The national party conventions are greatly diminished occasions in the American public consciousness. They have long since ceased to be real events in which decisions about candidates or policies get made. Even the “bounce” presidential candidates typically get in the polls from the week-long prime-time television commercial has dwindled in the age of social media and other distractions.
But if any convention has mattered in the past 40 years then this week’s Democratic fiesta in Chicago was it. Never in the history of the modern presidential nominating process has a candidate been picked so close to the convention – or election day – as Kamala Harris was last month. Public curiosity was bound to be high.
Given this attention, the Democrats had three principal tasks in Chicago. First, they had to bury Joe Biden.
Politics can be a brutal business but what we have witnessed in the past two months has been among the most efficient and ruthless acts of elimination since Henry VIII decided he wanted a new wife. It culminated on Monday, the first night, in the spectacle of Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker who played the pivotal role in the president’s involuntary demise, mouthing “thank you, Joe” at his farewell speech, and Barack Obama, whose aides fashioned the weapons of Biden’s execution, calling him “my brother”. Thank you, Abel. Yours tearfully, Cain.
As for the man himself, he was given the late slot that ended after most viewers’ bedtime, let alone his. But getting rid of the old guy not only meant literally waving him off in the dead of night, but also distancing the party from the past four years.
Biden’s approval ratings remain in the basement amid continuing high prices, heightened global insecurity and the highest ever levels of illegal immigration. There were a few nods to how he saved democracy from Donald Trump, but if Harris is to win, voters have to be made to forget the record of the past four years.
Michelle Obama, who gave the speech of the convention, managed to avoid mentioning Biden at all – a reflection of the bad blood said to flow between her and the president over the Bidens’ treatment of a family member to whom she is close, but also an example of how to try to make a case for your party while bypassing the fact that its leader is still the president. Joe Biden? Sorry. Don’t know him. Wasn’t he once a senator?
Second, they had to introduce Harris to a nation for whom she is still largely a blank slate. If dispatching Biden required ruthlessness with a smiling face, the Harris project demands a different sort of deception: simply forget the public record of almost every political thought she has ever had and recast her as an icon of the American Dream, the professional success story who is also the nation’s mother. Mamala.
Some of this was cringe-worthy stuff – the childhood friends who recalled her willingness to stand up to bullies in the school playground. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, did a better job, with a winsome speech that portrayed a late blooming love affair with a woman whose recipe for brisket had won over the hearts of his Jewish family.
Then we had Tim Walz, himself in the process of a fraudulent makeover: from hard-left governor of one of America’s most traditionally left-wing states into “Coach Walz”, the type of salt-of-the-earth Midwesterner who helps you to change your tyre when you’re stranded.
The politics of identity – always core to the modern Democratic Party – are crucial here. While Walz is intended to reassure the large number of white working-class voters who feel the Democrats no longer care much for them, Harris is the embodiment of the left’s commitment to the new religion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Trump has been making significant inroads into the ethnic minority vote. Critical to a Harris victory is bringing them home.
It was Michelle again who nailed this with her line of the week that mocked Trump’s recent comments about how immigrants have been taking “black jobs”. “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘black jobs’?” she asked.
Third, they had to keep The Joy flowing. There may never have been a lower substance-to-fluff ratio in the history of political campaigns than we have in the Harris movement. Other than abortion, which the Democrats adore, there was little actual talk of policies for the country’s many challenges.
The few proposals she has come up with, such as federal price controls on grocery stores, are so self-evidently unworkable and ruinous that they must be intended purely for cheap electoral appeal, decorative props in the construction of the giant Fun House that Democrats want voters to keep their eyes on.
As the Democrats achieved their three objectives, so must Trump – now it seems with the help of Robert F Kennedy, who is expected to exit the race and back him – undo them all if he is to win. It shouldn’t be hard to remind voters that, in spite of her attempt to hide it, Harris has been a key member of the unpopular Biden administration for the past four years. Nor should it be difficult to dredge up every single extreme left position she held only a few years ago and now supposedly rejects.
The joy she purports to offer is a harder myth to dispel. Its central element is the dubious but compelling promise of change from the rancorous, malignant politics of the past decade.
Nine years after he first stepped on to the national stage, four years after his own presidency ended in chaos, now in his third run for the presidency, can a 78-year-old man loathed by almost half the country offer the hope of freshness to a nation hungry for it?
The Times
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