Dear Friends -
2020 continues to surprise: “Coast Guard ferries postal inspectors to arrest Steve Bannon aboard exiled Chinese billionaire yacht” was not a headline I expected this week. Remember Rule 1: It will get crazier. Meanwhile, CalFire explained this morning that they don’t have the resources to fight the aggressive wildfires sweeping parts of California… because the state’s primary firefighter crews are convicts, and COVID-19 has hit the prison system so hard that there aren’t enough healthy prisoners to go fight the wildfires. Did I mention we’re living in a failed state?
Can Biden’s empathy defeat Trump’s cruelty? More on that below, but first my convention musings:
Does the Vice Presidential pick matter? I have insisted to you for the past two weeks that it does not. But my old boss Joe Trippi made a compelling case on his podcast this week: Trump can’t figure out how to attack the unobjectionable Joe Biden. But he is pathologically unable to resist attacking a Black woman. Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris, besides further alienating the suburban white women Trump desperately needs, distracts Trump and makes him look weak: why is he attacking the Vice President nominee and not Biden?
Obama’s ‘brutal’ attack: The press was all a-twitter that Obama’s speech was “the sharpest criticism a former president has *ever made* of a sitting president”... except that’s not true. Remember when Hoover called FDR a fascist? The truth is the post-WWII era is an anomaly in American history for its polite bi-partisanship. Don’t lionize it, and don’t expect any more of it. Politics has always been brutal and hyper-partisan; we’re just returning to how it was before the trauma of World War II and the Cold War when media was partisan and politics was savage.
Don’t believe everything you hear: If Biden wins, and especially if Democrats keep the House and win the Senate, the intra-party street fight around the issues will be intense and amount to full employment for corporate lobbyists. Just as the Convention was featuring emotional segments about combating climate change, the Democratic Party quietly removed language from the official party platform that would end tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We’re going to have to keep fighting, even if this team wins.
What was missing? I didn’t hear a word from anyone over four nights about the Supreme Court or the Census; I didn’t even hear anything about down-ballot races. Gabby Giffords gave possibly the most moving speech of the entire convention and NO ONE MENTIONED her husband is running for a critical Senate seat in Arizona. The silence must have been intentional, and it seemed to me a way to keep the force of the Convention emotional, rather than political.
End of the Clinton Era: Both of them had short speeches, and neither during the prime-time broadcast hour. The Clintons’ decades long leadership of the party appears to finally be coming to an end. Fun fact: Bill Clinton is now as old as Bob Dole was when they ran against each other in the 1996 presidential election. Of course, Biden is older than Bill Clinton today or Bob Dole back in 1996.
Why just one hour? The first hour of the Convention was only available on cable TV and the internet; the second hour was broadcast live on all the major networks. Almost every night there was a perceptible change in tone after the first hour; most notably the speakers were much whiter and less diverse. But why just one hour of prime time coverage? Ah, because the GOP doesn’t have their shit together.
But the truth is I absolutely loved this week’s Democratic Convention. I laughed (Calamari Comeback!), I cried (Jill Biden’s speech; Estella; Ady Barkan, and so much more). Even if Marianne Williamson didn’t like it ("like binge watching a Marriott commercial"), I did. There was something truly heartwarming about it: all those Zoom calls and video chats from everyone’s kitchens/living rooms/dens.
What’s the point of a convention? Having been to a few, the parties are legion. But in this day and age, the point is (1) to tell a story and (2) produce as many short clips as possible, hoping that a few go viral on social media. Don’t forget that most Americans didn’t watch the convention at all, and will only encounter it through whatever clips they see online, in all likelihood couched in hyper-partisan misinformation (possibly funded by foreign governments).
My last email was about the narrative advantage the GOP has on the Democrats, and some of that was on display this week: finding a consistent story through the montage of stories and chats was tough. Sure, there were messages (“Trump’s dangerous!”) and a out of emotional consistency, but the storyline was all over the map. Monday: We care about racism and a bunch of other stuff! Tuesday: We care about education and a bunch of other stuff! Wednesday: We care about immigration, climate change, and gun control! Thursday: We care about veterans and a bunch of other stuff! So, Democrats care about … well, everything. If this is a story, what’s the next chapter? Where does the narrative develop from here? Is simply “caring” enough?
As I was watching the convention, I kept thinking about an essay I read in January, pre-COVID. In the essay, Fintan O’Toole offers a thoughtful and brutal critique of Biden: Biden’s core asset is his ability to console, fueled by the depth of his personal experience of tragedy. O’Toole writes, “But can a politics of grief be adequate to a politics of grievance? Can it deal either with the real grievances of structural inequality or with the toxic self-pity that Trump has both fostered and embodied?” In other words, empathy doesn’t count for much in the math of political power.
I found the essay, at the time, a profound and compelling critique of Biden. Grief has “authentic force… as an antidote to Donald Trump’s grotesquely inflated greatness”... but grief is not enough to lead the country through the wreckage of the last four years. But watching this convention, I changed my mind. It is possible that exactly what we need right now is Biden’s empathy and ability to mourn. To mourn the loss of American greatness as the country’s institutions fail right and left; to mourn the hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths of Americans who have died (and continue to die) this year from the pandemic; to mourn the end of American leadership internationally; to mourn the violence of our own racism. Empathy isn’t a governing strategy, but it might be a winning strategy.
The focus on empathy in this week’s convention also highlighted the actual point of Trumpism: cruelty. Whether it be kids in cages, or taking health care away from desperate families, or refusing to negotiate an extension of the unemployment benefits -- Trumpism is cruel, and most of the leaders of the GOP have chosen it. Empathy offers a powerful choice next to Trump’s cruelty. For years, I have shown my class the infamous “Daisy” political ad from the 1964 presidential race. It ends with Lyndon B. Johnson - the President of the United States - intoning in a grave voice-over, “we must either love each other, or we must die.” (A line stolen from a gay British poet.)
We’ll soon find out if we love each other.
Love, nicco
PS. If you’re new to the list and missed my prior emails, here are a few of them:
More to come, I promise…