At Chicago’s United Center yesterday, the delegates at
the Democratic National Convention reaffirmed last week’s online nomination of
Kamala Harris for president. The ceremonial roll-call vote featured all the
usual good-natured boasting from the delegates about their own state’s virtues,
a process that reinforces the incredible diversity and history of both this
land and its people. The managers reserved the final slots for Minnesota and
California—the home states of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz
and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, respectively—to put the ticket over
the top.
When the votes had been counted, Harris joined the crowd
virtually from a rally she and Walz were holding at the Fiserv Forum in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Last month the Republicans held their own national
convention in that venue, and for Harris to accept her nomination in the same
place was an acknowledgement of how important Wisconsin will be in this
election. But it also meant that Trump, who is obsessed with crowd sizes, would
have to see not one but two packed sports arenas of supporters cheer wildly for
her nomination.
He also had to contend with former loyalists and supporters
joining the Democratic convention. His former press secretary, Stephanie
Grisham, told the Democratic convention tonight that when the cameras
are off, “Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers.” Grisham
endorsed Harris, saying: “I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris
tells the truth. She respects the American people, and she has my vote.”
Trump spoke glumly to a small crowd today at the
Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Michigan.
It was almost exactly twenty years ago, on July 27,
2004, that 43-year-old Illinois state senator Barack Obama, who was, at the
time, running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, gave the keynote address to that
year’s Democratic National Convention. It was the speech that began his rise to
the presidency.
Like the Democrats who spoke last night, Obama talked in
2004 of his childhood and recalled how his parents had “faith in the
possibilities of this nation.” And like Biden last night, Obama said that
“in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.” The nation’s
promise, he said, came from the human equality promised in the Declaration of
Independence.
“That is the true genius of America,” Obama said, “a faith in
the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles.” He called
for an America “where hard work is rewarded.” “[I]t's not enough for just some
of us to prosper,” he said, “[f]or alongside our famous individualism, there's
another ingredient in the American saga.”
He described that ingredient as “[a]belief that we are
connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who
can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior
citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between
medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my
grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without
benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that
fundamental belief—I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper—that makes
this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet
still come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of
many, one.”
Obama emphasized Americans’ shared values and pushed back
against “those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad
peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.” He reached back into
history to prove that “the bedrock of this nation” is “the belief that there
are better days ahead.” He called that belief “[t]he audacity of hope.”
Almost exactly twenty years after his 2004 speech, the same man, now a former president who served for eight years, spoke at tonight’s Democratic National Convention. But the past two decades have challenged his vision.
When voters put Obama into the White House in 2008,
Republicans set out to make sure they couldn’t govern. Mitch McConnell (R–KY)
became Senate minority leader in 2007 and, using the filibuster, stopped most
Democratic measures by requiring 60 votes to move anything to a vote.
In 2010 the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens
United v. Federal Election Commission decision, declaring that
corporations and other outside groups could spend as much money as they wanted
on elections. Citizens United increased Republican seats in
legislative bodies, and in the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans packed state
legislatures with their own candidates in time to be in charge of redistricting
their states after the 2010 census. Republicans controlled the key states
of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other,
smaller states, and after the election, they used precise computer models to
win previously Democratic House seats.
In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House
decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House
candidates. Yet Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the
House of Representatives. And then, with the 2013 Shelby County v.
Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act,
making it harder to protect Democratic voters.
As the Republicans skewed the mechanics of government to
favor themselves, their candidates no longer had to worry they would lose
general elections but did have to worry about losing primaries to more extreme
challengers. So, they swung farther and farther to the right, demonizing the
Democrats until finally those who remain Republicans have given up on democracy
altogether.
Tonight’s speech echoed that of 2004 by saying that America’s
“central story” is that “we are all created equal,” and describing Harris and
Walz as hardworking people who would use the government to create a fair
system. He sounded more concerned today than in 2004 about political
divisions, and reminded the crowd: “The vast majority of us do not want to live
in a country that’s bitter and divided,” he said. “We want something better. We
want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this
campaign tells us we’re not alone,” he said.
And then, in his praise for his grandmother, “a little old
white lady born in a tiny town called Peru, Kansas,” and his mother-in-law,
Marion Robinson, a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago, he brought a new
emphasis on ordinary Americans, especially women, who work hard, sacrifice for
their children, and value honesty, integrity, kindness, helping others, and
hard work.
They wanted their children to “do things and go places that
they would’ve never imagined for themselves.” “Whether you’re a Democrat or a
Republican or somewhere in between,” he said, “we have all had people like that
in our lives:... good hardworking people who weren’t famous or powerful but who
managed in countless ways to leave this country just a little bit better than
they found it.”
If President Obama emphasized tonight that the
nation depends on the good will of ordinary people, it was his wife, former
first lady Michelle Obama, who spoke with the voice of those people and made it
clear that only the American people can preserve democracy.
In a truly extraordinary speech, perfectly delivered, Mrs. Obama described her mother as someone who lived out the idea of hope for a better future, working for children and the community. “She was glad to do the thankless, unglamorous work that for generations has strengthened the fabric of this nation,” Mrs. Obama said, “the belief that if you do unto others, if you love thy neighbor, if you work and scrape and sacrifice, it will pay off. If not for you, then maybe for your children or your grandchildren.”
Unlike her husband, though, Mrs. Obama called out Trump and
his allies, who are trying to destroy that worldview. “No one has a monopoly on
what it means to be an American,” she said. “No one.” “[M]ost of us will never
be afforded the grace of failing forward,” she said. “We will never benefit
from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a
business…or choke in a crisis, we don't get a second, third, or fourth chance.
If things don't go our way, we don't have the luxury of whining or cheating
others to get further ahead…we don't get to change the rules, so we always win.
If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator
waiting to take us to the top. No, we put our heads down. We get to work. In
America, we do something."
And then Mrs. Obama took up the mantle of her mother, warning
that demonizing others and taking away their rights, “only makes us small.” It
“demeans and cheapens our politics. It only serves to further discourage good,
big-hearted people from wanting to get involved at all. America, our parents
taught us better than that.”
It is “up to us to be the solution that we seek.” she said.
She urged people to “be the antidote to the darkness and division.” “[W]hether
you’re Democrat, Republican, Independent, or none of the above,” she said,
“this is our time to stand up for what we know. In our hearts is right. Not
just for our basic freedoms, but for decency and humanity, for basic respect.
Dignity and empathy. For the values at the very foundation of this democracy.”
“Don’t just sit around and complain. Do something.”
—Heather Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/20/republican-trump-dnc-speakers
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/keynote-address-the-2004-democratic-national-convention
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atrupar/status/1825978535896297708
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