As far as Covid-era levels of TV production go, the first two days of the 2020 Democratic National Convention have been the political equivalent of the BET Awards.
In a year that got exhausting long before the presidential election, there’s a real effort not to bore an audience — which explains the Billy Porter performance on night one — even when there’s no physical audience. It couldn’t have been easy to reimagine a modern tradition so completely, let alone so abruptly, so I can’t totally bash the event, but for all intents and purposes, it’s been… fine.
The less-is-more approach proves that the DNC needn’t waste millions of dollars on parties and pageantry. That’s not a knock to the city of Milwaukee, which could have certainly benefited from that missing money to the point that Los Angeles mayor and Biden campaign co-chair Eric Garcetti called for the Wisconsin city to get a redo in 2024. (Let’s just hope America isn’t living off of peanut butter by then.)
I understand the political reality just fine. Young voters didn’t make the difference during the primaries that many had hoped, so an outwardly progressive candidate is not the nominee. But we deserve more than this.
As a jaded millennial living under the second greatest financial crisis of my adulthood, if I have to make the most of fewer resources, so should the only party that can consistently count on my vote. Besides, the roll call — which in this stripped-down convention became a montage of people all over the country providing visual representations of their states formally nominating Joe Biden for the presidency — was actually interesting to watch. Apparently White people in Rhode Island are now beefing about calamari getting the spotlight instead of other clam dishes, but I’m going to let those folks handle their family shit and enjoy the nice lil’ American after-school-special moment. (But shout out to the Cape Verdeans there!)
The Democratic Party, to its credit, has tried to show the faces of as many facets of its base as possible. (Finding a married gay Black man who lives and runs an organic farm in Maine can’t have been easy.) We’ve come a long way from all those White people dancing horribly to the macarena. But it’s one thing to see our face — and another to hear from us.
The fact is, we are seen and not heard as loudly as others. Do me and mine not deserve as much courting as these white women the DNC is so obviously going after with this production? Please advise.
That group is apparently being referred to as “rage moms” this year, but based on what I’ve read, they sound like the group of white women who vote Republican but have since been mortified by seeing Donald Trump offer the rawest, dumbest form of the very sort of bigotry they’ve been supporting for years as members of the Grand Old Party.
That’s why one presumes someone like former Republican Ohio governor John Kasich was given an invitation to speak. Four years ago, Kasich told the LGBTQ community to “get over” legal discrimination. When he was governor, he signed 17 anti-choice measures and voted to defund Planned Parenthood. I don’t give a fuck what John Kasich thinks about anything, and I say that not as a partisan (the Democrats are lucky to have my support), but as someone who fancies himself to be a decent human being.
Kasich talked about “unity” and irritated Chris Christie in the process, which frankly doesn’t seem enough of a payoff to warrant the time allotted to him. At least Colin Powell abandoned the party years ago, but do you people need Republicans telling them how awful Donald Trump is when the Democrats are right there?
And even they’re not exactly required viewing. It’s bad enough former President Bill Clinton was invited. Granted, there was no way in hell he was going to miss a booking, but after taking a shot at the late activist Kwame Ture (né Stokely Carmichael) at John Lewis’ funeral weeks ago, let’s hope the second night was his swan song so he can go sit somewhere and think about all he’s done and been accused of doing. (I’m still not over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And, yeah, other rumors.)
All this at the expense of folks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was less than a month ago that she gave a stellar speech responding to the sexist attack she endured from a Republican congressional “colleague.” She is one of the best speakers the party has right now — and when you are that young, that powerful, and that influential, your party should be elevating you at all costs, if for no other reason than being the best way to reach the Latinx and young voters the party continues to struggle with.
But she was only given a minute to speak.
She made the most of it, thankfully, managing to push for “guaranteed health care, higher education, living wages, and labor rights for all people in the United States” while pushing “a movement striving to recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia, and to propose and build reimagined systems of immigration and foreign policy that turn away from the violence and xenophobia of our past.”
Those willing to speak to the root of America’s sins that have given us Donald Trump deserve more time to speak.
I understand the political reality just fine. Young voters didn’t make the difference during the primaries that many had hoped, so an outwardly progressive candidate is not the nominee. But we deserve more than this.
I’m sure some voters were moved by Cindy McCain’s narration of Joe Biden’s friendship with her late husband, but others might ask why someone who in 2019 made headlines for reporting what she believed to be a child trafficking attempt by a “woman of a different ethnicity than the child” was invited as a symbol of unity. After her account was refuted by police and she offered a nonapology, she’s supposed to make me feel good about how people of different backgrounds come together?
Conventions are supposed to be about capturing (and in some cases indicting) our present political condition and articulating a vision of the future. As nice as it all looks, the DNC is offering one too many nods to the past for comfort.
The game is still the game, and right now the largest question of the 2020 election cycle is “do you want to die?” I, for one, don’t — so I’ll be voting for Joe Biden no matter what Sweet Potato Saddam, his minister of interior masquerading as an attorney general, and that racist fringe group known as the Republican Party do between now and then.
I should still be inspired, though, and the only folks who even seemed to try were AOC and Michelle Obama, who managed to both further terrify and inspire me while wearing big hoop earrings (swoon) and speaking in tones that don’t inspire critical essays by yours truly. Both of them are as aware as I am about the dangers of a second Trump term, and the fact that his fascist antics will only worsen the longer he has access to the powers of the U.S. presidency.
That’s enough for me, but not necessarily enough for folks who already feel left for dead. That’s why we need more than performances and faces, but words, from the people who actually understand why so many feel hopeless. That’s why AOC deserved more time. That’s why Stacey Abrams, another gifted orator, should have been given more than one minute to speak — and not as part of the “kids table,” as analyst Christina Greer aptly dubbed it. Julián Castro, the only Latinx presidential candidate of the 2020 primary, and the only one who ran on a platform of police reform, should have been given a prime-time slot.
Where are the people who have been in the streets all summer? Where are the people Donald Trump and the Republican Party helped put in the streets? All this about the middle class, when this country is mired in a crisis that once again exposes how little so many of us have.
Conventions are supposed to be about capturing (and in some cases indicting) our present political condition and articulating a vision of the future. As nice as it all looks, the DNC is offering one too many nods to the past for comfort. And should Joe Biden prevail, that model means that Democrats will face the same problems in the next election cycle — because those “rage moms” they are courting now will soon abandon them again.
The first two nights were a chance to balance the level of courting, but a lot of us are looking at this show (or not at all) and feeling like side pieces.
One reason why so many are excited about Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate is the fact that with Biden potentially becoming the oldest first-term president in American history, much of the party’s future rests on her shoulders.
This moment has always been bigger than Biden. As AOC said herself on an IG Live after the second night of the DNC, “We need to win in November. November is about, in my opinion, stopping fascism.” I’m in full agreement with that, as well as her call for progressives to work toward getting Joe Biden to victory — and then pushing him to deliver results. “We need to vote and agitate,” she explained.
I don’t want to die under a fool, so I will do my part to help see this through, but fear only keeps folks in your fold but for so long. I look forward to future agitating. This party will need it.