In January, eight months ago, Nikki Haley said, ‘The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election.’ Nikki Haley may be right.
The Democratic National Convention that took place at the United Center in Chicago the week of August 19th demonstrated something no one may have seen coming. Why?
The announcement on July 21st that Joe Biden was stepping out of the presidential race and Kamala Harris was stepping in unleashed a hurricane. A hurricane of emotion.
As Michelle Obama said in her convention speech on Tuesday night August 20th:
“Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it? You know, we’re feeling it here in this arena, but it’s spreading across this country we love. A familiar feeling that has been buried too deep for far too long. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the contagious power of hope.”
Michelle went on to explain what she meant about the power of hope:
“The anticipation, the energy, the exhilaration of once again being on the cusp of a brighter day. The chance to vanquish the demons of fear, division and hate that have consumed us and continue pursuing the unfinished promise of this great nation, the dream that our parents and grandparents fought and died and sacrificed for. America, hope is making a comeback.”
Michelle Obama put her finger on something powerful, something that can change history. It’s what founding father of sociology Emil Durkheim called hope’s “collective effervescence.”
Meanwhile the Democratic Convention speakers portrayed America’s past under Donald Trump as a nightmare. On Tuesday night August 20th in his convention speech, Barack Obama gave the Democratic perception of former president Donald Trump. Obama said, “This is a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago.”
Obama pointed to Trump’s “childish nicknames and crazy conspiracy theories and weird obsession with crowd size.” As Obama said “crowd size,” he spaced his hands nine inches apart in front of his hips, equating Trump’s crowd-size obsession with a concern about the size of one of Trump’s body parts. That joke evoked a laugh.
But when it comes to Trump’s nicknames for his opponents, some convention speakers used another quote from Michelle Obama. Michelle first said in 2016 that, “leadership is not about putting people down, it’s about lifting people up.”
Donald Trump appears to follow the Worldwide Wrestling Federation rule of politics—insult your opponent and do it flamboyantly. For example, Trump has been calling Kamala “not smart,” has said she is not capable of doing interviews, and has proclaimed that she is not as good-looking as he is.
The former president is putting his opponents down. In their convention, the Democrats said that they intended to lift people up. And convention speakers said that they had fulfilled that mission during the first three-and-a-half Biden years.
They asserted that Biden has produced sixteen million new jobs and has used the CHIPS Act’s billions of dollars to do something Donald Trump promised but did not deliver—bringing manufacturing plants back to the United States. Not to mention Biden’s passage of the first major infrastructure bill in over 50 years.
The Democrats in their convention said that a vote for Trump is a vote for a return to the past. A past that Barack Obama told the crowd Tuesday night was dominated by “chaos, corruption, and division.”
Not to mention what was on the lips of most of the Democratic conventioneers—the Trump Supreme Court’s decision to deprive women of their reproductive rights.
The conventioneers said they were championing a very different vision of the future, a future in which Federal child tax credits lift all of this nation’s kids out of poverty, in which daycare is affordable, in which you can pay your rent and afford groceries if you earn a minimum wage, in which you are free to decide whether or not to have an abortion, and in which you are free from gun violence.
The notion of Trump dragging us back into the past was behind one of the most common cheers at this convention, “We won’t go back.”
Meanwhile the convention benefitted from that magic something it hadn’t planned for. Kamala Harris is young and confident. She soaks in the energy from a crowd, amplifies it, and pours it back to the audience in ways that are positively joyful.
Even her stride when she descends from an airplane is dramatically unlike the hobbling gate of Joe Biden and the overweight walk of 78-year-old Donald Trump.
It’s Kamala’s physical strength, vitality, and joy that made this Democratic National Convention what Michelle Obama called “magic.” And it’s that strength, vitality, and joy that may have an impact on the course of history.
References:
https://www.businessinsider.com/haley-first-party-to-ditch-80-year-old-candidate-wins-2024-1
Full Transcript of Michelle Obama’s Speech at the Democratic Convention
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Biden’s DNC boast about “record” economy was missing detail
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https://www.businessinsider.com/haley-first-party-to-ditch-80-year-old-candidate-wins-2024-1
What time is Tim Walz speaking tonight at the Democratic convention?
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https://enotrans.org/article/70-year-trend-federal-infrastructure-spending/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/11/politics/child-care-affordability-biden-administration/index.html
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on the highest-rated overnight syndicated talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.net.
[i] https://www.businessinsider.com/haley-first-party-to-ditch-80-year-old-candidate-wins-2024-1
