The unbelievably weird second night of the Democratic National Convention had four stars — Donald Trump, COVID-19, Jill Biden and a terminally schmaltzy version of Joe Biden’s personal story.
This was the Instagram convention. A near vertigo-inducing series of amateur videos paired with an almost complete lack of spontaneity, substance and even rationality.
While desperately dull compared with a traditional convention, and as a result the main US TV networks are committed to only one hour each night, nonetheless, party managers like the control.
The night had some astonishing peculiarities. First, there was almost nothing specific on policy from anybody. At the general level Biden is going to heal the planet, solve inequality, unite the nation, end racial hostility, abolish injustice, end want, look after the nation as he looks after his family, provide leadership, be a figure of respect, demonstrate the power of example and the example of power (I kid you not) and so on.
This is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s vision of his own election as the moment when the planet stops warming and the oceans stop rising. But Obama did fatuous emptiness much more stylishly.
As to specifics, there were just a few familiar commitments — a minimum wage of $US15 ($20.73) an hour, easier access to Medicare and Medicaid, not much else.
Surely the strangest of all was foreign policy. Two former presidents — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — spoke, as did two former secretaries of state, John Kerry and Colin Powell (who was a Republican when in office). There was a video about Biden’s friendship with the late Republican John McCain, and tiny snippets from other foreign policy mavens.
But here is surely the fatal sign that this debased convention marks a further dreadful decline in the substance of US political culture. By any measure, the chief foreign policy and national security challenge the US faces is the rise of China.
Yet no speech or intervention remotely related to foreign policy addressed China at all.
This was surely by design. There is an element of contempt for the voter in this. Why should the party and the candidate seeking to run the country bother to talk to the country about the most important issue it faces? This is an unmistakeable decline in contemporary political culture.
One bugbear of traditional conferences is speakers running over time. That certainly doesn’t happen when every speech is prerecorded and held down, in many cases, to 90 seconds. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the far-left leader of “the squad” and touted even by Biden as the future of the party, was given exactly 90 seconds. The fact she couldn’t bring herself to mention Biden’s name is perhaps helpful to him eventually.
In any event she shouldn’t repine. This was a Twitter convention night. The most coherent you got was a Twitter thread, which is what the so-called keynote speech was, structured perversely as a bewildering series of more or less anonymous folks uttering a sentence each. Sometimes the sentences were loosely connected, sometimes not.
So the high point of political communication at the convention is a Twitter thread. Most of the convention was just lone tweets. Of course, these were stage-managed. Trump and COVID-19 and “isn’t Joe a good guy?” were the three recurring memes.
But politics is debased when Twitter dominates even in its own right. For a great political party in the world’s leading nation to reduce its political discourse to politics by syncopated if not demented imitation Twitter thread leads you to think, with Dorothy Parker: what fresh hell is this?
Bill Clinton’s role was fascinating. In this age of the #MeToo movement, and given new photos emerging of Clinton getting a neck massage by a then young woman who is now one of Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers, the subtext of the Clinton story is more problematic for today’s Democrats.
But giving Clinton a restricted role probably suited Biden’s managers anyway.
Clinton is an infinitely better speaker than Biden. At the last convention he gave a vastly more powerful speech than his wife, Hillary, the candidate, gave in her own behalf. In 2012 he probably even out shone Barack Obama in Obama’s own interest.
But the danger of the low-wattage Biden being hugely over shadowed by a rampant Clinton is pretty severe. Thus Clinton was restricted to five minutes. Still he gave the best actual speech of the night. Just as on the previous night Bernie Sanders sounded like the only politician who respected the intelligence of his audience, so it was with Clinton.
Indeed, Clinton’s speech attacking Trump’s record on managing COVID-19 was powerful. The White House should be a command centre, he said, instead it’s a storm centre. The US unemployment rate is twice as high as South Korea’s, 2½ times as high as Britain’s.
Yikes! Facts! How retro can you get, providing voters in a speech with facts to make your argument instead of just emotion, or abuse or increasingly meaningless abstract nouns.
The most effective performance overall came from Biden’s wife, Jill. Unlike Michelle Obama, she gave a very traditional spouse’s speech – ain’t my husband neat?
Jill Biden paid an emotional, lengthy tribute to Joe and all the personal loss and family adversity he has overcome, especially the tragic road accident in which his first wife and daughter were killed. This is all real tragedy. And it’s absolutely right that a candidate unfold his personality and his own story for the electors.
Yet it is noteworthy nonetheless that the Democrats’ big two set-piece interventions on the first two nights were by women – Michelle Obama and Jill Biden – who are spouses of politicians, not people who have ever run for elective office themselves. I am not remotely suggesting this indicates some kind of sexism on the Democrats’ part. Quite the reverse. The key polling advantage Biden has over Trump at this stage is that women prefer him to the incumbent by a large margin.
Rather, the leading role for two politicians’ wives – Obama’s and Biden’s – on the first two days, rather than, say, two female politicians, is part of the need to gain non-political, social authority for politics. It is a complicated process but in part this is another stage in the fusing of politics with celebrity.
There was one “real” moment. As Biden came on to hug his wife after her testimonial, he seemed to introduce himself as “Joe Biden’s husband” and insisted Jill was “lady, lady, lady”. How achingly we yearn to see the real Joe.
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