Anything but conventional
Democrats and Joe Biden meet the challenge during an unprecedented moment in U.S. politics.
MILWAUKEE— Joe Biden’s acceptance of his party’s nomination for president of the United States, which formally begins his campaign against Donald Trump, caps one of the most unusual political conventions, in one of the most unusual times, in U.S. history.
Unprecedented: A Democratic National Convention staged entirely on screens due to a pandemic, with no balloon drops or chanting crowds or glory for the nominal host city of Milwaukee.
Unprecedented: The vicepresidential nominee, Kamala Harris, was the first Black woman, and the first South AsianAmerican woman, to accept a major party’s nomination.
Unprecedented: Former president Barack Obama delivered the most direct attack on a sitting president ever made by a former president in modern times.
Unprecedented: The sitting president actively campaigned in the same state where the Democratic convention was underway, and was even scheduled to deliver a kind of prebuttal speech in Biden’s hometown hours before Biden took the stage.
Unusual: A plate of calamari played a prominent role in Rhode Island’s roll-call vote. As former Ohio governor John Kasich, one of several Republicans who endorsed the Democratic candidate, said in his speech Monday, “These are not normal times.”
And as Harris said in her speech Wednesday, “It’s a lot.”
She was speaking about the “constant chaos” and “incompetence” she said characterized Trump’s presidency, but the phrase could serve as a slogan for the whole of 2020.
In Milwaukee, some of the crises she was talking about were visible in the area around the convention site: streets that were expected to be filled with conventioneers were barren of tourists, with many bars and restaurants in nearby blocks closed, and those that were open mostly empty. It’s been so desolate that Mayor Tom Barret said he hopes Milwaukee might get a do-over by hosting the next Democratic convention.
In the streets around the Wisconsin Center, the most prominent demonstrations were by members of Black Lives Matter. On Thursday afternoon, protesters gathered at nearby Red Arrow Park, where Dontre Hamilton, a Black man, was shot dead by police in 2004. “We are here to defeat Trump, tell Biden and other Democrats to stop cops from killing Black men and other people, and build our movement,” said Ryan Hamann, one of the protest organizers.
The malaise of America — the reckoning over racial justice, the death and illness of the pandemic, the high unemployment it has caused — hung heavy over the convention.
Tying those ills to the current president was one of the key themes of the convention, carried out most prominently and effectively by former first lady Michelle Obama, in her intimate keynote from home on Monday, and by her husband, in his grave and formal address Wednesday on the jeopardy to democracy. “That’s what at stake right now — our democracy,” the former president said.
The other theme was building the positive case for Biden as the solution to that malaise — and the Democrats’ approach was to line up testimonials by the dozens to his compassion, empathy, experience and basic decency. The argument was made by regular folks, such as the elevator operator Biden befriended who made his formal nomination, and by more prominent people such as Cindy McCain, the widow of former Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
It was also made by Biden’s wife, Jill, who said his experience of personal loss and ability to make emotional connections with people are what the country needs. “How do you make a broken family whole? The same way you make a nation whole,” she said. “With love and understanding, and with small acts of kindness. With bravery. With unwavering faith.”
One big question going into the convention was how much the absence of crowds and a rally-type atmosphere would hurt the presentation of what is, essentially, a weeklong advertisement for the nominee. But while some of the politicians’ speeches were noticeably missing an element of excitement and energy, they were also kept far shorter than usual by the format — which for most viewers was probably a plus.
Using video feeds from remote locations allowed the party to show off the scenery and diversity of a big country, and to allow people of various ethnic backgrounds, abilities, sexual identities and ages to appear from where they live, effectively broadening the unity potential the Biden campaign was trying to emphasize.
The use of documentary-style video segments to outline policy priorities — gun control, health insurance expansion, immigration reform, fighting climate change — was far more effective than podium speeches could ever be. That was particularly so in the case of a segment narrated by an 11-year-old girl named Estella, whose father was a Trump-voting marine and whose mother was deported as an undocumented immigrant. She addressed Trump directly: “Every day that passes, you deport more moms and dads and take them away from kids like me.”
Necessity is the mother of invention, and in at least some respects, the innovations forced by the pandemic turned the convention into a more compelling experience.
Part of the message the speakers were pitching to voters, especially as the week went on, was that perhaps the same could be true of a recovery from the crises the country is going through. It’s in their slightly clunky slogan, “Build Back Better.” It was in the theme of Biden’s speech, “America’s promise.” It was in Barack Obama’s appeal to a defence of participatory democracy, to ensure that “America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed.”
Or as Hillary Clinton put it in her speech Wednesday, “As the saying goes, the world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. Joe Biden knows how to heal, unify, and lead, because he’s done all of that for his family and his country.”