I am standing on the floor of an arena in Chicago, waiting for Kamala Harris. It has been nearly three hours. There are thousands of us squished together, toppling over, jostling, hot, uncomfortable, straining under the lights. Everywhere I look there are people holding tall “Kamala” signs, shouting, screaming, panting, roaring. Music is pounding.
It was like this last night (Saturday), and the night before, and the night before that: a 96-hour psycho war dance.
To get an idea of what has been achieved at this year’s Democratic National Convention - how a party purges itself of one candidate and installs another in the blink of an eye - you need only look across the hall. It is as if a dollars 200 million tornado has blown in, showering 5,000 delegates with new catchphrases, merch, watchwords, ideas, emotions - hope, joy - overnight, while everything else has been clinically erased from memory.
Joe Biden, Jill, Hunter, their deranged Secret Service-biting dog, Commander - all long in witness protection. Mention Biden’s name and they’ll barely respond. And he actually appeared at the convention. It is as ruthless as it is awesome.
I ask delegates from California, Georgia and Minnesota if Harris can now pull it off. It’s her most important speech; the most significant convention in 40 years. All of them scream “YAAASSS!” She’s brilliant, “amazing”, “Mizz Kamala”.
As for the look - well, it’s convention loopy. Everyone around me is wearing Kamala outfits: pearls, skinny jeans, Converse. Even the men. It’s quite strange to talk to a 6ft retired web designer called Chuck from Minnesota in pearls, or to a see a male delegate from California sporting a straight-up Queen Mother-grade choker and Kamala make-up.
But, as the speakers say, again and again - while describing some minor playground injustice that Harris suffered as a child or some killer parmigiana she cooked - “That’s Kamala!”
“That’s Kamala!” It is as if they have all known her for ever, while having to be told by a six-year-old - Harris’s great-niece - exactly how to pronounce her name (it’s “comma” followed by “la").
By the time I arrive at the convention centre on Monday it’s already filling up with genteel, elderly black women and Ryan Murphy virgins in spray-on chinos and tasteful stripes.
Everyone looks 45, whether they are 20 or 80, with the exception of the VP candidate Tim Walz, who has been specifically picked to look 60 and white (who’s the DEI hire now?).
There is a special VIP lounge for 200 TikTokers - sorry, “creators” - who will tell you they are big into either “Congress” or “public policy”. Why risk hoping 15,000 journalists will parrot your line when you can just fly in an “anti-authoritarian” TikToker or a tame viral expert “on all things Nancy Pelosi”, as a girl from California calls herself. She finds the former Speaker of the House of Representatives “passive-aggressive and beautiful”.
One of the TikTokers, a Minnesotan who works in a bank, says she’s “ashamed” her most viral video was pointing out “there’s a senator from Georgia who’s super-hot”. Did she get paid to come here? “We did,” she sighs. “Some people get paid to do it.” Some people even have “multiple sponsors”.
I’ve never seen politics so monetised: one woman tells me she is a “delegate and performer” and whips out the details of her Kamala-inspired single, “music for upliftment and engagement”. “Upliftment” is an official convention word.
On a blue carpet next to the convention hall, celebrities step and repeat and give interviews. One, a star from RuPaul’s Drag Race, BenDeLaCreme, tells me that he has set up a political funding vehicle - Drag PAC - to reach the “five million new queer voters” and he’ll be doing posts telling them “what is the actual process”.
I look on his feed later and it’s mostly him prancing around in a 9ft wig shouting, “You see how I come dressed for the DNC? Very demure, very mindful,” and asking state representatives if they want a “smooch”. Meanwhile the strange conversations flow. It’s perfectly normal for people to open with “My cousin is a coach on The Voice Philippines” or “Would you like a free Bible?”
Policy-wise, genitals are top of the agenda. Hoo, it’s abortion city. Madam Prosecutor has made clear that she will write Roe v Wade “into law” the moment she gets into the White House, so - in the absence of almost any other hint of a policy - the convention has run with it in the only way American politics knows how: to terrifying extremes. At parties you are showered with morning-after pills and condoms. “It’s reproductive rights forward in there,” warns a 23-year-old with a cheese on his head.
About a mile from the hall a Planned Parenthood abortion lorry is offering free vasectomies and medical abortions. It’s not part of the DNC but it sure does capture the spirit: almost everyone believes in zero limits, even elderly South Dakotan former grain farmers like Larry, who, when asked about full-term scare stories, says, “Yah, but when does that happen? Name me when that happens!” Everyone is fully pro-abortion and pro-women while, of course, not being able to say what one is. What is a woman?
“I don’t have an official answer for that,” says a girl at the recording of the podcast America, Who Hurt You?.
On the first night there are at least 66 speeches. I know, I know - lawyers gonna lawyer. Most of them follow this format: the speaker will come on, give an incredible foxy smirk at the audience and then say, “Can you feel somethin’ happenin’? Somethin’ stirrin’? It’s the MAGIC OF KAMALA HARRIS.” And the crowd will then get to its feet and scream and shout, and then another person will come on and say, “I was raped by my stepfather after years of abuse” or “In 2013 I was sex-trafficked across California”, and then you’re passed a stick saying “We love Joe”. It’s intense.
Hillary Clinton gives a sabre-rattling speech, and the next night so does Michelle Obama, who presides over the audience like a thundering sibyl. She seems annoyed the screaming and clapping of the mortals is interrupting her transcendent metaphors about escalators and mountains, wagging her finger as the crowd whoop, cry, roll over and paw the air like Commander Biden, until her husband comes on and dials in some half-arsed material, pouring particular scorn on Donald Trump’s “cult of personality”, even though a mere two days later 2,000 men will stand in pearls before “the President of Joy”.
Trump, by the way, is the convention’s real star; they are teeth-gnashingly obsessed with “that man from Mar-a-Lago”. Don’t they realise it’s cooler not to mention him? I began counting how long any could wait before bringing him up. Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a sassy Ashley Judd lookalike, lasted two whole sentences.
There’s surprise after surprise on Wednesday: Stevie Wonder, Oprah Winfrey ("democracy requires hard work - and heart work"), the entire American football team Walz coached. It’s pronounced “Walls”, by the way. He’s been picked to attract the “dad in plaid” demographic and makes Trump’s VP, JD Vance, look like a rich tosser horror ex, even though Vance’s background is far more humble than his. How does that happen?
In Walz, Harris has somehow, brilliantly, found herself a pure Robin Williams character who can at once say, “I’m a veteran. I’m a hunter. I’m a better shot than most Republicans,” and talk about the “hell of infertility”. He gives the best speech, but it’s a poor week for men, most of them rambling, tear-sodden, boring, confused or describing themselves, teeth-itchingly, as an “actual billionaire” (the governor of Illinois, taking a swipe at Trump). The rest is a straight-up Botoxed production of Lysistrata.
I guess after all the incredible fizzing energy, the nonstop videos, the playing of Beyonce’s Freedom, the dressing-up and the endless sickening soundbites ("A vote is a kind of prayer"), Harris’s speech was always going to be an anticlimax.
There’s a clamour as she walks to the podium, glossy, confident, smiling like a Hollywood star.
It’s a soft speech, a bit wet, low energy: a nothingburger. She calls Trump an “unserious man”; he and Vance are “out of their minds” on abortion. There’s a better bit on America’s “lethal fighting force”, but her voice is a crying voice, and 35 days is no time to Margaret Thatcher her.
Afterwards there’s disappointment she has simply played to the base - where was anything to tempt moderate Republicans, personal finance, small businesses, cost of living?
After mere minutes, though, it’s forgotten - the crowds snap back to unreality, go wild, pour out of the doors and roil through the arena. I see Spike Lee and the Central Park Five being led, like blind people, through the glittering masses. Can any of this last? Has she now peaked? Not if these lunatics can help it.
The Times
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