Democratic National Convention via AP
The former first lady gave a speech that matched the moral urgency of the moment.
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.”
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.)
Michelle Obama isn’t so much a rally speaker as a mom talking one-on-one, and the evening’s planners clearly realized that she’d be able to deliver the evening’s most impactful speech.
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.
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.
