Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren begins her speech with “GO CFPB!” That’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; you know you’re at a Democratic convention when a self-funding federal agency gets greeted with cheers like the local championship sports team.
There are a half-dozen points that just about every speaker has hit in one way or another: Donald Trump is a felon. Donald Trump doesn’t care about you. Kamala Harris “gets it.” Donald Trump will ban abortion. (He won’t.) Donald Trump will wipe out Social Security and Medicare. (He won’t.) I know that very, very few people watch almost all the speakers at all four nights of the convention, but this all gets extremely repetitive.
“I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch,” Warren says, another crude joke about a hoax involving Hillbilly Elegy.
The smartest thing about Walz’s speech was its brevity. That’s not a backhanded compliment: It let everything in it pack more punch.
I think the most effective political messaging of the night was Oprah’s.
The Democratic campaign against Project 2025 has been remarkably successful but traffics in a lot of lies. Tonight, Walz pretended it included a national ban on abortion and cuts to Social Security and Medicare. It doesn’t. Must be nice to have so much of the press on your side.
“Mind your own damn business” is such a ridiculous justification for allowing unborn children to be killed. It works just as well as an argument for tolerating child abuse.
Tim Walz described the district in which he first ran for Congress (MN01) as a “deep-red district.” In 2006, it had a Partisan Voting Index rating of R+1.
At 11:18 p.m. Eastern, after bringing out Tim Walz’s old football team, we’re starting the biographical video about the Minnesota governor.
There are Pete Buttigieg fans in this world; he was greeted with enthusiastic applause. But he’s offering what strikes me as a very cookie-cutter speech, and he’s still speaking at 11 p.m. Eastern. Tim Walz is still a relatively unknown figure, with about 40 percent of Americans telling pollsters they don’t know enough about him to feel favorable or unfavorable about him. I don’t get why Democrats would want Walz speaking closer to midnight than any of the prime time hours. Maybe Democrats believe that in today’s media environment, all speeches are cut down into short snippets and seen over social media. If that’s the case, let’s just start holding the convention at midday and let everyone hit the bars and party in the night.
In a nauseating moment on Wednesday, Secretary Pete Buttigieg mused that politics can be “uplifting” – “it can even be,” he adds, “soul-craft.”
Gross.
This was the trap into which Democrats fell in the Obama era – the idea that political activism, or even just voting, can be emancipatory. It cannot.
Politics – real politics; elections and legislative affairs – is a grueling, unrewarding activity defined by either painful compromise or failure. It is an unavailing profession that involves crafting legislation by committee, only to see it die for reasons that are utterly parochial and incomprehensibly petty.
Politics is not fun. It is certainly not a spiritually fulfilling exercise. You won’t find deliverance in it, but you will find disappointment if you over-invest in it.
Buttigieg is promoting a fantasy, but not a harmless one. Don’t fall for what he’s selling. You’ll regret it.
I did not expect a George Will allusion at the DNC tonight.
@jgeraghty Richard Wagner would have tried to cut this program down to something manageable