The convention this week gave viewers a gaseous promise of nothing at all, an appeal to momentum rather than direction.
Well I survived, so there’s that. Not that anyone at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this year was threatened by anything except boredom, or ideological nausea: All that doom-mongering — my own very much included — about what might happen to the city turned out to be for naught. The police response was superb, and the Palestinian protests turned out to be a pathetic farce. (I will return to this theme very soon, in a piece devoted mostly to happily dunking on myself.)
But for now: When it comes to the sea of true, blue Democratic believers who were simply thrilled just to be there, it would be disingenuous for me to claim they were disappointed. I was there, and they were mostly happy clams all week long. (I say “mostly” because everybody hated the security lines, and frankly conventions ought to serve beer like Bulls games, right up until the final speeches.) It was a gigantic social and networking event on top of being an affirmation of everything that the sorts of people who really care about Democratic politics want to get together to celebrate, and near as I can tell folks enjoyed every minute of it, including the minutes that bore most others to tears. Nobody was grumbling about ideological compromise that I could hear.
Unfortunately for these people however, I am a conservative, and also more jaded about politics at this point than a Zhou-era figurine. So as far as I’m concerned, I have just suffered through the four days of the single most boring and insultingly incoherent political production of my adult life, all while knowing full well it was leading up to a soft-pastel cloudburst of shimmering meaninglessness — Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech — that would receive universally rapturous media reviews.
These are the sorts of thing that will derange a man. (Michael Brendan Dougherty writes with real fire this morning from that precise perspective, in fact.) At the risk of repeating a month’s worth of columns in a sentence, the Harris campaign’s organizational conceit is to remain a blur, as impossible to pin down as a decent photo of Bigfoot. Over the past month or so of work I have used drug-trip metaphors, invoked the Beatles, and spun dance-party analogies — heck, I once even opened a piece with a reference to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist — in a desperate attempt to convey to readers how nauseatingly unmoored from any sense of reality or actual policy commitments the Harris campaign is. Every week or so, a few lone voices from the mainstream media pipe up to say the same. This week it’s from across the pond at the BBC and the Economist, who beg the Harris campaign for policy specifics like a Dickensian orphan piteously asking, “More gruel, please?”
But the rest of the media are happy currently to sing songs of praise at the dawning of a new age of Aquarius. And there is some reason to do so: Harris’s speech was itself well-delivered, and from the beginning of her fairy-tale campaign, this was always agreed to be Harris’s one key advantage over Joe Biden: Though both candidates need to be tightly stage-managed and kept away from unscripted moments lest their candidacies instantly implode, at least Kamala can still read a speech off a teleprompter with a decent performative affect. (It is a valuable skill, as last night’s performance demonstrates — one Donald Trump is incapable of mastering.)
Beyond that? Who cares. Charlie Cooke covered 90 percent of my other thoughts this morning before I even rolled out of bed, so just go read him. (He slings prose like a woodchuck chucks wood; meanwhile I just snail along, leaving a goopy trail of verbiage wherever I go.) I’m exhausted after a week of this nonsense, and I have a much more important question anyway: Where was Beyoncé, dammit?
Because let’s get angry about what really matters before this impromptu media diary ends once and for all: The powers that be want you, poor misled American voter, to think about Kamala Harris’s big gauzy speech last night. Meanwhile I am sitting here, as I suspect a certain number of people who “heard it through the grapevine” are, and wondering when the big surprise guest everyone on site was <whisper, whisper> buzzed to believe would appear. So certain was I that Beyoncé would parachute into the convention like Stevie Wonder (or maybe even Tom Cruise, for that matter) that I wrote it up as a certainty in my previous piece. And it never happened.
Some media wags are laughing about how the false rumors might have juiced viewership for Kamala’s speech (which came far earlier than the keynotes of prior nights and made it into the prime-time). I doubt anyone will ever know how the rumor began myself. But while I’m not conspiratorial by nature, I’m pretty sure the Harris people knew exactly what they were doing by not officially tamping down rumors when they could have, and then juking expectations by getting Harris onstage nearly an hour before the last three nights. Whether those at home watching were simply sacking out on the couch with nothing better to do (you don’t have to wait for your entertainment nowadays, after all) or had tuned in for some warmed-over star power, what they got instead was a gaseous promise of nothing at all, an appeal to momentum rather than direction: “Forward!” “We’re not going back!” And always, “Twirling, twirling towards freedom!”