Democratic National Convention Implodes

"Implode"??

looked more like the Big Bang.

Hers was a purely positive speech, the kind of soaring, inspirational oratory that made her husband famous 12 years ago. A week after Obama’s national debut speech at the 2008 convention was plagiarized by Trump’s wife, her remarks tonight felt like the ultimate rebuke. She is a more confident, fluent, and powerful speaker than she was in 2008 — and a far more persuasive one, too.

The speech was unmistakably Sanders. There were invocations of the political revolution, of the greed of Wall Street and pharmaceutical companies, the reference to $27 average donations and the need for tuition-free college. There was all the red meat a Bern feeler could’ve asked for.

But that red meat was tethered strongly to a repeated, clear, and unequivocal reiteration of his endorsement of Clinton...

And he didn’t ignore the cognitive dissonance created by him praising a candidate he was fiercely condemning not two months ago. He instead told a plausible story of how he came aboard, one that emphasized the gains he and his movement made in the process

When Silverman was added, organizers presumably didn’t know there’d be a substantial number of pro-Bernie hecklers. They didn’t know she’d effectively be charged with winning over the most hostile and skeptical segment of the audience. And they thus didn’t anticipate that she would respond to the situation the way any comedian facing hecklers would — by fighting back, and telling the crowd, "Can I just say, to the Bernie or bust people, you're being ridiculous."

That was definitely not in the script. The words "Bernie or Bust" were not supposed to be uttered; even mentioning it is giving the idea more attention than national Democrats really want. And directly confronting the Bernie die-hards risks alienating them further and adding to the convention’s drama.

Here’s the thing, though: It looks like it worked. The comment brought on a wave of applause, and Vox reporters on the floor say the response was overwhelmingly positive.

Obviously, some Bernie die-hards won’t be persuaded by Silverman, and might even be put off. But for casual Bernie supporters watching at home, weighing whether to stay home or throw in for Hillary, it might have been the bracing moment they needed to get on board.

Traditionally, the left and even many liberals have had a conflicted relationship with American political culture’s insistence that America is wonderful and must be celebrated. Almost by definition, to be liberal, or at least anti-conservative, in this country is to embrace the idea that America or at least its government needs to change.

Then something weird happened: Republicans nominated Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is not a fan of America, or at least America as it currently exists. Even as he argues for a fervently nationalistic foreign policy and appeals to his base with jingoistic rhetoric, Trump’s overarching slogan proclaims that America must be made great again, that it has lost a past glory, that something is, at this juncture, fundamentally wrong with it.

That, combined with the major progress of the Obama administration in making America more like the universal health care–boasting, marriage equality–having, anti-racist country liberals have wanted for decades, has enabled a Democratic convention that is almost unprecedentedly patriotic and celebratory of America.

The odd statements are Trump; the even ones are Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Bob Casey (D-PA), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), respectively. The rhetoric is nearly identical. Both parties are committing themselves to opposing unrestricted free trade and outsourcing and, more specifically, the TPP — even though the incumbent Democratic president is the one who negotiated it.

It got off to a slow start, adding in quotidian, seemingly insignificant details — Hillary’s stint sliming fish in Alaska, the square footage of the couple’s first house, watching Police Academy movies with Chelsea — that combined for an effect not of tedium but of familiarity, of humanization. Clinton embraced the traditional first spouse’s duty of making voters see the candidate as a person with emotions and thoughts and quirks, a person they can empathize with and relate to. And because Bill Clinton is one of the best rhetoricians alive today, he absolutely killed it.

It’s not exactly a mystery why the white working class abandoned Democrats to begin with. Political scientist Larry Bartels has found that from 1952 to 2004, support for Democrats declined by nearly 20 percentage points among white voters without college degrees in the South — and barely at all among white voters without college degrees outside the South. The unmistakable lesson is that the group’s abandonment of Democrats has something to do with white Southerners’ anger over civil rights. Winning back those white Southerners meant tacking right on race. It meant critiquing Sister Souljah. Bill Clinton seemed to think it took killing Ricky Ray Rector.

So it was remarkable to see at the nominating convention of Clinton’s wife, on the night when he spoke, that explicit calls for black equality and against the kind of punitive law and order policies that Clinton once championed took center stage. Former Attorney General Eric Holder assured the crowd that Clinton “will end this policy of overincarceration,” and reminded them that she “fought as a senator against sentencing disparities and racial profiling.”

And, most powerfully, the Mothers of the Movement — the mothers of black victims of state violence Michael Brown, Jordan Davis, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Dontre Hamilton, Hadiya Pendelton, and Sandra Bland — were given a prominent platform. “I am here with Hillary Clinton tonight, because she is a leader and a mother who will say our children's names,” Bland’s mother, Geneva Reed-Veal, said. “She knows that when a young black life is cut short, it's not just a loss. It’s a personal loss. It’s a national loss.” Sybrina Fulton, Martin’s mother, added, “In memory of our children, we are imploring you, all of you, to vote this Election Day.”

There have been credible runs by women for major party nominations before, but surprisingly few. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) got more than 200,000 votes in 1964 before losing to Barry Goldwater. Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) got more than 400,000 in 1972; Rep. Patsy Mink (D-HI) got more than 8,000. Former Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole dropped out in 2000 before any vote had been cast. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL) dropped out after only one primary in 2004, and even she got more votes than Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) or Carly Fiorina in 2012 and 2016, respectively.

In that context, Clinton's two runs stick out dramatically. This primary cycle, she got more than 16.8 million votes. In 2008 she got 16.6 million votes, excluding ones cast in the renegade Michigan and Florida primaries. She has outperformed every other female contender in history by two orders of magnitude. Even if she loses in November, she will remain, by far, the most successful female politician in the history of the United States.

The odds were pretty good that somebody was going to say these words at the DNC:

Madame Chair, I move that the convention suspend the procedural rules. I move that all votes, all votes cast by delegates, be reflected in the official record. And I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States.

But it was hugely meaningful that they were ultimately said not by Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, not by a politician from her home state like Chuck Schumer, not by a longtime Clinton ally like Terry McAuliffe, but by Bernie Sanders.

(Bill) Clinton did more than anyone to reconfigure the politics of trade such that a large and vocal faction of Democrats championed liberalization and bi- and multilateral trade deals as engines of economic growth and necessary supports for poor nations. He pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement. He was a crucial part of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) round that saw GATT turn into the World Trade Organization. He oversaw China’s entry into the WTO and the massive rise of Chinese exports to the US that followed.

And this convention featured his wife loudly rejecting a large multilateral trade deal crafted by a Democratic president, egged on by Bill’s ’90s-vintage opponents on the issue like Bernie Sanders and the AFL-CIO.

Bill signed a 1996 bill that overhauled the immigration system to make it easier to deport people and harder to legalize people already here. That helped create the undocumented immigration situation as it currently exists and runs totally contrary to this convention’s repeated vocal opposition to large-scale deportation and its emphasis on celebrating and providing platforms to undocumented immigrants like DREAMers.

Bill emphasized fiscal discipline as the cornerstone of his fiscal policy, but the focus of the convention, and the Democratic platform, is not on straightening out the federal books. Rather, it’s on adding new programs like tuition-free college and infrastructure spending, which might be paid for but will not be accompanied by efforts to close the existing deficit.

Bill was sympathetic to financial deregulation and closely allied with Wall Street, appointing former Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin as one of his top economic advisers and Treasury secretaries. The second day of the convention in particular celebrated Sanders’s campaign for taking on Wall Street and emphasizing the need to still further regulate it.

You would think that the night when Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s predecessor as secretary of state and a longtime friend and confidante, spoke would feature some kind of robust defense of Clinton’s foreign policy record and an affirmative vision going forward. Nope. ...

The strange thing is that Clinton actually does have real accomplishments from her time at State. She was crucial to the US rapprochement with Burma, and she initiated the talks that lead to the nuclear deal with Iran. She oversaw the end of the Qaddafi regime — and while Libya is hardly a successful state now, it’s not mired in a bloody civil war as seemed likely in 2011, and a massacre of Qaddafi opponents in Benghazi was averted. The State Department under Clinton’s leadership negotiated New START, a significant nuclear arms reduction pact with Russia. She was in the room when bin Laden was killed, and supported the raid to kill him.

You can debate any or all of these points, but they’re all perfectly good enough to be included in a speech meant to bolster Clinton’s reputation as a potential commander in chief. And yet they were left out. It was a baffling stumble, one that bodes ill for the rest of the convention’s handling of foreign policy.

Bernie supporters plan to disrupt the convention tonight I wonder what will happen.

Quote:

Bernie supporters plan to disrupt the convention tonight I wonder what will happen.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi2z4VJ4G8s[/youtube]