Closing night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (Photo by John Griswold)
That’s a wrap, as they say in the biz, or at least I assume that is what some 45-year old White guy with starched hair, skinny pants, and no socks said in DNC Global Media Headquarters after the balloon drop that ended the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago last night. My work email has been full of the DNC’s public self-congratulations for the convention’s TV ratings, which they say beat the hell out of the RNC, as well as its streaming numbers and clicks and likes on social media.
The DNC media team had said they were very proud to announce this was the first convention in history to welcome influencers and “content creators,” giving them access and special lounges at the arena to do their work. It was smart to do so. Even if some of the content regarding our nation’s political process looks like a transmission from Ruby Rhod in Fifth Element, there was massive “engagement” for the Dems—and they have not even formally tapped into the massive fan base of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé yet.
I was on the third deck of the United Center last night, headed in to have a seat in the media section, when three young creators who had not been given access tried first to reason, then to bully, their way in. Volunteer ushers were as hard as Secret Service in these matters and denied them entry. The three went into loud motion, moving around each other like guppies in a fishbowl. Their leader put a deadly fingernail to the volunteer’s face and said, “Imma put this on TikTok, and NOBODY wants that.” The volunteer gave a sickly smile and apologized but turned them away. Later, creators were dancing in that section, in Manson-family dresses, for an expensive camera held by one of their number. Their backdrop, three stories below, was the multimedia production claiming to be saving the world’s oldest modern democracy.
Today’s marketing event called the American political convention is enough to make you believe some of the terrible things that a liberal such as Walter Lippmann said about our citizens: “Only the insiders can make decisions…because [they are] so placed that [they] can understand and can act. The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome…”
If you are reading this, you already know what that show looked like. All I can add is that in person it felt like a stadium show that went on for twenty hours. No…it was different from that, due to 23,000 other people’s manufactured consent passing through my soul for four days, their emotions boosted by the world’s most manipulative marketers, the highest level of tech, and a devoted army called The Visibility Team, who worked as fluffers to get the crowd to scream, cheer, and dance in place.
For what it is worth, I am guessing this was one of the great media productions of all history, given its scope, size, need for security, its number of “high-value” speakers, the size of the audience in person and digitally/worldwide, and perhaps above all the quickness with which it had to be prepped. Much of the production was in the works already, of course, but the actor was going to be Joe Biden, not Kamala Harris, and many aspects of it had to change completely. Biden announced he would not run again, and endorsed Harris as his successor, only twenty-nine days before opening night. Harris herself, in her acceptance speech, brought up how quickly her candidacy happened.
The DemPalooza geedunk shops did not even have time to stock much Kamala merch, and what there was got picked over quickly, leaving only Joe shirts and mugs. Few attendees wanted them, despite the Democrats’ public outpouring of gratitude to Joe for his service and his bowing out. A young marketing-communications professional in line behind me at a metal detector said Pat told her all the new merch, appropriately branded, would be released at the start of September. Delegates hung on like grim death to the floor signs they waved, to take home as souvenirs.
I can hardly put into words how weird (since that is the Democrats’ own word of the month) it was to see dozens of international figures, including Harris and her husband, the Walzes, the Clintons, the Obamas, Bernie Sanders, Lil Jon, Common, and Stevie Wonder, all in short order. Stevie gave a good mini-speech and asked, “Can you feel me?” The crowd most definitely did. Jesse Jackson was rolled onstage for a tableau vivant. (Another day, as I walked the packed delegate floor, I heard a large man in the human traffic jam say to me, “Brother, can you keep moving on? Thank you.” When I looked back, Jackson was sitting among the delegates, as one of them.)
Jesse Jackson on the delegate floor on Tuesday, the second night of the convention. (Photo by John Griswold)
I broke out laughing when Leon Panetta took the stage. Panetta, who is 86, served as Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, and White House Chief of Staff, among other positions, but I involuntarily said aloud, “What the hell?” Panetta did a nice, serious job talking about the risk to national security that Trump poses, but the young people around me were exponentially more excited by Pink.
Throughout, I could feel the emotion not just running through me, but at times working on me, the way (I have to admit) Peggy Noonan’s “thousand points of light” speech for Bush the Elder worked on me as a young veteran. Before her speech, Elizabeth Warren broke into tears at the crowd’s thundering reception, which nearly destroyed me and the young video curator working furiously on her laptop next to me. Barack Obama cock-shamed Donald Trump, which brought his sometimes-folksiness to new heights. Michelle had always said to go high, but when Barack got a little naughty, the crowd loved it. I had to laugh at his comic acting too in the moment. What are you gonna do? We are all peasants at heart, guffawing at low humor by the bear-baiting pit.
For most of the time, however, I sat there feeling either dead inside or professionally Zen, which I hoped might let me see what was really going on apart from marketing tricks. There was not much of substance, apart from some good things said by and about about the candidates that you could read online in 10 minutes.
In the case of Tim Walz, for instance, whom Dems are calling America’s dad, I have a natural advantage: I am a dad of many years too, and a midwestern one to boot. I do not like football, football metaphors, or hunting. I was a sergeant, combat engineer, and deep-sea diver in the regular Army, and in the terrible class system of the military, my combat infantry friends call the National Guard, in which Walz did his service, “Nasty Girls.” Governor Walz grabs for his chest so often to signal his heartbreaking love for someone that he looks like Fred Sanford having the Big One. But his placement in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, with its history of figures such as Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, is interesting.
As to Kamala Harris, she of the 10,000-watt smile, I am left wondering, Why so happy, in this moment, other than ego and power? The job will be hard, and my 401k is down. Her performative friendship with Oprah Winfrey signifies celebrity-capitalist values that lie under the public joy. For some hours I sat there, knees folded painfully in the tiny seat and no way to relieve the pressure on my lower back, thinking of how much I dislike liberals when they gather together like in one of those kitschy paintings where celebrities are brought together in heaven. Bill Clinton, the old horndog, bit his lip suggestively in his speech, and Oprah plugged Kamala Harris for President of the United States of America with the same shouting, leaning-back, shaking her head Muppet-bit she used when giving away new cars to middle-class White women.
I once told a friend that a surgeon did an excellent job on me, decades ago, but he had no bedside manner, almost to the point of sociopathy. My friend argued that she would rather have someone who signaled kindness and empathy, even if it meant the doctor was not as good. In a potential president, I do not particularly need dancing, though that can be nice. I would like high competence, an excellent liberal-arts education, a love of good books, wisdom, grit, brilliance, benevolent cunning, responsiveness to input, an aptitude for both party-building and across-the aisle policymaking, and values that benefit as many of us as justly as possible. It remains to be seen how much of that might describe Harris as president.
My impression, sitting in the arena, was that much of Harris’ speech was not dynamic. She spoke too softly, in a nasal, warbling voice. She leaned back and looked small. The crowd went quiet, but not from listening hard to her ideas, since she mostly rehashed what those who had been there four days had been subjected to over and over: the stories of her childhood, her mother, IVF and abortion, busting gangs, collecting guns, getting the banks to give California $20 billion. She has done a lot, but with enough repetition in a short time those achievements began to sound like someone padding a résumé.
She did hit the word “unserious” for Donald Trump, my preferred word and maybe the greatest condemnation, and eventually got steely-eyed and loud and began to prosecute Trump in a specific way no one had done yet that week. (It was a risk to humanize him, even as a criminal and lout.)
One of the repetitious tropes all week, used mock-humbly by multiple speakers, was that the previous speaker was a hard act to follow. Barack Obama said it of Michelle. Harris had to give her speech last, and the entire circus had existed just to culminate in her appearance. How many could live up to that?
Harris said that this election is the most important in our lifetime—no, possibly in our nation’s history. It was a bit…proud of Harris to suggest this in a speech framing herself as the savior of American freedom, but she may be correct. A friend imagines November as a forking path: One path goes to the US being what most of us have lived in; the other goes to that dystopia where Biff becomes dictator in Back to the Future II.
DNC 2024 was a historic, planet-killing waste of money and resources. Security alone, CBS reports, cost $75 million dollars, and I suspect it was many times more than that if city and federal resources are counted. There is no way to know how many of the 50,000 attendees flew to get there, or from where, but a calculator I consulted suggests that, on average, each person burned up almost a year’s individual carbon emissions to make a show of support for Harris/Walz (with not a little ego reflection for themselves too, as with the writers writing it). Still, the governmental, organizational, and personal costs of attending would be worth it—it would be worth almost anything—to save the world in the short run, given what we know of Trump’s aims. Harris will likely win, but there are only 74 days until we see if that production airs.
