Democratic Convention Review: It’s Bernie’s World, Hillary Just Suffers in It
The opening night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia was characterized by a mixture of defensiveness, self-righteousness, and whininess, and, no, I’m not talking about MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, although come to think of it.… Anyway, the opening day of what her party wanted to stage as a celebration of the Wonderfulness of Everything Hillary Clinton ended up with the candidate’s party in a defensive crouch, between the leak of DNC emails (which demonstrated that, gee, sometimes people say mean things about other people), the fall of DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the mollycoddling of sulky-angry Bernie Sanders voters who needed to be begged to stop booing the name of the party’s frontrunner.
And those two themes — the emails and the wrath of the Sanders-nistas — were what dominated the cable and broadcast news coverage throughout Monday. It carried on deep into the convention night, to the point where Sarah Silverman, an ardent Sanders supporter now giving a full-throated endorsement to Clinton (because, y’know, she’s a grown-up Democrat), felt compelled to chide the part of the audience that still nursed hurt feelings: “To the Bernie or Bust people — you’re being ridiculous.”
Paul Simon came out to sing a version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that was wobbly but sincere (quickly putting on my music-critic hat: go buy Simon’s terrific new album, Stranger to Stranger, whose title does not refer to introductions between Hillary and Bernie fans). And Brian Williams summed it up on MSNBC when he said, “Yes, like you, we thought Artie might come out.” Except I’d wager if you pinched Garfunkel, he’d tell you he was casting his vote for the Green Party. Fox News did not air most of Al Franken’s and Sarah Silverman’s speeches, The Kelly File instead opting to go over and over the DNC email leak and cutting to a commercial during Simon’s crooning.
While Elizabeth Warren was cheered, rather mildly, for being used as the Don Rickles of the Democrats, delivering one anti–Donald Trump punchline after another, most of them zingers we’ve heard before. The real rouser for this crowd was Michelle Obama. The first lady delivered a speech that was effective in her (and, by extension, President Obama’s) endorsement of Clinton. In addition to providing some soaringly inspirational rhetoric, Michelle Obama’s speech did three things. She attacked Trump without mentioning him by name. She also attacked Sanders without mentioning him by name — implicitly comparing the way Clinton was defeated by Obama eight years ago and went on to support Obama wholeheartedly, suggesting that Sanders has done little to support Clinton till now. And finally, she addressed the elephant in the room in every sense: that Clinton’s campaign lacks an enthusiasm that Trump’s has in spades. That’s what Michelle Obama meant when she fired up the crowd to “knock on every door, get out every vote.”
Finally, batting cleanup, Bernie Sanders came out to deliver his full-throated endorsement — for himself. Thanking “the 13 million who voted for the political revolution” — thereby proclaiming himself the One-Person Political Revolution — Sanders said, “I understand that many people here in this convention hall and around the country are disappointed about the final results of the nominating process. I think it’s fair to say that no one is more disappointed than I am.”
Sanders knew his audience: Appeal to the weeping Woodstock-nostalgic baby boomers and the millennials — the wounded self-importance of his core supporters. Sanders passed the 11 p.m. hour — taking himself out of prime time and cutting into local sportscasters’ time — before he got around to actually urging his fan base to vote for Clinton.
Before Sanders’s speech, CNN’s Jake Tapper said Sanders’s challenge lay in “trying to win over the progressives” to “not just support [Hillary Clinton] but support her enthusiastically.” Sanders finally got around to saying, “Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States,” but he swaddled that directive around all of the campaign positions that Sanders, not Clinton, was running on. With allies like this, and given who made the night’s real media impact, Hillary Clinton must be wishing Michelle Obama was available to travel the rest of the campaign trail with her.
