The Democratic National Convention

Ready on the Left

Tuesday

AMERICANS have a remarkable talent for creating transparently pointless political rituals. The most pointless of all is the “spin room”. The first thing that journalism’s finest do after every debate is rush off, notebooks in hand, to a special room where the candidate’s surrogates brief them about how well their man (or woman) did. Dennis Kucinich is building up unstoppable momentum! Tom Tancredo has the Republican nomination in the bag! The spinmeisters manage to impart all this nonsense not just with a straight face but with a look of complete sincerity.

The big question hanging over the next two weeks is whether the conventions are the most transparently pointless rituals of all. It has been decades since anything was actually decided at a convention. They have degenerated into little more than prolonged infomercials designed for prime-time television.

Every single one of the thousands of journalists here knows how the week will unfold already. Hillary Clinton will make a rousing speech about how wonderful Barack Obama is. Mr Obama will make a wonderful speech about how wonderful change and hope are. And the Democrats will pull ahead in the polls. Why endure the misery of a four-hour flight when you can just stay at home and watch the whole thing from the comfort of your La-Z-Boy recliner?

This complaint is not without merit. I have already passed a lot of time with journalists that I regularly pass a lot of time with in Washington, DC. I am preparing to go to seminars on how Mr Obama will govern that will be presented by policy wonks from the Brookings Institution, which is a few hundred yards from my office. Washington has arrived in the Rockies and is doing what Washington does best—talk to itself.

Even so, there remains something exciting, at least for people in the commentary business, about the sight of thousands of people gathered together to participate in a political ritual, however hollow. You get to stay up late and drink too much while discussing the minutiae of electoral maths—and people actually seem to be listening. And when you wake up in the morning there is a huge package of convention bumph waiting outside your hotel door.

The ever-industrious National Journal not only provides a glossy magazine containing everything from a poll of insiders to no fewer than three articles by the brilliant Ron Brownstein; it also produces a daily newspaper analysing what has gone on. There is even a political crossword for hard-core obsessives. “No hiccups so far”, reads one headline, which is all to the good, since, at the time when the story was filed, the convention had not even got underway.

The convention also gives you a chance to meet real live Democrats en masse—people who live far beyond the Beltway but nevertheless care enough about politics to devote a chunk of their lives to getting their candidate elected. One Denver-bound Democrat I met at Dulles airport was wearing a T-shirt that read “Kill ‘em all—let God sort ‘em out”. (The TSA officials waved him through security without raising an eyebrow.) Denver has also witnessed a minor riot involving professional malcontents such as Ward Churchill and Cindy Sheehan.

But for the most part everybody seems disturbingly nice. Nobody complained about the 90 minutes it took for United to offload our baggage (they blamed lightning). Nobody seemed in the least put out that there were no taxis around for another half an hour. Everybody seemed to be delighted to be here—and delighted to be taking part in a history-making event. I overheard three young people discussing whether they should meet up at the black-Jewish mixer, the Hispanic-Jewish mixer or the black-Jewish-Hispanic mixer. They decided, in the spirit of black-Jewish-Hispanic unity, to go to all three.

Back to top>>

Wednesday

THE watchword of the Democratic National Convention is “unity”. National unity (“There is no red or blue America” etc). Family unity. And above all party unity.

But the atmosphere in the Pepsi Centre in Denver is rather like that at a dinner party thrown by a couple who have just had a plate-throwing row: the superficial bonhomie cannot conceal the rage that seethes just below the surface.

Button sellers are doing a brisk business in “Hillary supporters for Obama” badges. One former Hillary supporter in a striking wool pantsuit sported a badge reading “Old white women for Obama”. And the party is doing its utmost to rally the faithful. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, kicked off Monday evening with a veritable Niagara Falls of clichés about the American dream.

APAn intimate family moment

The party then played not just the Kennedy card, but the whole deck. Caroline Kennedy sang her uncle Ted’s praises. A slightly bizarre film showed Ted helping the poor and skippering his yacht. Then the man himself delivered a tub-thumping speech about Barack Obama. The crowd would have gone wild in any circumstances, but the fact that Mr Kennedy is suffering from serious health problems (and laboured over some of his words) added poignancy to the performance.

But even uncle Ted was outclassed by Michelle Obama. It’s not just that she is a poised and impressive woman and a fine speaker. She struck exactly the right notes to reach out to the “bitter” Hillary voters who have failed to warm to her husband.

She presented herself as the product not of the civil rights movement, but of the solid upwardly mobile working class. Her father worked for 30 years at a local plant before succumbing to multiple sclerosis. He raised his children to go to college and law school—but taught them never to forget their roots. This was a story that all Americans can embrace. It went down like a dream.

The Clintons will no doubt do everything that they need to do to boost Mr Obama. Mrs Clinton will urge “her” delegates to embrace her former rival. Her husband will rally the tribe for the struggle against the forces of evil. They will do it with the utmost sincerity.

But will anybody believe them? Everybody knows that we have just seen one of the most bitter quarrels in Democratic history. Everybody knows that Bill and Hill regard Mr Obama as an upstart who gamed the system and stole what rightly belonged to them. And everybody knows that Mrs Clinton would be, shall we say, ambivalent about a Democratic defeat in November: it would prove that she was right all along and hand control of the party back to her.

Many of her supporters on the floor are surprisingly open about all this. Chili Cilch, who was proudly wearing a “Hillary army” badge, told me that “With Hillary Clinton I was confident that she would do what was needed to be done. With Barack Obama I’m hopeful. I’d rather be confident”.

Other Hillary supporters were more combative. Many Hillary delegates sat on their hands and conspicuously failed to join in the general Obama-rama.

This is worrying news for the Democrats. The Obama team had assumed that Mrs Clinton’s supporters would return to the fold. How could they do anything but vote Democrat after eight years of George Bush? How could they continue to bear a grudge with the economy in the doldrums and house prices slumping? But so far the grudge remains tightly clenched.

Over the past two-and-a-half months Mr Obama’s support among Hillary voters has got worse rather than better, despite plenty of wooing. Roughly 30% of Clinton voters say that they will not vote for him. Since June Mr Obama has lost ten points among Clinton supporters and John McCain has picked up ten points. The presidential candidate for a party that has been out of the White House for eight years only enjoys the support of 80% of his party’s supporters.

This is partly because the Obama forces have been cack-handed in handling Mrs Clinton: they argued that they could not consider her for vice-president because she is a Washington insider who voted in favour of the Iraq War. Then they chose Joe Biden—a Washington insider who voted in favour of the Iraq War. But the deeper reasons are cultural: the white, working-class voters whom Hillary Clinton rallied are profoundly sceptical of Mr Obama’s coalition of black activists and liberal professionals.

The hosts at the Denver dinner party may be putting a brave face on it. But when the guests go home the seething family quarrel will burst back into life.

Thursday

ON MONDAY night I began to wonder if the convention was turning into a disaster. Many of the speeches were lacklustre. Wild rumours were circulating about the Hillary forces demanding a floor vote. The Democrats let the entire day pass without laying a glove on John McCain.

Tuesday put many of these fears to rest. The speakers did their jobs much better. The throngs in the Pepsi Centre responded with gusto. And the revolt of the Hillary-ites failed to materialise. It would be too much to claim that the Democrats are now united after the trauma of the primary season. But the leadership has done a good job of reminding the troops that the real enemy is Mr McCain and his plan for four more years of George Bush.

AFP

The roster of speakers was a vivid reminder of just how large a coalition the Democrats have managed to assemble. There were two governors from hard-core conservative states (Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and Brian Schweitzer of Montana). There were also leading politicians from three vital swing states: Ted Strickland, Ohio’s governor; Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s junior senator; and Mark Warner, a former governor of Virginia.

The speakers displayed the party’s ideological diversity as well as its geographical reach. Mark Warner is a multimillionaire who, as governor, went down well with both his state’s business elite and its rural voters. Bob Casey is an anti-abortion Catholic whose father was prevented from addressing the Democratic convention because of his anti-abortion views. Brian Schweitzer is a rancher who boasts about how many guns he owns. I’ve grown a little weary of Mr Schweitzer’s western shtick over the years. But he certainly delivered a rousing performance on Tuesday.

The speakers also provided plenty of what Monday night lacked: McCain bashing. Ms Sebelius joked that the Republican candidate believes that there is “no place like home...and home...and home”. Mr Schweitzer said that “even if you drilled in all of Mr McCain’s back yards” there would not be enough oil to satisfy America’s needs. Almost everybody argued that Mr McCain is a shill for oil companies and Washington lobbyists, and he represents nothing more than “four more years of George Bush”. The crowd loved it.

This was all, of course, a prolonged overture to the main event of the evening—Hillary Clinton’s speech—and she carried it off with aplomb. The crowd was as worked up as any I have seen at a Democratic convention. Many of the people on the floor had seen their dreams of electing America’s first female president dashed by “a handful of votes”.

But Mrs Clinton left no doubt that she wanted her supporters to back Mr Obama. In his convention speech in 1980 Ted Kennedy mentioned his victorious rival, Jimmy Carter, once. Mrs Clinton heaped praise on her former rival.

There were times when her speech sounded typically Clintonian—all about her. She talked about everything she had spent her 35 years in politics working for. She reminisced about the campaign that had consumed 19 months of her life. “You made me laugh and, yes, you even made me cry”.

But then she cleverly turned everything around. She told her supporters that they had not been campaigning for her. They had been campaigning for her causes. And the only way to get those causes honoured was to vote for Mr Obama. When she started speaking, the massed throngs had been waving “Hillary” banners. When she finished, many of them were holding signs that read “Obama” on one side and “unity” on the other.

The conventioneers poured out of the Pepsi Centre in a much better mood than on the previous evening. Even the protesters did their part. “No homo sin” read one banner. “Fox News is the only fair and balanced news” read another. The conventioneers were spoiling for a fight—but first there were parties to attend and bars to drink dry.

Friday

THE main business of political conventions is to introduce the candidate to the American public. All the rest of the hoopla—the funny hats, the late night parties, the tedious speeches by minor politicians—is merely incidental.

The Democratic convention in New York in 1992 was a success because it branded Bill Clinton the “Man from Hope”. Likewise, the Republican convention in Philadelphia in 2000 was a success because it presented George Bush as a new kind of conservative—the compassionate kind.

AFP

What has made the convention in Denver such a peculiar affair is that it has been about two things rather than one—persuading the party to get over the Clintons as well as introducing Barack Obama. So far the first has completely overshadowed the second.

The problem with persuading the party to get over the Clintons is that the only people who could do it were the Clintons. This meant that the former first couple dominated two nights of a four night convention.

Hillary Clinton stole the show on Tuesday with her tribute to her “army of the travelling pantsuits”. She then stole the show again on Wednesday when she interrupted one of America’s time-honoured political rituals—reading the roll call of how each state cast their votes—to move that Mr Obama be nominated unanimously. That was before her husband had even opened his mouth.

On Wednesday Bill Clinton delivered one of his best speeches in recent years. He strode onto the stage to the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”—his theme song from 1992 convention—and pledged his support to the Chicago wunderkid.

Mr Clinton said all the right things. But it was impossible not to fixate on the man from Hope rather than on the man he was praising—on his extraordinary personal magnetism and his rare gift for bumper-sticker phrases (“America must lead by the power of our example rather than the example of our power” was a particularly nice one).

The psychological focus did not really shift to Mr Obama until Joe Biden’s speech. Mr Biden did a good job of introducing himself—as the scrappy son of Scranton who has endured family tragedy and wants to help ordinary Americans who have fallen behind under the Bush administration. He also did a good job of reassuring voters about Mr Obama’s biggest potential weakness—his inexperience on foreign policy. On every decision that matters, he argued, Mr Obama’s judgment has been right and Mr McCain’s has been wrong. Mr Obama’s surprise appearance on the stage to embrace his running mate sent the hall into predictable paroxysms.

All good stuff. But Mr Biden also recycled two Democratic talking points that I am beginning to find extremely irritating. The first is that his running mate was a legislative powerhouse in the Senate. This is nonsense. New senators are never powerhouses in an institution based on seniority (the real powerhouses are mostly past retirement age). And Mr Obama was less of a powerhouse than most first-termers: he spent his time planning to run for president and then campaigning.

The second is that Mr Obama made great sacrifices in going into public life. “With all his talent he could have written his ticket on Wall Street”, Mr Biden argued. But instead he chose to become a lowly community organiser.

This not only suggests that the Democrats think that up-by-the-bootstraps types who go to Wall Street are greedy sell-outs; it is also absurd. Mr Obama has been well-rewarded for his bet on public life. And even if he he’d remained a lowly Chicago politician he would be doing very nicely, thank you. His wife earns more than $300,000 a year for running “community outreach” for the University of Chicago hospital.

Three days into the convention Mr Obama nevertheless remains as much as a mystery to me as ever. I have seen him speak dozens of times. I have read piles of material on him. But I still cannot figure out what makes him tick. How can a man who had such a difficult background be so preternaturally self-confident? And how can someone live at the heart of the political storm and yet remain so relentlessly cool? Bill is a much easier figure to understand than Barack.

Today is all about Mr Obama. Tonight more than 75,000 people will cram into Invesco Stadium to hear him speak. Mr Obama will undoubtedly give another stunning performance—and everyone will thrill to the fact that America’s first black presidential candidate is speaking on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s great “I Have a Dream” speech. But whether we will end the evening with a deeper understanding of the man who is causing all this excitement I very much doubt.

Back to top>>

if you enjoyed reading this, subcribe to my RSS feed!