View this email in your browser

 

AUGUST

**18, 2020**

Harold Meyerson' s
National Convention Report

**Unconventional: The Democrats, Day One**

On the opening Monday of a normal political convention, a passel of
local officials welcome the delegates, a lot of minor elected officials
get five minutes of afternoon dead time to introduce themselves to
whoever is listening (their nuclear families, and if they're really
good speakers, their extended families), and there may be a floor fight
on rules if an insurgent wing of the party insists on it. In prime time,
a few notables get the spotlight; cheering sections practice their
noisemaking for Wednesday and Thursday, and the networks cut to a lot of
commercials.

Not so on this Monday, not even the commercials. Like an assembly line
on speed-up (akin to what Donald Trump's Department of Agriculture has
done in slaughterhouses), testimonials to the ticket, indictments of the
current president, and efforts to link the party to the zeitgeist of
protest and hope all whizzed by. A new kind of speechifying was required
of the participants, though it didn't fully appear until the
evening's finale, when Michelle Obama slowed down the pace and
elevated the evening to a level matching the moral urgency of the
moment. Her husband spoke often of "the fierce urgency of now," but she
made a better case than he has yet-and Barack Obama is no slouch as a
speechmaker-for reversing the nation's descent into Trumpian hell.

Bernie Sanders built up this crescendo by talking to his supporters
about what four more years of growing authoritarianism and the
degradation of democratic norms would do their shared agenda. He came up
with a line that would have set a regular convention howling with glee:
"Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Trump golfs."

Michelle Obama, by contrast, isn't so much a rally speaker as a mom
talking one-on-one, and the evening's planners clearly realized that
precisely because there was no arena, no crowd, just a couple of
cameras, she'd be able to deliver the evening's most impactful
speech. She stressed Trump's inadequacy and cruelty, his absence of
competence and his void of empathy, though with a tone that came off as
disappointed, not disrespectful, at once personal yet also
professionally evaluative (she'd seen, after all, what a president
needed to do).

The grounds for personal reflection of the injuries Trump had inflicted
had been well prepared. One of the most effective "regular folks"
presentations of the evening featured Kristin Urquiza, who lost her
father, a Trump supporter, to the pandemic when he believed the
president's assurances that it was safe to circulate in public again,
went to a karaoke bar, came down with COVID-19, and died. "His only
pre-existing condition," she said, "was trusting Donald Trump."

Support Independent, Fact-Checked Journalism

The other regular folk who mattered was the Amtrak conductor who
attested to how much regular Delaware-to-D.C. commuter Biden cared for
the transit workers and his fellow regular riders, how he reached him by
phone in the neighborhood barbershop to check on his recovery after
he'd suffered a heart attack. "The average guy is important to him,"
the conductor said, twice.

Just as Urquiza's narration of her father's death set up Michelle
Obama's discussion of the effects of having a president without
empathy, the Amtrak segment set up her discussion of the effects of
having an empathetic-or as she made clear, a "normal"-president,
i.e., Joe Biden. "He lives a life that the rest of us can recognize,"
she said. "Joe knows the anguish of sitting at a table with an empty
chair."

As a more rooted and normal person, the evening's script went (most
particularly in the presentation of Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond),
Biden understands the economy as an ecosystem of neighborhood shops and
institutions, not as the fluctuations of the Dow, which is the only
metric Trump follows. At some level, that's true; at another, given
Biden's long history of pro-corporate and pro-bank legislation,
including carrying Wall Street's water on a bill making bankruptcy
harder on small businesses, it wasn't. (I say "wasn't" because
Biden, a longtime reader of the political tea leaves, reversed that
position earlier this year to support the less onerous stance of
Elizabeth Warren.)

Which brings us to the evening's outreach to the right, which featured
both Republicans and conservative Democrats like Alabama's Doug Jones
excoriating Trump and effusing over Joe. In part, this was designed to
offset Bernie Sanders's presentation. After all, Sanders was the pol
who got the most speaking time (Michelle Obama not coming under that
heading, though she was surely the most effective pol of the night).
There's nothing unusual about a party convention featuring members of
the other party who are willing to testify to their temporary
conversion; I've sat through some god-awful speeches at Republican
conventions from dissident Democrats (former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller
delivered the most demagogic, a diatribe against Democratic wussiness on
behalf of George W. Bush).

I know some progressives fear that the appearance of former Ohio Gov.
John Kasich and other disconsolate GOPniks portends a Biden
administration that shuns progressive initiatives, but it needn't. In
1964, when the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, who signaled a
shift to the radical right and whose views on nuclear war endangered the
planet, a number of prominent Republicans endorsed Lyndon Johnson. Their
ranks included Robert Anderson (Dwight Eisenhower's Treasury
secretary), the biggest names on Wall Street, and Henry Ford II.

We Can't Do This Without You

Despite their support, the following year Johnson and a Democratic
Congress enacted Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, immigration
reform, and the measures comprising the War on Poverty. To be sure,
Johnson was no foe of Wall Street, but no one at that time was really
pushing him or the Democrats on that issue (with the possible exception
of UAW President Walter Reuther, who wanted the War on Poverty to
include giving workers and the public a say in corporate decisions).
Kasich is no friend of unions, but Biden and the Democrats are already
locked in on boosting worker and union power. There will always be
conservative forces pressuring Biden; if the election goes well,
progressives should have enough wind at their back to counter many of
them.

On balance, the convention planners appear to be focusing on swayable
centrists and historically low-turnout minority voters in their
messaging. That left it to Bernie to try to move the disgruntled young
left into Biden's column come Election Day by linking the very
possibility of left advances to a Biden victory. Whether AOC can make a
similar case in the 60 seconds allotted her tomorrow night remains to be
seen.

If I regretted the absence of a normal convention ritual last night, it
was that Sanders wasn't able to make the kind of career valedictory to
which he'd have been entitled in non-pandemic times. More than anyone
else, he built the forces that pushed the Democrats to grapple with
American capitalism's gutting of the economy that once boasted a large
and vibrant middle class, and if there's a Biden presidency that
begins to restore some balance to class power and American lives,
Sanders will deserve a lot of credit. It would have been nice if he'd
been able to get some anticipatory credit for that last night.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

[link removed]

Unconventional Wisdom

Covering this year's conventions, minus the conventions BY HAROLD
MEYERSON

What Was Missing on the DNC's First Night

A thin policy discussion was made even thinner by some notable
oversights. BY ALEXANDER SAMMON

Former Top Google Lobbyist Speaking Tonight at DNC Convention

Susan Molinari is the mystery former Republican member of Congress
endorsing Biden. BY DAVID DAYEN

Muslim and Arab Communities: A Priority for Team Biden

Can the presumptive Democratic nominee clinch the Bernie bloc? BY
BLAISE MALLEY

To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to
subscribe. 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

Copyright (C) 2020 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
_________________

Sent to [email protected]

Unsubscribe:
[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States