Democrats use convention for healing
The exhaustingly long, exceedingly brutal test America’s future leaders must survive is unlike any in the democratic world.
The punishing process gets longer, more expensive and more bloody with each cycle. As a result, the parties’ conventions’ role has become more important in one essential task: healing.
The wounds inflicted on every candidate and their supporters, in the 18 months of the toughest battle for succession anywhere must be bound up by the time delegates leave for home. If the party is to have any chance of mounting a united campaign their convention must be an emotional reset.
No primary season has been more damaging in a generation. Republicans watched 16 party leaders get mugged by a real estate hustler, a conman who may yet be president. Democrats endured months of bitter recrimination about the compromises of the first Clinton era, punctuated by almost weekly heartbreak in collisions between police and young black men.
Despite gaffe after gaffe, Trump bulldozed his way through his convention. The convention ended with a Nixonian ‘dark days are here’ speech, sending delegates home angry but united. Its ongoing impact on voters is less clear. It is a sad reflection of the dread that has seized too many Americans that some rewarded him with a small post-convention bump. History and most observers predict the bump will fade.
For a party never so divided since the days of Teddy Roosevelt or Barry Goldwater, the GOP’s event was an abject failure. Perhaps it appeared to TV audiences that the delegates were finally united, enraged by Ted Cruz’ apostasy. But every American convention is really three events.
There is the convention on the floor, then the TV show and finally, the unseen convention — in hotel rooms and hundreds of parties. Each plays an essential role. On the floor — in spite of yourself — you are moved by the crowd. Your excitement rises as the speakers relentlessly raise the emotional tension. You leave energized and smiling. At home, the best convention TV productions send the undecided to bed saying, “Well, maybe . . . they’re right . . .” And then in hundreds of rooms and restaurants across the city, dozens of political partnerships, alliances and pledges are launched. This convention failed at all three.
It got little attention that the Republican governor of the host state, and every presidential nominee in 25 years and dozens of senators and congressmen boycotted their own party’s most important event. Unbelievable! Cleveland was the low point in GOP conventions in a generation.
This week we saw a more high-wire form of party healing. As Will Rogers, the Jon Stewart of an earlier generation put it — nailing the eternal chaos of progressive parties — “I am a member of no organized political party, I’m a Democrat.” The sight of the red-faced “Bernie or Bust” delegates booing the mention of Hillary Clinton’s name, some even apeing the Trump slogan, “Lock her UP!” must have made Rogers smile from above.
These political wood lice, who attached themselves to his campaign, left Sanders looking old and sad by mid-convention. He endured some of them egregiously denouncing him as a traitor for doing the only thing every candidate must do when they lose — endorse the winner. The Busters are irrelevant, but they tried hard to frustrate the healing process.
The wickedly funny Sanders supporter Sarah Silverman finished by turning on them saying, “You ‘Bernie or Bust’ people! You’re just being ridiculous!” The crowd roared. When Alicia Keys shouted them out in a call for unity, many sat on their hands amid the general euphoria. For these Bernie delegates the healing was still tentative by the end of day two. Then the master spoke. Colleagues from his White House days tell of Clinton arriving unannounced at a staff birthday, or a welcome for a new hire, and sitting down — then riffing for 30, 40 minutes, an hour and a half, stories and analysis of people and events. Asked a veteran why people didn’t simply quietly sidle out, you are greeted with incredulity. His charisma as a storyteller, as the “Secretary of Explaining Stuff,” as Obama dubbed him, was on full display. But it was not the usual Clinton barnburner. It could not be about him or his prodigious policy expertise.
In a line out of Faulkner, or To Kill a Mockingbird, timidly, in a quavering voice, he started, “In the spring of 1971, I met a girl . . .” It was the launch a paean to the love of his life so intimate that it felt, in a stadium of thousands, like you were sharing a late night drink in a bar with an old friend.
On one level it was a wandering shaggy-dog story, but it was also an icon of Clinton’s storytelling mastery. He name checked a dozen states that had touched Hillary’s life, and built brick-by-brick, the counter to Hillary’s “old establishment” tag struggles to throw off.
For some women of his generation, Monica Lewinsky was the elephant in the room, an indelible stain on his claims as a husband. For millions of others, I suspect, he was as compelling as ever.
To a new generation he introduced a different Hillary Clinton — the relentless change maker, the fighter who never quits. As one young black Bernie pundit said with pained bemusement, “I never saw her before. She was a just a powerful establishment politician, a mystery — as a woman, as a person. He connected the dots . . .”
And then the next night came the master of a new generation.
Barack Obama also had a task he had never before faced. To use his oratorical genius to persuade America of the trustworthiness and ironically, “the likability” of a former political enemy. Not easy. It was such a home run, that the Bernie blowhards were not only silenced, several told the networks that he had successfully turned them — they would now support Clinton.
In the hours between that triumphant night and Hillary Clinton’s arrival on stage Thursday, Democratic party officials prayed that an always pedestrian speaker would not suffer too badly by comparison. She was launched in an intimate, loving introduction by her poised and eloquent daughter, Chelsea.
The candidate then defied the doubters. It was the speech of her career, and to most observers, she delivered. Not Obamaesque poetry, but powerful, nonetheless. Few Sanders delegates — who made up 43 per cent of the convention — went home as angry as they had been on arrival, the key test of party healing.
More Americans watched the last three nights of the Philadelphia celebrations than the dystopian vision from Cleveland, by many millions — an important test of political impact.
When party managers are confident that their carefully scripted healing process is doing its work, they deliver any successful convention’s necessary punchline — the call to arms. Michelle Obama delivered it, as did Joe Biden.
President Obama simply said, “Don’t boo. Vote!”
Canadian political managers are often tempted to sneer at the Hollywood glitz that is core of American convention culture. They might reflect on this: Almost one in four American voters watched the GOP show its wares. The Democrats appear to have drawn closer to one in three.
Years ago our political parties celebrated a huge convention success if a million voters paid attention — slightly better than one in five. Today, it is typically less than in 1in 10 Canadians.
Who has the more effective political education and persuasion tool?