Oh my goodness has the NYT bought in. Nothing critical, just, "Wow, I'm here in person watching all these speeches about how to win in November"... Nothing at all about extracting us from the Middle East though. Same old same old Dems. and ... OPRAH. Not as impressed as the NYT wags who are seeing dragons from the Dems. Dragons! I tells ya. lol
The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Deputy Opinion Editor, reporting from Chicago
Republicans used to brag a lot about family values, but Donald Trump cooked that turkey when the G.O.P. traded moralizing for an immoral president.
In his wake, there hasn’t been much talk in national politics about ideals, principles and conscience — that is, until Wednesday night, when Tim Walz made an awfully persuasive case for Democrats as the party of old-fashioned, small-town and, yes, conservative values, stressing the theme of neighbors looking after neighbors and especially children as the measure of a country’s humanity.
“While other states were banning books from their schools, we were banning hunger in ours,” said Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, in one of several lines that drew effusive applause from the party’s convention hall in Chicago.
“We respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make,” Walz said, invoking his support for abortion rights while also noting his respect for those who hold differing views. “And even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”
On one level, Walz delivered a classic running mate’s speech: He delved into his biography to introduce himself to the country (Nebraska-born, 24 in his high school class, close-knit community, then the National Guard and a career as a social studies teacher); his political beliefs (a center-left agenda focused on health care, education, gun control and a social safety net); and the case for the top of the ticket, Kamala Harris, and some shredding of Trump.
But Walz’s speech was really about something greater: a vision of a party and country that take pride in the military uniform, that show awareness for vulnerable families struggling with illness, poverty and debt, that prize the most essential workers (“never underestimate a public-school teacher” drew huge applause).
I’ve heard quite a few running mate speeches at conventions — John Edwards, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, Mike Pence, Tim Kaine, Kamala Harris — but I’ve never heard one as values-driven and down-home as Walz’s. (Edwards’s was a little like this, but far more slick.)
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all sugar and honey — he knocked Trump plenty, like saying “some folks just don’t understand what it takes to be a good neighbor.” Walz knows how to be an attack dog: Speaking of Project 2025, he drew on his football coaching days and said, “when someone takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.”
But the man has a way with a speech. “We’ll build a country where workers come first, health care and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom,” Walz said.
It was a peroration that would make any progressive proud, but it also felt grounded in core values — dignity, humanity, privacy — that a great many Americans of all parties care about.
Deputy Opinion Editor, reporting from Chicago
From my perch inside the United Center Wednesday night, I was curious to hear Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, two shrewd architects of Democratic victories, lay out the question on a lot of minds in the convention hall: how Kamala Harris wins in November.
Clinton got off some good lines about Donald Trump’s narcissism, and Pelosi struck some strong notes about the horror of Jan. 6 and the importance of abortion rights. But I didn’t hear a particularly sharp vision or vigorous message that made clear how Harris can win what her own advisers told me this week will be a tough, close race that will probably get harder soon (interviews, debates, policy fights, news media investigative stories, you name it).
But then came Josh Shapiro.
Unlike Clinton, whose voice and visage betrayed his 78 years, and Pelosi, who sped through her remarks — or, for that matter, Oprah Winfrey and other speakers — Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, got down to business fast. And he drew enormous applause and cheers from the convention hall in doing so, a burst of energy during a night that was a little too quiet a little too often for a convention.
Shapiro cast Harris as the continuation of America’s founding history in Philadelphia, part of “ordinary Americans, rising up, demanding more, seeking justice.” He wove together the themes of progress and freedom throughout his speech, and Harris as a champion of both.
“It’s not freedom to tell our children what books to read,” Shapiro said. “It’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies.” Then, referring implicitly to Trump, he said, “And it sure as hell isn’t freedom to say you can go vote, but he gets to pick the winner.”
“We are the party of real freedom,” he continued, and laid out a vision of progress that included great public schools and teachers, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, clean water and voting rights.
Where other speakers emphasized vibes, Shapiro got specific. And that’s what voters in Pennsylvania want, in my experience covering elections there over the years — specifics and goals that are about them, not about emotions or vibes-driven uplift. I think Pennsylvania will be won or lost in November on the economy, trade, jobs and abortion rights — and whether Philadelphia and its suburbs turn out in enough numbers for Harris. Shapiro, a winner of three statewide elections there, knows better than most of us how to win there, and Democrats will need it to win the presidency. His speech is worth listening to on repeat.
“We value our freedom, we cherish our democracy, and we love this country,” he closed out to huge cheers. “Are you ready to protect our rights?”
“America, let’s get to work,” he concluded.
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Chicago
Nancy Pelosi has spent a month coyly trying not to take credit for ringing down the curtain on the half-century run of a prolix play called “Scranton Joe.”
But blissed-out delegates here are not having it. Their attitude mirrors the poet Andrew Marvell, who wrote, “Had we but World enough and Time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime.”
In his speech Wednesday night, Bill Clinton praised Joe Biden for “voluntarily” giving up the presidency.
But the crowd here, who gave Pelosi a standing ovation when she came out after Clinton, knew who the mastermind was behind the nick-of-time, get-the-hook, take-no-prisoners maneuver that they believe saved their party’s chances in November and turned this convention into a rager.
It was the first female House speaker and, as the Republican former Speaker John Boehner called her, the best speaker of all time. The most powerful woman — and, along with L.B.J., the most talented vote wrangler — in the history of Congress. The boss, who clearly inherited the DNA of her father, Thomas D’Alessandro, a famed party boss in Baltimore. People here were posting admiring Instagrams of Pelosi walking through the convention area, adding the soundtrack of “The Godfather.” “Godmother” buttons sprang up.
Unlike the party bosses of yore, Pelosi, 84, doesn’t swig Scotch and talk dirty. She’s a devout Catholic who likes chocolate ice cream sundaes. Before TikTok discovered “demure,” Pelosi looked demure.
But she has a dozen different ways to threaten and cajol and make you submit to her will — even if you are the commander in chief.
The cameras kept cutting to Pelosi’s face during Biden’s speech Monday night amid a sea of bobbing blue “We ♥️ Joe” signs and “We love you, Joe!” chants, looking for signs of the pair’s schism. Some skeptical observers thought Pelosi was forcing her smile, as though, one person joked on X, you were singing “Happy Birthday” to a co-worker you hate.
The two old friends and political allies have not been speaking since Pelosi and a coterie of other top Democrats — including Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries — told Biden to step away from Air Force One. Pelosi wanted an open convention, where more Democratic stars could compete, but Biden forestalled that by quickly endorsing Kamala Harris, who then exploded off the blocks.
Pelosi is sad about the rift with Biden, but what could she do? She wasn’t going to let someone who encouraged insurrectionists to take over the Capitol on Jan. 6 regain the Oval if she could help it. Her take-the-cannoli-leave-the-gun fierceness is a good model for Harris in how to play the game. When sentimentality collides with viability, it’s not a contest. “It’s not personal, Joe. It’s strictly business.”
Mindy Kaling introduced Pelosi Wednesday night as “brat before brat was brat,” and as “the Mother of Dragons.”
Looking meticulous as always, in a lavender pantsuit, chunky necklace and her beloved stilettos, Pelosi started her remarks with the de rigueur thank-you to Biden, and a litany of his accomplishments.
Then she moved to the matter of most importance to her: defeating the former president who egged on his “patriots” to smear the Capitol with feces and blood, bringing violence and sedition to that hallowed building.
“Let us not forget who assaulted democracy on Jan. 6,” Pelosi said. “HE DID. But let us not forget who saved democracy that day. WE DID.”
She quoted “The Star-Spangled Banner,” saying, “We gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”
Nancy Pelosi did help save democracy that night. And she helped save her party when she worked with others to persuade Joe Biden that it was time to go home to Wilmington.
Mother of Dragons, indeed.
Opinion Columnist
Even now, more than three decades after Bill Clinton became a fixture on the national stage, it’s startling to be reminded of the 42nd president’s preternatural political gifts.
For the better part of an hour on Wednesday night, Clinton spoke to the Democratic National Convention’s audience of thousands as if they were a few good friends gathered in his living room. His tone was warm, relaxed, conversational, uplifting. “Aren’t you proud to be a Democrat?” he asked in nearly his first breath, and the audience was his from that moment on.
His speech did everything an elder party statesman’s speech is supposed to do, most of all by making the case for Kamala Harris and — more brilliantly — against Donald Trump. “Don’t count the lies, count the ‘I’s’” he said of the former president’s fondness for speaking about himself. “His vendettas, his vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies.” About Trump’s management style, he aptly observed, “He creates chaos and then he sort of curates it, as if it were precious art.”
Then, toward the end of his remarks, Clinton took a more somber, admonitory — and necessary — turn. “We saw more than one election slip away from us,” he said. He warned Democrats to “never underestimate your adversary.” He reminded delegates that “there are still a lot of slips between today and Election Day that we have to navigate.”
Most important, with his wife’s politically catastrophic “basket of deplorables” remark surely in mind, he offered some much-needed advice: “As someone who spends a lot of time in small towns in rural areas in New York and Arkansas and other places, I urge you to talk to all of your neighbors, to meet people where they are. I urge you not to demean them.”
That’s good advice in any election cycle, but perhaps never more so than in this one. Democrats want Americans to believe that democracy itself hangs in the balance in this election. Perhaps it does, but undecided voters who recall similar dire warnings from 2016 will most likely be unimpressed. What they’ll be asking instead is how a Harris presidency will be better than the Biden one with which they weren’t altogether happy.
Almost inevitably, Clinton ended by invoking his political mythology as “the man from Hope” to pay tribute to Harris as next year’s “president of joy.” Joy is great, but what Harris needs to do is convince wavering voters that she’ll bring down their cost of living.
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board, reporting from Chicago
It was all Rachel Goldberg could do to stand up straight when delegates at the Democratic convention began chanting, “Bring them home!” on Wednesday night. She broke down for a moment, dropping her head on the lectern, and her husband, Jon Polin, had to help her stand and recover. Then, the two of them delivered one of the most moving addresses at a political convention in a long while.
Goldberg and Polin are the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old American who has been held hostage by Hamas in Gaza for 320 days, a number drawn on pieces of masking tape that both of them wore. They have become the most prominent and effective advocates in America for a return of the hostages and a cease-fire, knocking on as many politicians’ doors as they can find and bracing themselves in scores of television interviews.
But the cameras Wednesday night were a little different. As Polin noted, this was a political convention, and it was a little awkward to talk about the kidnapping of a beloved son in front of raucous delegates who came to dance in their seats and wave signs. But the delegates stood largely in silence as Goldberg and Polin described the events of Oct. 7 in Israel and their desperate efforts to build political support for an end to the war.
“Needing our only son and the cherished hostages home is not a political issue, it is a humanitarian issue,” Polin said. “We are heartened both Democratic and Republican leaders demonstrate their bipartisan support for our hostages being released.”
It was also a slightly awkward moment for the Democratic Party. The war in Gaza has been mentioned only lightly at the convention. Though the pro-Palestinian protests of U.S. assistance to Israel have been a little tepid around Chicago, they have not stopped. Uncommitted delegates have struggled unsuccessfully to get an advocate for the Palestinians a speaking slot. Earlier in the evening, Keith Ellison, the Minnesota attorney general and a rare Muslim voice at the convention, spoke to the delegates and barely mentioned Gaza, focusing instead on the killing of George Floyd and Republican corruption.
Goldberg and Polin sidestepped recriminations and political blame as well, which was clearly the way convention organizers wanted it. “We have met with President Biden and Vice President Harris numerous times at the White House,” Polin said. “They are both working tirelessly for a hostage and cease-fire deal that will bring our precious children, mothers, fathers, spouses, grandparents and grandchildren home and will stop the despair in Gaza. We are all deeply grateful to them.”
It was emotional and effective, and it gave Democrats a way to say they care about the human suffering in the region without having to discuss the messy details of how to end it.
Contributing Opinion Writer
Party conventions nowadays are infomercials, and the Democrats have been putting on an effective one, full of compelling characters, emotional moments and — most important — a sales pitch that is likely to give the Harris-Walz ticket a bounce in the polls.
But the convention managers have slipped in one area: time management. Monday night ran 90 minutes long and Tuesday night went more than 30 minutes past the scheduled adjournment. As a result, neither President Biden nor Barack Obama spoke during prime time in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina.
Most network affiliates delayed their local news until after those speeches ended. But that still required millions of Americans — including Biden — to stay up long past their bedtimes. The president’s speech didn’t end until 12:19 a.m. Eastern time.
For old-timers, this brought back memories — or nightmares — of the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. That year’s Wednesday night session — which included big fights over the party platform — didn’t end until 4:15 a.m. The next day, after needless bickering over vice-presidential balloting, the presidential nominee, Senator George McGovern, did not finish until 2:47 a.m. Eastern time.
This was in an era before videocassette recorders and personal computers, so almost no one on the East Coast or in the Midwest ever saw McGovern’s speech. He went on to lose to the incumbent, Richard Nixon, in a 49-state landslide.
In today’s world, anyone who wants to watch Biden’s or Obama’s speeches the next day can easily do so. But social media was nonetheless filled with speculation that Biden was snubbed. Not likely. The women running the convention, Minyon Moore and Stephanie Cutter (who also produced the brilliantly executed 2020 convention), both adore Biden and would never intentionally do anything to hurt him.
At the same time, Cutter now works for Harris. So while she didn’t want to push Biden out of prime time, she also didn’t want to scratch speakers — on, say, abortion — who might have given Democrats a chance to persuade voters.
The main cause of the Monday delay was that Gaza protesters, while present in far fewer numbers than expected, briefly breached a fence outside the United Center, leading to the closing of several entrances as a precaution. This delayed the opening of the convention. Then several speakers waited for applause to die down rather than talking through it as instructed.
On Tuesday night, Cutter opened the convention a half-hour earlier and sent instructions to Democrats to shorten their speeches and stick to their allotted time. But it didn’t fully work. Speeches should have been cut or shortened on the fly. While Michelle Obama’s elegant takedown of Donald Trump aired in prime time, only a few minutes of her husband’s speech did.
Democratic insiders know they must fix their scheduling problems on Wednesday night. The stakes are high. Tim Walz needs to introduce himself to the country in prime time. The same, of course, is true for Kamala Harris on Thursday night.
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board, reporting from Chicago
In suburban synagogue social halls, in Hebrew school parking lots and the handball courts of Jewish community centers across the United States, Doug Emhoff would be a completely familiar figure. The structure of non-Orthodox Jewish society in America is built in part on busy, well-meaning, slightly distracted dads who earnestly invest their spare time in their children’s lives. And if they are less devout than their own parents, and occasionally stray from the traditional path, they are at least there for the holidays and the challah, the swim teams and the haftara lessons.
Emhoff’s life as a lawyer and a dad, so familiar to American Jews of his age and position, would be both praiseworthy and entirely unremarkable had he not left that fateful 8:30 a.m. message on Kamala Harris’s phone in 2013, leading to the blind date he described in his goofy and deeply loving remarks on the stage of the Democratic convention Tuesday night. But that date eventually put him on national television, with his parents, Barb and Mike, beaming from the stands, and he wielded the details of his pure ordinariness like a Coen brother to make an impressive case for his wife’s ability to bridge cultural gaps.
“Over the past decade, Kamala has connected me more deeply to my faith,” he said, “even though it is not the same as hers. She comes to synagogue with me for High Holy Day services, and I go to church with her for Easter. I get to enjoy her mom’s chile relleno every Christmas, and she makes a mean brisket for Passover. It brings me right back to my grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn, you know, the one with the plastic-covered couches.”
Yes, we know those couches so well. But we’re not used to hearing about them in this context, as a significant memory in the life of someone who could very well be living in the White House soon. The country has had many different types of first spouses: ciphers, supportive helpmates, ambitious would-be policymakers, advocates of causes. They have all been women, of course, and if Harris is elected, most of the conversation about Emhoff will be about how he defines a male role in a traditionally female position.
But for many American Jews, Emhoff’s elevation will be much more than that. The idea that the country’s first first gentleman will be a schlubby and fundamentally decent guy they know so well, the guy behind them in the drop-off line at Jewish summer camp, is astonishing enough to make even secular Jews believe in a higher power with an enormous sense of humor.
Opinion Columnist
The reservoir of good will for Barack Obama is deep in the Democratic Party.
He was the embodiment of a moment when people were invested in the ideas of hope and change, believing that he represented an inexorable evolution of the country toward a more egalitarian tomorrow.
And on Tuesday night he attempted to resurrect that feeling, to make people remember the time and place that the lightning had struck, to make them believe that Kamala Harris was in many ways a continuation of, and a natural heir to, his legacy and mantle.
As the former first lady Michelle Obama said before her husband took the stage, “America, hope is making a comeback.”
Indeed, Obama was still proselytizing a form of rainbow-ism that the Trump years proved is not a natural, inevitable progression for America, but is instead a defense against an endemic part of America.
America is near a fracture, and electing Harris may be the only way to prevent it.
In his speech, Obama quoted Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, in which Lincoln counseled Americans not to let passionate disagreement “break our bonds of affection.” Obama quoted it as if it were about idealized unity.
In fact, Lincoln’s address was an attempt to appease Southern enslavers, an effort that ultimately failed, thrusting the country into the Civil War.
Obama was accidentally prescient here, if anything he does is truly accidental. The situation in the country is just as tenuous now as it was when Lincoln spoke those words, and the opponents of equality and progress are just as strident.
Harris has come into that doom circle not selling Obama-era hope but a close cousin of it: joy. She is directing her campaign to the half of an electorate traumatized by Donald Trump and dreading the possibility of his return.
Harris is selling joy as an antidote to despair. She is selling optimism to Democrats who had fallen so deeply into a depression, and for so long that they could no longer fully appreciate the magnitude of their own sorrow.
Hope is an investment in the future; joy is a payout in the now.
Many of us will never forget what Obama meant to the country, how important and transformative his presidency was, not just in policy but as a radical alteration of the image of power, efficacy and excellence.
But the Obama era existed in a moment in time, and it cannot be recalled at will, no matter how much he and others may wish it so. This is a new day, a new era, a Kamala Harris era, and she was meant for her own moment on her own terms.
In this era, it’s not so much about the audacity of hope as it is about a radical insistence on joy.
Opinion Columnist
In 2007, a young biracial senator from Illinois named Barack Obama was trying to convince Black voters that he was one of them. I traveled to South Carolina to see a set of speeches that would become a historic inflection point — Oprah and Michelle Obama code-switching to tell the state’s Black Democrats that he was the real deal.
On Tuesday night, Michelle was back. She stood before an adoring crowd at the Democratic convention and drew concrete parallels between her Black American story and Kamala’s “person of color” immigrant story. Mothers were the linchpin of her cultural analogy. “Her mother is like mine, and like yours,” she said.
If you trust Michelle, you can trust Kamala. That was the gist.
Michelle went on to code-switch to the audience with a juggernaut of shots at Donald Trump’s privilege, his abuses of power and his inarticulateness. Then she owned the elephant in the room: naming Trump’s racist attacks on her, her husband and her children. She pulled no punches. “Who wants to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” she said to thunderous applause.
Trump’s improbable run for president started as an ego campaign. Obama made him the butt of a joke at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Trump would continue to tell one of his big lies — that Obama is not American.
Michelle Obama is the best messenger for this direct attack. After years of playing it safe, invoking the high ground, she went straight for the jugular.
“Most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” she said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.”
That is a brilliant rhetorical summation of complicated ideas that boil down to this: Donald Trump embodies the inequality that is an enemy of democracy.
No doublespeak, no metaphors — just the straight talk for which debased voters have been desperate. It was a theme for the night — righteous anger. Owning rage reflects the anger so many voters have been stuck with since 2016.
Deputy Opinion Editor, reporting from Chicago
Get ready, Kamala — Bernie has yuge, YUGE plans for your presidency.
It was classic Bernie Sanders on Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention. He grasped the lectern with both hands as he unfurled one massive government program idea after another in a progressive policy reverie that must have been music to the ears of every democratic socialist at the United Center.
It took me back to Iowa town halls circa 2015 when Sanders, then a presidential candidate, tapped into a yearning among many Democrats for a more activist government devoted to lifting up poor and working-class Americans while taking aim at money in politics and the nation’s one-percent plutocrats.
Only this time, Sanders was ostensibly trying to make the case for Harris, a far more moderate and cautious politician who shared few of Sanders’s specific policy ideas when the two of them were running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
In short, Sanders did on Tuesday night what his fellow progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chose not to do in her convention speech on Monday night: make policy proposals that put Harris in a big-government vise, binding (or pushing) her in a direction that a lot of moderates do not want to go. Harris needs some of those swing-state moderates if she’s going to win the presidency, but the electoral math didn’t seem to be on Sanders’s mind. Rather, the moment was a reminder about Bernie: If you give him a speaking slot, he’ll play it to the hilt and take it to the limit.
“When the political will is there, government can effectively deliver for the people of our country,” Sanders said after reviewing the giant Covid and emergency relief programs that the Biden-Harris administration supported with Democrats in Congress. “Now we need to summon that will again.”
He then ticked off a long list of ideas: overturning Citizens United and moving toward public funding of elections; making health care “a human right” for all Americans; raising the minimum wage to a “living wage”; raising teachers’ salaries; cutting prescription drug costs in half.
“I look forward to working with Kamala and Tim to pass this agenda,” Sanders said. Invoking the enormous government of interventions of Franklin Roosevelt, he continued, “We must take on Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tech and all the other corporate monopolists whose greed is denying progress for working people.”
On one level, this was Bernie being Bernie — no one expected him to come in and just sing Harris’s praises. But on another level, it was a reminder that Sanders was one of the loudest voices last month urging Joe Biden to stay in the race. He thought Biden would be an ally and sign on to more and more of the progressive agenda. On Tuesday night, Sanders put Harris on the hot seat and all but said, Kamala, what kind of Democrat are you going to be?
Contributing Opinion Writer
On Monday night at the Democratic convention, the United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, opened his jacket to reveal a T-shirt reading “Trump is a scab.” Suddenly the entire convention was chanting it.
“Scab” — which also means “contemptible person”— has more bite than “weird,” and the Trump campaign may have a harder time scraping it off its candidate.
Especially after Donald Trump’s notorious Aug. 12 online conversation with Elon Musk. “You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said, referring to Musk’s ability to cut costs by using nonunion labor. “You walk in, you just say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike — I won’t mention the name of the company — but they go on strike. And you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone.’”
This is the true Trump, stripped of his pose as the guy who has the back of blue-collar workers. Most union members get it. Exit polls in 2020 showed Joe Biden won 57 percent of union households, compared with Trump’s 40 percent. By most calculations, Kamala Harris must at least match Biden’s number to win in November.
She’ll have important backing from Fain, who quotes a Nelly song (“It’s getting hot in herre”) and avoids the mealy-mouthed “middle class” in favor of fiery appeals to “the working class.” With organized labor enjoying a modest rebound, especially among younger workers, Fain is now the most compelling American labor leader since Walter Reuther, who built the U.A.W., co-founded the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and was instrumental in the passage of most of Lyndon Johnson’s historic legislation in the 1960s.
Fain could play a similar role in a Harris presidency, but first he has to help pull her over the finish line in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where union members make up about 12 percent of the electorate. (Wisconsin is less of a labor state these days.)
Trump lagged among the one million active and retired U.A.W. members in 2020 but had hopes of increasing his numbers this year because many autoworkers fear they will make less money building E.V.s, which Biden has pushed hard. But to win Musk’s endorsement, Trump flip-flopped from opposing E.V.s to supporting them. That crude transaction — vintage Trump — will do nothing to restart his sputtering campaign engine in critical states.
Of course, even when organized labor was much stronger, union members often voted Republican. In 1972, the support of pro-Vietnam War “hard hats” (members of construction unions) helped power Richard Nixon’s landslide. And in 1980, so-called Reagan Democrats — millions of them union members — rejected Jimmy Carter because of the poor economy and a false perception that he was weak.
This year, Trump continues to have a strong advantage among non-college-educated white men, many of whom would like union protections but can’t get them. If Fain can help Harris cut into those margins, the “blue wall” will hold.
Editorial Board Member
How many anatomical details about women’s bodies do people need to hear before our rights are restored?
I realize the mood among Democrats in Chicago this week is buoyant. But that’s the question lodged in my mind since the moment three women — and one of their partners — stepped onto the stage at the Democratic convention Monday night and shared their deeply personal experiences with rape, miscarriage and being denied access to abortion.
If we needed a reminder of why defeating Donald Trump is so important, just look at the political landscape Americans are living in already. Thanks to the Republican Party’s embrace of an extremist minority, Americans are being forced to make their personal pain public to support the restoration of reproductive freedoms we had just years ago.
There was Amanda Zurawski and Josh Zurawski, a Texas couple who recounted being told their pregnancy was nonviable at 18 weeks. Thanks to Texas’ abortion ban, Amanda was sent home to endure a dangerous miscarriage alone until she was sick enough to receive care. “Eventually, Amanda’s temperature spiked. She was shaky, disoriented and crashing,” Josh said. “Every time I share our story, my heart breaks,” Amanda said.
I can only imagine.
A Louisiana woman, Kaitlyn Joshua, said she too was denied treatment for miscarriage under her state’s abortion ban. “Two emergency rooms sent me away,” she said. “I was in pain, bleeding so much my husband feared for my life.”
Hadley Duvall of Arkansas shared her relief at knowing abortion was an option for her years ago, after enduring horrific abuse at the hands of a family member. “I was raped by my stepfather after years of sexual abuse,” Duvall said. “At age 12 I took my first pregnancy test, and it was positive.”
There’s a reason an earlier Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade on the basis of the constitutional right to privacy. One of the many reasons I’ll be voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz this November is that I’m tired of seeing women like these performing a public service no one should ever have to perform.
We also learned this week the details of the fertility treatment Gwen Walz and Tim Walz used to conceive their daughter, Hope, something Walz has talked about on the trail. The campaign said the treatment used by the couple was intrauterine insemination, known as I.U.I., which fertilizes an egg in the uterus via a catheter, not in vitro fertilization, known as I.V.F.
I.V.F. is used to create embryos and is under attack from some Republicans. It is a more intensive process that involves weeks of hormone shots, then a surgical procedure in which a needle is inserted through the vaginal wall to retrieve as many mature eggs as possible.
Consider that for Republicans, this is government business.
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Chicago
The protests on the first day of the Democratic convention did not live up to either fears or hopes that they would be a repeat of the chaos at the Chicago convention in 1968. That year was also the dawn of televised live events, the moment when the now-familiar protest chant originated: “The whole world is watching.”
On Monday I watched as a small group of protesters who broke away from the bigger, peaceful main march repeated the chant “The whole world is watching” as some of them removed a section of the fence that surrounded the main event arena almost half a mile away. A few burst through the opening into the row of police officers who outnumbered them at least 20 to one. Four were arrested.
But who was watching?
The small number of disruptive protesters certainly had an audience, but perhaps not the one they hoped for. The event was swarmed by a gaggle of right-wing live-streamers and social media influencers in search of “content” that would help them portray the convention — and the city of Chicago — as descending into chaos.
I watched as a man in a pink suit and his camera operator constantly jostled for position to record moments with the most cops. I quickly found their account online, and it was just what you would expect.
“The liberals will rage if you followed and shared this post,” they wrote as they posted 30-second snippets of the demonstrators. “The far left are taking over the DNC and breaking down all the barriers.”
But the problem was that after the initial few arrests, not that much was happening besides occasional heckling and a few halfhearted attempts at removing another section of the fence.
So, many of their videos didn’t show much, just a bunch of people milling in front of the now-replaced fence section.
What to do when the content showing chaos and communism taking over Chicago isn’t there?
Well, that’s what creativity is for, I suppose, and there were inevitably those who sought the opportunity. In another corner, for example, “The Rudy Giuliani Show on America’s Mayor,” a YouTube show streaming live from the convention, featured its reporter, Ted Goodman, approaching protesters with provocative questions and Giuliani commenting on how terrible it all was.
At one point, a man from the protesters’ side walked up to Goodman holding up his phone, challenging him on what he was doing.
“We’re live on TV,” Goodman said, to which the protester responded, “Well, I’m live on TikTok.” The match was made.
“The Democrat Party of today has a communist problem,” Goodman said in a correspondent’s voice, as Giuliani watched approvingly.
But then came the snag. “So my phone is running low, so I’m going to go charge for a bit,” Goodman said. Nodding in approval, Giuliani responded, “Yeah, that was pretty exciting, you get back to us.”
On YouTube, they had about 6,000 people watching, with about 35,000 views on X. Have to keep feeding the beast.
Opinion Columnist
President Biden’s speech on Monday night was a reminder of why the Democrats were right to make the switch to Kamala Harris as their candidate for president. I expected something personal from Biden, ruminating on his life, commitments and the hills and valleys of a long career. Instead, we got a familiar campaign speech that was about as personal and moving as a platform committee report.
I was hoping for something in the spirit of the Harris campaign — ebullient and joyful. Near the end, he got a little sentimental and said, “America, I gave my best to you.” But largely he delivered an unsmiling, haranguing speech.
We’ve had roughly a decade of the politics of anger, anxiety and indignation. The country is exhausted, and it would have been even more exhausted if this campaign had been another few months of old guys growling at her. On Monday, Biden offered people a vision of what his campaign might have been. I suppose the vast majority of Americans will be glad we are spared it.
I confess I still haven’t gotten over the way Biden was pushed from the nomination. He’s a sensationally good man. He made a million decisions as president that contributed to a string of policy victories, decisions that made him a superior president. The way it ended for him was unworthy of all he gave.
But on Monday it was clear there has been a shift in the spirit of the times, and Biden hasn’t quite caught it. He remains a great public servant. But he reminded us of the wisdom of Nancy Pelosi’s decision to maneuver him from the race, and the strategies of all those who worked to replace him. Anger and indignation is not the spirit America is hungering for now. The culture has moved on.
Opinion Staff Editor
The first hours of the Democratic National Convention started with a whimper, as some of the party’s most awkward and uncharismatic speakers attempted to extol the Biden-Harris economic record to a skeptical American public. But when Shawn Fain, the bespectacled president of the United Auto Workers union, took the stage, he electrified the crowd.
In the cadence of a practiced union organizer, Fain quickly whipped a relatively sleepy stadium into a frenzy, asking the question that has prodded union members for nearly a century: “Which side are you on?” With the precision of an electrician (he is one), Fain dismantled Donald Trump’s claim that he is a friend of the American worker (he is not one), recounting the former president’s broken promises to the labor movement and declaring, “Donald Trump is a scab.”
That phrase sparked a riotous chant among the crowd: “TRUMP’S A SCAB.”
But beyond the hype, Fain’s speech also made a compelling case that the Democratic Party’s future is tied to an economy that works not only for businesses, but also for workers.
“Corporate greed,” he said, “turns blue-collar blood, sweat and tears into Wall Street stock buybacks and C.E.O. jackpots. It causes inflation. It hurts workers. It hurts consumers. And it hurts America.”
For the people Fain represents, a labor-friendly administration couldn’t be more crucial. For a party that’s often criticized as elite, an alliance with labor demonstrates that working Americans are critical to the party’s identity.
It’s hard to talk about the compelling nature of Fain’s appearance without acknowledging the noticeable absence of Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, from the night’s proceedings. Weeks ago, O’Brien spoke at the Republican convention; perhaps unsurprisingly, he was not invited to speak by Democratic organizers. This was a missed opportunity for the Democrats to demonstrate that their values transcend party loyalty.
The 1.3 million Teamsters are crucial to the labor movement at large; their directives to not cross picket lines bolster other unions’ attempts at collective bargaining. If the Harris-Walz ticket is serious about being a friend to labor, it should make a Teamsters endorsement a priority. If the Teamsters’ leadership is serious about representing the needs of its members, it should consider throwing the union’s support behind a presidential candidate who does not praise Elon Musk for firing striking workers.
Opinion Columnist
Let’s admit that Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention Monday night is not going to go down in political history. Oratory, we all know, is not her best thing. But boy, it really did feel good to see her standing there, being wildly cheered while she called on the country to elect a woman as president.
Finally.
Clinton urged her audience to fight hard for Kamala Harris and remember that “the story of my life and the history of the country” was that “progress is possible but not guaranteed.”
It’s been less than eight years since Clinton — the first woman ever nominated for president by a major political party — lost to Donald Trump, to nearly everyone’s shock, including her own. Well, on Monday she did manage to mention that “nearly 66 million Americans” voted for her. She didn’t point out that was 2.9 million more votes than Trump got — this was a presidential nominating convention, not a symposium on reforming the Electoral College.
Hillary’s story isn’t quite as inspiring as Kamala Harris’s. Being married to the president is certainly a good way to make a name for yourself, but it’s not necessarily the perfect résumé for a job running the country.
And Clinton wasn’t a terrific candidate. Still, she worked as hard as humanly possible, soldiered on and then swallowed what many regarded as a deeply unfair defeat. She had been the secretary of state and a senator. Now she’s an advocate for the woman who’s trying to make America see a female president as something that’s perfectly normal.
“The future is here,” she proclaimed.
Yeah, I told you it wasn’t a super quotable effort. But give her credit — if it hadn’t been for Hillary Clinton, the Democrats wouldn’t have been prepared to embrace the idea of Kamala Harris as their nominee with such serene cheer.
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board, reporting from Chicago
For all the good cheer radiating from the United Center here, for all the rising poll numbers and buoyant rallies, Democrats can’t let themselves forget how serious the threat from Donald Trump remains, one longtime party operative said on Monday.
David Axelrod, a Chicago native best known for helping to engineer the rise of Barack Obama, told a group of Times Opinion writers and editors that they shouldn’t become deluded by Kamala Harris’s impressive poll numbers, because the polls often underestimate Trump’s real support.
“Everyone at the convention should be very much aware that this is a race he can win,” Axelrod said. “In fact, I think he would win today, despite those intoxicating Siena polls. I think it’s much more even or that she’s even slightly behind, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan.”
Trump has a “feral genius” for arousing his people, he said, and they will turn out at the polls to express their discontent. The United States is still a “65 percent wrong-track country,” he said, and Trump’s message that the world is out of control continues to resonate.
Axelrod’s admonition is an important reminder that Democrats and the Harris campaign can’t coast on giddy vibes. She may be doing better than President Biden was, but the race remains coin-toss close. The enduring mystery is how Trump’s base of support could continue unabated in the face of his increasing incoherence, his irrational attacks even on members of his own party and his overt denial of reality.
That’s an advantage Harris has, Axelrod said, and she needs to capitalize on a desperate desire among so many voters to have a chance for something new.
“A chance to turn the page on an era,” he said. “It’s somewhat awkward because you don’t want to be insulting to Biden. Tonight’s going to be challenging in that regard. But people wanted to turn the page on both these guys, and she’s offering them that opportunity — and she just needs to give them enough comfort that it is a reasonable step — that she is within the 30-yard lines and is focused on what’s important to people.”
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Chicago
It isn’t hard to find former Trump voters who are now supporting Kamala Harris — many of them are people who served in Donald Trump’s administration. But Rich Logis, whose video testimonial will air Monday on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention, is unusual in that he was a MAGA die-hard, not just a conventional Republican who had reluctantly backed Trump.
A Florida businessman and a Ralph Nader voter with a deep suspicion of mainstream politicians, Logis was attracted to Trump’s outsider pose, eventually becoming a Trump volunteer, a contributor to pro-Trump websites like American Greatness and a MAGA podcaster. The Trump movement was his life.
“I was quite deep into that world,” he told me recently, explaining that his “MAGA second family” often “took precedence over my own blood family.”
Logis began to become disillusioned with his new family in 2021, at first because of its rampant anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. He describes his emergence from the movement as if he’d escaped a cult.
“All of these various pathologies about sex and race and Christian theocracy,” he said, “it keeps adherents in this constant perpetual state of desperation and feeling very panicked and hopeless.”
Today, Logis is the vice chair of Florida Republicans for Harris and has a nonprofit called Leaving MAGA, meant to provide outreach to former Trump supporters like him and to publicize their stories. Though the organization is still in its infancy, Logis has connected with a few fellow apostates.
“There has to be an offramp,” he said of MAGA devotees who might be harboring secret doubts. “There’s got to be a place for them to go, to make it just a little bit easier for them to leave. Because it’s not going to be easy at all.”
Opinion Columnist
My, oh my, how a couple of weeks can change things. During the Republican National Convention (not even a month ago!), I was worried about how young the MAGA dynasty looked. At the time, President Biden was still the presumptive Democratic nominee, which could have made the visuals at the Democratic convention look geriatric by comparison.
Now we are headed into a Democratic convention that will be defined by a changing of the guard. Remarkably, a woman of color is the Democratic presidential nominee. Vice President Kamala Harris has the organizational, financial and political backing of an establishment candidate and the brand potential of a history-making one.
Here are four things to think about as you’re watching this week:
Personal biography. With such a historic candidate, the way the campaign frames Harris’s biography may be a rich political text. It might tell us how the campaign understands voters’ political imaginations and their taste for continuity. I believe Harris’s biographical narrative about race and gender has the most potential to challenge us. How will the convention display her identity as a woman, as a woman of color, as a mother figure and as a Gen X leader?
Accommodating the left. Some political strategists fear that Democrats will go too far to accommodate what they see as disconnected, discontented leftists. But some left-wing policies are among the most popular with Democratic voters, and many of its members are young people. How much will the Harris campaign play ball with them?
Biden’s legacy project. This convention is as much about how Harris became the nominee as it is about her platform. Biden should receive a hero’s send-off for stepping aside and for his decades of party service. How that send-off happens may indicate how the Harris campaign plans to distinguish her platform from the Biden record. How will the convention both enshrine Biden’s wins and make room for Harris to define herself?
The gender election. If 2008 was a reckoning on race, this election is a reckoning on gender. The Dobbs decision galvanized Democratic voters. The Trump-Vance campaign’s continued mischaracterization of its anti-abortion position also creates an opening for Democrats to reach Republican women. I expect to see this convention embrace everything from reproductive rights to Supreme Court expansion to energize the base. How much will it matter to undecided voters?
Contributing Opinion Writer, reporting from Chicago
So Kamala Harris is a communist? As the Democratic convention opens, that’s the word Donald Trump has chosen to define her, accusing her on Sunday of having gone “full communist” in her economic platform, which she detailed in a speech on Friday. He even posted a fake image of Harris addressing the Chicago convention, made to look like a communist rally.
Talk about a blast from the musty past. During the McCarthy era, a period in the early 1950s that historians will surely compare to our own, Republicans routinely accused Democrats of being communists. The far right of the party — represented by the John Birch Society — even claimed President Dwight Eisenhower was an agent of the communist conspiracy.
These charges declined in the years that followed. In 1971, when President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls on the economy far more stringent and ill-advised than Harris’s anti-price-gouging program, there was plenty of criticism, but no one accused Nixon of being a Red.
That’s in part because Nixon was himself a famous Red baiter. But the bigger reason Nixon’s price controls brought a different reaction was that by the 1970s, we knew there was no communist threat in the United States. After 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, only crackpots flung the term around.
Which brings us to Sunday’s bogus charge by Trump and his fellow travelers. If Harris is a communist, then so was the “trust buster” Theodore Roosevelt, who in the Progressive era initiated the kind of vigorous antitrust enforcement that Harris would use against price-gouging corporations in the food sector. Roosevelt’s rhetoric and policies went far beyond anything Harris said in her Friday speech. Urging the 114-year-old Federal Trade Commission to continue its vigorous work on behalf of consumers is hardly radical.
As for thinking like a card-carrying communist, there is one candidate in this election with close ties to an infamous Soviet agent. Donald Trump has trashed hundreds of patriotic Americans, but he has never uttered a single critical word about a former K.G.B. colonel named Vladimir Putin. In fact, Trump has said that if our allies don’t pony up in the exact way he demands, Russia can have free rein to rebuild the old Soviet Empire in Europe.
When Trump inevitably claims in his Sept. 10 debate with Harris that he is tougher on Putin and the Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping, Harris will no doubt be ready with the words of Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton: “Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un” — another communist — “and others: They think he’s a laughing fool. And they’re prepared to take advantage of it.”
Senator Joseph McCarthy dominated American politics from his first demagogic lies in 1950 to his censure by the Senate in 1954. Trump’s era has now gone three years longer than McCarthy’s, but an end may be in sight. With the help of hard work by real patriots, Trump may soon be remembered as a more powerful and dangerous McCarthy, consigned, like communism, to the dustbin of history.
Deputy Opinion Editor
Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
Heading into the Democratic convention, I’m curious to see whether any of the speeches will be for the ages. Will any approach the soaring poetry of Mario Cuomo at the 1984 convention, the hope-filled apogee of Bill Clinton in 1992, the star-making performance of Barack Obama in 2004 and in 2016 the searing dignity of Khizr and Ghazala Khan and the home run of Michelle Obama? These are some of the people I could see grabbing America’s attention (if they indeed get a slot):
Nancy Pelosi: Will the legendary House speaker become a legendary convention speaker? She has the goods: Her determination to put party (and country) ahead of personal interests — President Biden’s — gives her a singular standing to make a case about the stakes in this election. She’s reportedly speaking on Wednesday; at the very least, she can deliver zingers at Donald Trump that evoke Ann Richards taking on George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Michelle Obama: The former first lady is a great speechmaker, but doesn’t do many of them, so when she does, they feel special. You can imagine her setting the stage powerfully for Harris during her remarks on Tuesday and making a call to the country to live up to its history and ideals.
Pete Buttigieg: Anyone who watches Buttigieg on Fox News knows he can boil things down with terrific lines, and it’s being memorable in a matter of minutes that is meaningful.
Bill Clinton: Like Ms. Obama, the Big Dog has kept a low profile lately. When he speaks on Wednesday, could he do for Harris what he did for Barack Obama in 2012, making that sharp case for her over Trump?
Hillary Clinton: The ex-theater reporter in me wants her to surprise the audience by speaking from the heart, not the head. In an alternate universe, she is winding down her second term as president. What if she tried to transport listeners to that universe for a night — or else make people feel what might have been?
Joe Biden: Talk about speaking from the heart. If ever there was a moment, Monday night is it.
Beyoncé: She appeared with Hillary eight years ago to help close out the 2016 campaign. Will she do the same for Kamala Harris and turbocharge the Chicago convention?
A Palestinian American speaker: I’m curious to see if a Palestinian American is given a speaking slot at the convention, to bring home the war and suffering in Gaza and bring inside a taste of the protests outside the hall. Gaza is a test for Harris, and the convention speaker lineup says a lot about a party.
Tim Walz: He has a great stemwinder in him. Usually the V.P. doesn’t upstage the presidential nominee, but how Walz introduces himself to his biggest television audience yet will be must-see TV.
Kamala Harris: The biggest speech of her life. She’s been on a roll on the campaign trail, but a lot of Americans are still getting to know her as a possible president. No matter your party, it’s intriguing to see what Harris makes of the moment — whether she tries to be all things to all people or tries to make a few indelible points. Not many presidential nominees give the best speech of an entire convention — it would be one for the ages if she did.
An earlier version of this article misstated the target of Ann Richards’s Democratic National Convention speech in 1988. It was George H.W. Bush, not George W. Bush.
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