: “…People who voted for Donald Trump asked, ‘What have we got to lose?’ Well, our health care, our jobs, our loved ones, our position in the world…and even our Post Office…” –Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
9:43 pm: Preceding former Secretary of State and 2-time Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s prime time speech is a fittingly long tribute to the many women in the Democratic Party who have risen to extraordinary public stature. The accession of so many women to politics, particularly in the wake of Trump’s grotesque Inauguration to the Presidency in January 2017, has done as much as anything to make the occupants of elected office around the country resemble this country more than they ever have before.
9:36 pm: Following the missive to Trump from the child of a deported mother is an appeal and a call to action from 3 women of different immigration status whose differing situations serve to highlight the irrationality and the cruelty of our slow-moving naturalization system and our increasingly restrictive immigration procedures and standards.
This is followed by a recording of a speech by former President Barack Obama celebrating the experiences, efforts, and contributions of immigrants in America. Of course President Obama set a great example for public service in high office, and stirred the base of the Republican Party into an ongoing frenzy of hate: This commonality of theme isn’t lost when it’s President Obama who is chosen to speak of the immigrant experience in Donald Trump’s America. The Republican Party of Donald Trump, after all, wages war not just against aspiring Americans but against millions of Americans that don’t fit meekly into its impoverished and narrow preconceptions about what an American should look like.
9:32 pm: A daughter of a veteran Marine–a former Trump voter–whose mother was deported to Mexico by Trump reads a letter to Donald Trump, interspersed towards the end with clips of Trump saying of illegal immigrants “I want to get these people out of here,” and “They’re animals!” It’s beyond my comprehension, frankly, how so many millions of Americans can be enthusiastic about the forced family separations and deportations of immigrants with extreme prejudice which seem to be Trump’s point of greatest pride from his time in the Presidency; it’s no easier for me to comprehend how so many millions more Americans can at least seem not to bear such animus towards immigrants in their hearts, but nonetheless care so little about them that they can see these family separations and prejudicial expulsions of so many immigrants who just want to live and peace and have a chance to work, and still support Donald Trump.
9:10 pm: Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), whose husband, former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, is currently running for United States Senate, felt that she had to end her political career prematurely after a mass shooter indiscriminately murdered and maimed attendees of one of her public events in January 2011 and critically wounded the Congresswoman. I haven’t seen Congresswoman Giffords give a public address of significant length since she sustained a serious head injury during that mass shooting. Tonight Congresswoman Giffords exhibited the damage that her injury did to her capacity to speak, though it is clear that Congresswoman Giffords knows what she wants to say. The extended speech by a public figure whose present reminds us of such an unpleasant (though in this country not uncommon) episode of mass murder, with no touches to hide the difficulty the former Congresswoman has with speaking, is another example of the consistency with which the 2020 Democratic National Convention has brought many of America’s serious problems to the fore.
Last night, the production quality improved significantly from the start of the prime time block at 9:00 pm to First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech shortly before 11:00 pm. Let’s see if the Convention organizers and contributors hit their stride tonight. Presentation matters; we need to persuade a lot of Americans to support the party that will challenge Donald Trump’s incredibly destructive approach to the Presidency and government. Persuadable people will respond not only to the content of an appeal but also to the craft of it; in much of my observation, people are persuaded more by craft than by content.
10:44 pm: A retrospective of Vice President Biden’s and late Senator John McCain (R-AZ)’s friendship is touching–and like so much of this years Democratic National Convention, it is an implicit rebuke to Trump. Donald Trump just decided at some point that he hated Senator McCain, a storied Republican figure. Trump tried to prevent the lowering of the flag on the White House grounds to half-staff following Senator McCain’s death; the White House arranged to have the U.S.S. John McCain moved in anticipation of Trump’s Japan trip so that our President wouldn’t see it. In Joseph Biden’s case, we see political adversaries treated not only with courtesy but with understanding and the possibility of a real bond; in Donald Trump’s case, a logical ally who won’t immediately do his bidding on command will be the target of his hatred and vindictiveness even after his death.
11:04 pm: “Hi, everyone, I’m Jill Biden’s husband…”
10:50 pm: Jill Biden is Dr. Jill Biden, having earned an Ed.D at age 55. She has been a teacher in various academic settings over the years. We have already had a First Lady who was a teacher; it’s interesting to imagine a First Lady who taught in very different settings and who attained a postgraduate degree past middle age.
10:42 pm: …As if to further corroborate the understanding that a Republican who cares about foreign policy is now a Democrat, former George W. Bush Administration Secretary of State Colin Powell offers an unreserved endorsement of Joe Biden for President. And you thought that the Republicans for Biden all spoke last night…
10:38 pm: Former Republican Nebraska Senator and Obama Secretary of Defense Charles Hagel says that Vice President Biden is ready to be President of the United States based on what he saw of him at foreign policy decision points during the Barack Obama Administration. He also concludes that Trump has “degraded” the international reputation of the United States. He can speak for the many former Republicans who care about United States foreign policy; you could seriously ask whether anyone who is still a Republican could be said to care about foreign policy.
10:35 pm: “Donald Trump inherited a growing economy and a more peaceful world–and like everything else he inherited, he bankrupted it.” –Former Massachusetts Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry
10:23 pm: Vice President Biden speaks by video conference with a diverse set of Americans who had narrow brushes with death due to congenital vascular defects, cancer, or neurological disease and who can attribute their survival to their availability of insurance. One of them was a lifelong Republican who survived throat cancer; another had lymphoma and had to receive her first round of chemotherapy in 2017, while Republicans in Congress were voting on their ill-fated initiative to gut the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.
Donald Trump is still trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act by way of a ridiculously weak argument that Congress’s zeroing-out of the individual mandate penalty somehow made the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional in the abstract. This argument is on its way to the Supreme Court; while unlikely, if this argument were to prevail at the Supreme Court, tens of millions of Americans will either lose guaranteed health benefits at an affordable out-of-pocket insurance rate or even lose their access to health insurance altogether.
10:20 pm: Vice President Biden briefly accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, then he and his wife Jill put on medical masks! What an interesting phenomenon, that just modeling good behavior in an uncertain time is inherently a challenge to Donald Trump, who makes the times even less certain for everyone and only models bad behavior.
10:16 pm: The parents of Matthew Shephard, a young gay man murdered a generation ago in a brutal religiously-inspired hate crime, cast Wyoming’s delegates for Vice President Biden.
10:13 pm: Vermont Senator and recent Presidential adversary Bernard Sanders stands with the Vermont delegation that casts votes both for his and for Vice President Biden’s Presidential candidacy. Senator Sanders, to his considerable credit, has learned the object lesson of 2016 and gives his support in word and deed to the Biden candidacy.
10:06 pm: “It seems that every time working people believe a promise from Donald Trump, they end up getting screwed…” The Ohio delegation drives home one of the most strategically important messages the Democratic Party can send in 2020: Donald Trump has been a disaster and a joke for the working-class voters who gave him a chance.
10:03 pm: Not all delegations’ representatives for this nominating roll call have utilized this opportunity to the same extent, but some of them–particularly those representing Western States–have taken the occasion to cast their State’s delegates from extraordinary vistas. This really plays-up the merits of remotely casting these votes. I wish that all delegations had cast their votes from an iconic locale within their State; that would have been a memorable moment.
9:54 pm: Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg announces the cast of the vast majority of Indiana’s delegates’ votes for Vice President Biden. Just seeing Mayor Buttigieg speak for 1 minute makes me hope that he remains engaged, because he brings a certain set of qualities…what are they? Oh, that’s right, it consists of being intelligent, perceptive, honest, and less than middle-aged.
9:48 pm: The Delaware Democratic Nominating Delegation, in the spirit of recusal, passes on casting its delegates for a Democratic Presidential nominee–from the Wilmington Amtrak train station. Haah.
9:40 pm: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), with all the sanctimony she can muster, doubles-down on both her authentic Leftism and her political irrelevance by reminding us of the evils of colonialism and misogyny before seconding a nomination of Senator Bernard Sanders (I-VT), who has already endorsed Vice President Biden for President and who spoke on his behalf last night.
9:30 pm: Former President Bill Clinton looks old for 73, but he still delivers a speech with extraordinary charisma. He puts his characteristic gift for delivering a message to good use, but in the past President Clinton has had to deliver complicated messages involving matters of policy or to cast the choice between a Democratic candidate and a Republican candidate in stark terms; this time, there is no nuance of policy or of different public personalities to get across, because there is only the dominant narrative to communicate: Donald Trump is abusing the extraordinary office with which he has been entrusted, while Vice President Biden can be trusted to lead that office based upon a record of public service.
Donald Trump flattens everything into general terms. It’s difficult to educate while engaged in political advocacy while Trump is President, because the people who you need to persuade to commit to remove Donald Trump from office have already heard about his failures and his privations. It isn’t clear what else needs to be said; the Democratic Party even has a platform while the Republican Party does not because Trump has made everything about himself.
9:28 pm: Former President Jimmy Carter, at age 95, comes out of a storied retirement to deliver a recorded message in endorsement of Vice President Biden’s Presidential candidacy. It pains me to think of such a well-intentioned public figure having to witness the depravities of a Donald Trump Presidency in his twilight years.
9:22 pm: “America: Donald Trump has quit on you.” Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) contrasts Trump shrugging at over 150,000 Americans dead due to the COVID-19 pandemic on his ostensible watch (over 170,000 Americans dead now, if you want to keep track), saying only “It is what it is,” with the leadership of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt who felt the weight of their responsibility and who would never say “It is what it is” when it was a question of what they had done or of what they could do now. Senator Kennedy has a long shadow in the Democratic Party, and it falls on the Establishment and on Progressives alike.
9:25 pm: A message from Caroline Kennedy, a former U.S. Ambassador and daughter of President John F. Kennedy, and Jack Schlossberg, her son, continues to be sound politics. The strong analogue these days is not President Kennedy, of course, but the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), whose years of service in the United States Senate almost perfectly paralleled Joe Biden’s own.
9:18 pm: Sally Yates, a former United States Deputy Attorney General who was fired by Trump only days after his Inauguration for refusing to do his unethical bidding, speaks about Trump’s unsettling and frequently unlawful consolidation of power, contrasting this to Vice President Joe Biden’s decades-long record of ethical and reliable public service.
There is such loud ambient feedback while the former Deputy Attorney General is speaking that I can already see the Saturday Night Live bit now: A janitor just off to the right while Ms. Yates is speaking, dutifully cleaning the floor with a big vacuum cleaner or maybe even something larger all the while.
9:10 pm: The message is unified and consistent: Joe Biden is a professional who cares about people’s bottom line, who isn’t interested in playing games and who wants to know how people’s material needs can be met. The previous night’s various themes-criminal justice reform and the confrontation of institutionalized facets of racism, protecting and expanding the health care gains of the Affordable Care Act, aggressively fighting the SARS-CoV-2 virus rather than allowing it to run wild around the country with inadequate half-measures, addressing environmental degradation and global warming, and providing greater security for millions of financially vulnerable Americans–are sustained by these various freshmen Democratic officeholders with a deftness of collective delivery that may not be fully appreciated for the discipline it reflects.
9:00 pm: Many of the new (post-Trump Inauguration) generation of Democrats speak in a relay about the perspectives and concerns that inspired them to run for public office all across the country. The clip and the level of emotional engagement is already significantly better than at this point on Night 1.
The 2020 Democratic National Convention opens at an extraordinarily dark time in this country. We’ve elected a President who has an entrepreneurial spirit about encouraging depravity in Americans, the worst pandemic in 100 years rages unchecked, and we face what may be the worst economic crisis we’ve confronted since the 1929 Stock Market Crash. Now, Donald Trump–having already been impeached by the Democratic House of Representatives for illegally withholding Congressionally-appropriated military aid in an attempt to suborn the President of Ukraine to assist in fabricating an investigation into the man who is now the Democratic candidate for President–is overseeing an astonishing contraction of the facilities and services offered by the United States Postal Service in the hope of suppressing enough votes cast by mail in order to get a second term that he must know the American people intend to deny him. It feels like we need to be rid of Donald Trump just so that we can live without a feeling of being continually sickened.
11:00 pm: “We’ve got to vote early–in person, if we can–we’ve got to request our absentee ballots as soon as possible–tonight, if we can–and we’ve got to send them back as fast as we can–and we’ve got to follow-up to make sure they were received…” First Lady Michelle Obama urges total tactical rigor, dexterity, and tenacity as Americans who will vote to remove Donald Trump from office ensure that their votes are cast, delivered, and counted as soon and as surely as possible.
10:58 pm: First Lady Michelle Obama reminds us that Vice President Biden comprehends loss from a succession of harsh experience–watching his father lose his job, losing his wife and his very young daughter in a car accident in late 1972, losing his son Beau (himself a rising star in Delaware politics) to cancer while Vice President.
10:48 pm: “As I’ve said before, being President doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are.” First Lady Michelle Obama warns us that a Presidential Election can also reveal who we are. I fully agree; the election and reelection of Barack Obama as President revealed a strength of our typical character–while the reality that in a contest between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a “businessman” who has never been much more than a criminal thug in Donald Trump, Secretary Clinton could get little more than 48% of the nationwide popular vote and Trump could actually get as much as 46% of that popular vote reveals a country that I for one hadn’t realized had catastrophically lost its way.
“Do I still believe that going high can work when the other side is going so low? My answer: Going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low…we just become part of the noise that’s drowning-out everything else…” First Lady Michelle Obama urges Americans to be separate from the cacophony of mean-spiritedness that is disorienting Americans in the midst of multiple emergencies of historic proportion.
10:43 pm: To borrow the immortal words of President Lyndon Johnson, I’m really glad that Senator Sanders is inside the tent pissing out instead of outside of the tent pissing in.
10:40 pm: Senator Sanders graciously (and accurately) supports Joseph Biden as the President who will begin the Progressive policy work that would be needed for the Left to achieve the transformation of America into a fundamentally more humane and equitable country. It isn’t an equivocation; it’s a pragmatic accommodation, and it’s encouraging to see Senator Sanders exhort Progressives to make that pragmatic accommodation.
10:37 pm: “…This election is about protecting our democracy. Under this President, the unthinkable has become normal…” Senator Sanders observes that Trump has tear-gassed peaceful and law-abiding protesters unnecessarily and even insisted that he wouldn’t leave office after his term has ended. Senator Sanders expresses that he takes much of this personally, as he recognizes a prospective authoritarian when he sees him, and in Trump he sees a man who assaults American democracy itself.
Senator Sanders also observes that Trump is so lacking in a sense of accountability that he avoids taking action to protect American lives from an historic contagion: “Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Trump golfs…”
10:35 pm: Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is speaking for Vice President Biden’s candidacy. That warrants a banner itself.
10:33 pm: There is a charming segment about then-Senator Biden commuting on the Amtrak Northeast Corridor trains from Delaware to Washington, DC and back, and getting to know the train crews and the passengers.
Who doesn’t like Amtrak? Even Republicans appreciate Amtrak.
10:23 pm: Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) very tactfully says that she felt assured on the day that she ended her 2020 Democratic Presidential bid, as that was the day that she knew she would endorse Vice President Joe Biden for President. Senator Klobuchar–who was certainly on Vice President Biden’s short list if not on his short short list for a running mate–offers an introduction for each of the other Democrats who ran for President this year–of which there were many.
Several of the former Democratic Presidential hopefuls who speak–Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ), Washington Governor Jay Carney, Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), Congressman Beto O’Rourke–seem to upstage Vice President Biden a bit in terms of screen presence, but this could be the rare year when Biden’s mildness is reassuring and taken for a token of his authenticity and his genuineness.
What the hell am I saying?! No one believes this; Vice President Biden had better hit a grand slam with his acceptance speech on Thursday night, because we urgently need him to do his part to wake desensitized Americans up.
10:16 pm: Senator Douglas Jones (D-AL) (just look at that extraordinary designation for 21st century politician–“Senator Douglas Jones, Democrat of Alabama”) offers a message that affirms our common humanity.
Douglas Jones has as much right to deliver such a message as anyone. He was the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama who prosecuted the 2 Klu Klux Klan terrorists who murdered 4 children in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Senator Jones has had an interesting political career where more than once he has forced Alabamians to reckon with their inherited demons–and prevailed.
10:08 pm: A series of well-known Republican public figures offer their endorsements for Joe Biden for President–Christine Todd Whitman, former Governor of New Jersey and President George W. Bush’s first EPA Director; Meg Whitman, famous tech CEO, former Republican California gubernatorial candidate and donor; Susan Molinari, former Republican Congresswoman from New York City; John Kasich, former Republican Congressman, FOX News personality, and Republican Governor of Ohio. Governor Kasich, of course, was a very serious Republican Presidential prospect in 2016, so for him to speak for Vice President Biden’s Presidential candidacy at this Convention is a significant moral victory for the Biden-Harris ticket.
All deliver a variation of a singular message: I don’t recognize the Republican Party anymore, and I believe that we all know that what Donald Trump is doing is profoundly wrong.
10:03 pm: “Hello, America, I’m Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer–or as Donald Trump likes to call me, ‘that woman from Michigan.'” Governor Whitmer delivers a well-placed message: President Obama and Vice President Biden saved the Detroit automakers and many thousands of jobs in Michigan and throughout the Midwestern States after inheriting the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Our needs will drive their policies, “not politics or ego…” This is the message that has to bind the other messages–racial justice, confronting the SARS-CoV-2 virus as the historic public health emergency it is, contending with the problem of global warming, crafting public policies that encourage the creation of jobs with benefits–specifically, that we need Presidential leadership comported and conducted out of regard for all Americans and for what is supposed to be best for the country rather than for a transitory partisan hit.
9:59 pm: Ugh, rustic music…
9:57 pm: Maine House Speaker Sarah Gideon, a Democrat running for United States Senate, introduces herself and says little more before introducing a country music singer for an interlude. We’ll certainly hear more from her in 2021, after she ends Senator Collins’ political career and assumes a seat in the Senate.
9:50 pm: An Arizona woman gives an account of her father, who trusted Trump’s account in April and May that the worst of the virus was already over, went out to a karaoke bar shortly after Republican Arizona Governor Doug Ducey reopened the State for normal business activity, developed the COVID-19 illness several weeks later, was hospitalized in intensive care and put on a ventilator, and died after 5 days of isolation. She says that before his death, her father said that he felt “betrayed”. This is a story that has played-out many times in this country where millions remain in denial about the seriousness of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and which will play-out many times more this year and at least into early next due to Trump’s scary unwillingness to take responsibility for modeling cautious behavior and attentiveness to public health guidance even though he’s encouraging those who trust him the most to pointlessly endanger their lives.
9:45 pm: “Donald Trump didn’t create the division; the division created Donald Trump–and he made it worse.” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is the right person to deliver a message of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his duty to protect this country due to his constant pursuit of conflict between Americans. Governor Cuomo has consistently conducted himself as the Governor for all New Yorkers rather than the leader of the Democratic base in New York. He proved this most compellingly in the way he personally addressed New Yorkers during the darkest days of New York’s contention with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, in late spring. Many Republicans acknowledged at that time that they trusted what Governor Cuomo had to say about what was known about the virus, and about the seriousness of the problem, and about what could be done to halt its spread and to care for the sick and to care for those who were trapped at home and dispossessed of their livelihoods.
Governor Cuomo has been the best Convention speaker thus far. He can certainly consider himself nationally established now.
9:39 pm: House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) introduces himself, and is then directed by his film crew to start over from the beginning…but we heard and saw Congressman Clyburn loud and clear the first time. You’ve got to tighten this ship, ladies and gentlemen.
Congressman Clyburn has an accent that is a bit thick for those used to “broadcast TV accent,” but he knows how to deliver a speech with a crucial combination of gravitas and lack of pretension.
The predominant theme of racial justice has been gaining a sense of narrative grandeur as it is sustained from speaker to speaker. Congressman Clyburn represents the South Carolina-6th, and can speak with a legitimate partiality to the legacy of African slavery and both institutional and criminal White supremacy on his community and others.
9:26 pm: Philonese Floyd, brother of George Floyd, who was a victim of a very public police homicide that occurred not 3 months ago and changed the face of this country, speaks with a passion that is earnestly needed at this point without the dramatic affirmation of a live audience.
9:24 pm: I feel wrong for focusing so much on cosmetics (the truly petty side of the already-impoverished armchair industry of punditry) but Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, DC has trouble with her prime time speech. Preparing the Party’s national figures for national exposure should be–someone’s job. No, this isn’t a groundbreaking insight–so why does it feel unaddressed by Night 1 of the Democratic National Convention?
Mayor Bowser’s speech addresses racialized policing, police brutality, and Donald Trump’s deliberate alienation and physical abuse of peaceful protesters, by the way. Few people could bear witness to such pressing problems at a national party convention as authoritatively as the Mayor of Washington, DC in Donald Trump’s America–but I don’t think that the speech itself will receive much substantive attention because the format itself doesn’t lend itself to the gravitas associated with national party conventions.
9:22 pm: One of the many contributors speaking from the comfort of his own home makes an excellent observation: Donald Trump isn’t even running on a platform. The Republicans are so bankrupt of policy ideas at this point (or so afraid of alienating Donald Trump by standing for something besides his momentary convenience) that they haven’t bothered to publish a party platform. This is a good point, and it should be made on Night 1, and the guy bringing this up even speaks well…but without a prepared speech and a suit to sport and a podium on a stage at the center of a stadium or theater full of people…this comes off as less than even a conversation. The fault doesn’t lie with the message or with the messenger; it’s the medium that’s lacking.
9:18 pm: Hmm. Country music. OK, this is going to take some patience.
9:15 pm: The 2020 Democratic National Convention opens with a check-in with 4 Americans from all over. The adolescent girl speaks with more eloquence and self-assurance than the adults.
The Liberal Ironist 