Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci’s definition of a crisis was, “when the old is dead and the new cannot be born.” Those of us living in the United States are in the midst of finding out whether the new can be born (in November), and whether the old is really dead. A crisis? I’d say so.
One thing is certain: Representatives of the old are having real issues with the potential changes in the wind that were evidenced at the recent Democratic National Convention. Venerable conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote: “They stole traditional Republican themes (faith, patriotism) and claimed them as their own.”
Former Fox News commentator and Newsmax host Eric Bolling raged: “We’re losing the race! We’re losing the presidency. … The enthusiasm level on the left is overwhelming. They’re trying to say Democrats are the patriots! They’re wearing camo hats with Harris’ name on it! Camo! That’s ours!”
Democrats as patriots? How can this be? And camo? Really? How dare they! Camo can’t be woke, can it?
It’s easy to understand the GOP’s pain. For decades — at least since Richard Nixon’s presidency — the Republicans have claimed the mantle of patriotism and the title of “real Americans,” wrapping themselves in the flag, Christianity, country music, family values, and military strength. “America: Love It or Leave It” was their mantra. Guns, flags, the cross, and camo clothes were their primary fashion accessories.
It worked for more than 50 years, from Nixon on through the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and even through the Obama years, when the nation’s first Black president was accused of being born in Africa, which, to Republicans, is as un-American as you can get. Donald Trump, of course, has literally wrapped himself in the American flag on several occasions.
That’s why seeing 20,000 “Demoncrats” in Chicago waving little American flags had to have driven them nuts, not to mention the sight of that Harris/Walz camo hat on the heads of hundreds of delegates, the Nashville sounds of Jason Isbell and The Chicks, the nightly invocation of prayers, the pledges to defend our NATO allies militarily and stand up to Putin in Ukraine. It was all turf formerly claimed by the GOP.
But you can hardly blame Kamala Harris and the Democrats for moving in. The house was empty and Republicans left the door wide open by abandoning — or twisting beyond recognition — their foundational principles. And it all started with Trump, for whom there are no principles, foundational or otherwise, only transactional exchanges. The party has been following his lead since 2015.
Republicans exchanged the American flag for the countless variations of Trump flags flown at rallies, and from MAGA pickups, boats, and front porches. “I pledge allegiance to Donald Trump” being the implied new credo. Family values? See: Trump, Donald. Religion? See: Nationalist, Christian. Country music? See: Rock, Kid. Strong military defense? See: Putin, Vladimir, a murderous despot now openly supported by Trump and his acolytes, including Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Robert Kennedy Jr., most Fox News hosts, Speaker Mike Johnson, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and dozens of other GOP senators and congressmen.
The party that once put forth a strong, conservative platform every four years, now has a platform of “whatever Trump says today,” no matter how idiotic or deranged. The party that once spent millions on an election ground game and ad buys in swing states now spends a large percentage of those dollars on Trump’s defense funds and lawyer bills.
The recent polling has been swinging Harris’ way and Trump’s campaign strategists have been urging him to “talk policy” instead of using his rally speeches to air his many grievances, hurl personal insults at his opponents, and brag about his looks. Trump counters that Harris has no policies and has ignored several of the issues he has raised, including the low-flow shower-head crisis, the boat battery vs. sharks controversy, and the problem of solar-powered airplanes that crash when the sun’s not shining. Furthermore, he says, Harris has not had the courage to take a stance on the late, great Hannibal Lecter. And she has the nerve to say Trump is “an unserious man.” What chutzpah!
At any rate, here is where we find ourselves — on the very edge of the approaching hurricane, waiting to learn the course of its final path, waiting to learn the fate of our nation, waiting to discover if the new can be born.
Editor’s note: Our political columnist Jackson Baker and former Flyer writer Chris Davis traveled to Chicago, Illinois, last week for the Democratic National Convention from Monday, August 19th, to Thursday, August 22nd. For this story, Baker and Davis reflect on their experiences, giving light to the ever-changing political landscape.
CHICAGO — Let the record show that the second major-party convention of 2024 ended as the first one had — with a firm conviction on the part of its cadres that victory in the November general election was, if not inevitable, then likely. And if not that, at least possible.
That circumstance, ideal from the vantage point of a suspenseful showdown and a spirited turnout, depended largely on events that occurred between the two, the Republican gathering in Milwaukee in mid-July and the Democrats’ a month later.
Those events began with the withdrawal from the race of Democratic President Joe Biden, whose evident infirmities had been amply signaled in an early debate with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.
Kamala Harris after acceptance address (Photo: David Upton)
They continued with the substitution of Democratic nominee of Vice President Kamala Harris, as close to her party’s line as Biden had been and vastly more dynamic and appealing in espousing it.
In between these events had come what appeared to be an emotional unraveling of contestant Trump, who was largely reduced to unloosing poorly formulated insults at his new opponent, including one which, manifestly absurdly, claimed he was the better-looking of the two.
Harris had, with impressive speed and efficiency, managed to still most doubts about herself as campaigner and party avatar within her party ranks, and she had bolstered her position with her choice of a running mate, the unassuming but engagingly folksy governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, a former high-school football coach progressive enough to have been faculty advisor for a “gay-straight alliance” at his school.
The Democrats’ changing of the guard would be relatively seamless. On night one of the convention, Biden, transparently grieving, would take his demotion with gravel-voiced acceptance and would be rewarded with prearranged chants of “We love Joe” and ritual hugs from wife, family, and Kamala. All would liken him to George Washington, obscuring the look of archetypal sacrifice.
Thereafter the money rolled in, the polls responded, and it was all a rush to celebrate Kamala as the first Black woman, first Asian, first woman of color (pick one) to be nominated for president of the United States, the consecrators came forth — the old Lion Bill in his subdued approving wheeze, the Obamas, “Do something,” “Tell Trump this is one of those Black jobs,” and the formal roll call to nominate her became a collage of carnivals, all more Dionysian than Apollonian. Coach Walz came in with gridiron metaphors: “A field goal down in the fourth quarter,” “Let’s roll.”
Kamala had every reason to smile, and her ever-beaming face became mask, then masque. It was on. The entertainers arrived, Stevie Wonder sighting higher ground and Oprah Winfrey flinging her arms in wide embrace.
On the last night, it was all Kamala. And she delivered, lashing the fundamentally unserious Trump as the serious threat he was, tying him to the retrograde Project 2025 with its rolling back of American freedoms and vowing, “We’ll never go back!”
She would go on to touch all the bases: a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, tax cuts for the middle class, freedom to read, solidarity with our NATO allies, confronting Big Pharma, retarding pursuing inflation, and overhauling immigration policy, protecting the border while creating a path to citizenship.
There was one less developed point — just what to do about the Israel-Gaza war, other than to seek a ceasefire and the return of hostages taken by Hamas.
The much-ballyhooed protest of Gaza war policy — seriously overseen by squadrons of Chicago’s finest — turned out to be more pro forma than profound. Passing through the midst of the chanters of an evening, I heard one voice out on its periphery, more prevalent than the rest, and that turned out to belong to a solitary sentinel denouncing things of this world.
A Christian soldier, as it were, passing out literature extolling a world to come — one even more remote than one in which Palestinians might achieve what they and their supporters could regard as full justice.
If there was a serious issue that never made it to the rostrum of either convention in 2024, it was anything resembling a major re-evaluation of the nation’s Middle East policy.
Kamala, it seemed, was able to finesse the issue on a talking point pledging support for Israel’s right to defend itself coupled with hopes for eventual self-determination for Palestinians.
That this might be seen as progress was a statement in and of itself.
Among the Democrats taking part one day in a rooftop celebration for the Tennessee delegation atop one of Chicago’s several new Downtown skyscrapers were Joseph Walters and Brenda Speer of Speerit Hill Farm of Lynnville. A second-marriage couple, they were, in retirement age, looking to the Harris-Walz team and its attempted evocation of joy as a revival of their political hopes.
These had been lapsed now for a near-generation, since, Walters remembers, the time of Obama, when a presidential victory in the nation at large became, paradoxically, a signal for the white South, including Tennessee, to forswear its Democratic Party heritage.
These were the years when Memphis’ Jim Kyle, now a Shelby County chancellor and then the Democrats’ leader in the Tennessee state Senate and a potential heir to the mantle of lieutenant governor, began a campaign for governor in 2010, only to discover that “all the yellow-dog Democrats had become yellow-dog Republicans”
“I was so disappointed,” Speer, still a mainstay of party activity in rural Middle Tennessee, such as it is, says of that time, when her neighbors began deserting the Democratic legacy in droves.
It may be impossible now, and for some time yet, for Democrats to challenge the Republican supermajority in Tennessee for power in the state at large.
Yet the building blocks would seem to be emerging in the ranks of determined Democrats like Sarah Freeman of the Germantown Democratic Club, a candidate this year for the 8th District congressional seat now held by Republican David Kustoff. Freeman won out in what was an old-fashioned multi-candidate free-for-all in the Democratic primary, and she was accompanied at the convention by her own videographer documentarian.
There was Lee Harris, the Shelby County mayor who was on hand for ongoing policy talks with peers from local governments elsewhere, and there was first-term Memphis Mayor Paul Young, who declared to his fellow Tennesseans, “People in the hood … don’t care about our conventions. They just want things to change. And so as we leave here, I want us to take this energy and turn it into action.”
Justin J. Pearson with the Tennessee delegation (Photo: Jackson Baker)
And there was Justin J. Pearson, the oracle of change to come, the galvanizing figure of the campaign to save South Memphis from a potentially hazardous oil pipeline and later a key member of the Tennessee Three, who shamed the state’s GOP leadership for its inaction on gun safety. And still later Pearson, the District 86 state representative, would become an accomplished fundraiser and all-purpose benefactor of progressive causes he deemed meritorious or necessary. And their apostle, as in the following words delivered to the Tennessee delegation on the last morning of the convention:
“We’ve got to be fired up when we have somebody who’s been convicted of 34 felonies running against the most qualified person ever to run for president of these United States, Vice President Kamala D. Harris.
“We’ve got to be fired up for such a time and moment as this, where we are seeing the rights of women being taken. We’ve got to be fired up when the gun violence epidemic continues to plague our communities because the Tennessee Firearms Association and the National Rifle Association seem to have bought our politicians into a level of complacency and cowardice that is demeaning and degrading and hurting us.
“We’ve got to be fired up when our civil rights are being attacked on every side, and this Supreme Court acts much more like a MAGA-extremist Republican Party than it should.
“We have to be fired up in this moment to preserve and protect and defend the democratic constitutional experiment that our ancestors marched for, that our ancestors died for, that our ancestors built through many dangers, toils, and snares. We’ve got to be fired up in this moment. In Tennessee and in America, we’ve got to be fired up. …
“We are Democrats. We are Democrats.”
Pearson’s oratory was confined to the Tennessee delegation. The nation at large has not yet heard him. But they will. They will.
Meanwhile, there is the following: a priceless musing on the subject at hand from my colleague on this mission and a strong right arm indeed, Chris Davis. — Jackson Baker
……………
A new audacity: Hopeful Democrats leave Chicago full of fight, but questions linger
The rebellion started, like they do, with a normal request from the back of the bus: “Can we please just get off and walk to United Center?” The question, voiced by some unidentified patriot, who only wanted to get to the Democratic National Convention in time to hear President Joe Biden speak, set off a rumble of interest. Problem was, a small but determined group of demonstrators had broken away from the bulk of Monday’s pro-Palestinian protests in Union Park and breached the DNC’s security perimeter.
The occupation was brief and peaceful but it ended in arrests, confusion, and a lengthy lockdown of the perimeter that stranded a mile-long convoy of buses, carrying DNC guests from their Downtown hotels to the venue. The stuck Democrats were getting restless, but they weren’t getting mad; they were ready to do something.
Pro-Palestine protestors marched in Chicago. (Photo: Chris Davis)
A genial police officer, assigned to guard the shuttle carrying delegates and guests to the venue in Chicago’s Near West Side neighborhood, didn’t want anybody taking any unnecessary risks: Stick to the plan and the bus will get everybody there, eventually. Ex-military and petite, the officer was wrapped in Kevlar, strapped with tactical gear, and gifted with an evident flair for theatrical performance.
She told riders they needed to stay on the bus because modern protesters wear gloves treated with caustic chemicals so they can burn cops just by grabbing them. The officer said she thought other guests from other buses had already attempted to walk and they’d gotten into fights with protesters or something like that. She said it was better for everybody to stay on a bus that wasn’t going anywhere than risk running into any of that.
Before the smiling officer could finish her cautionary fairytales, somebody in the middle of the bus found footage of the breach on TikTok. “I think I’m gonna walk,” they said. “The protesters aren’t wrong,” someone else said to a buzz of general agreement, and people began to stand up and move toward the front of the bus. By this time doors to the other stalled buses were swinging open and Democrats poured out into the street: evidence of similar, simultaneous rebellions within the stalled convoy.
The protestors called for action not just for Palestine but for other nations, like the Philippines, whose leader is in effigy above with Harris and Biden. (Photo: Chris Davis)
“If you really want to get off the bus, I can’t stop you,” the officer said, as Democrats started getting off the bus en masse and trudging like a well-dressed zombie horde toward the fenced perimeter. Only those with mobility issues, and people who despise walking were left to ride. They would, as the police officer assured, arrive in time to see the president speak. Three-and-a-half hours later the last of the stuck passengers disembarked at the United Center.
This feels like a metaphor for something. Maybe a metaphor for everything. In any case, I got off the bus and walked to a happy hour event hosted by Grow Progress, an organization who “use[s] science and empathy” to build more persuasive political messages. They persuaded me to enjoy several drinks, and I arrived in the arena somewhat later than the stranded bus riders, but in a much better mood.
Hillary Clinton was speaking. I could see her on the hallway monitors, as I made my way to a media-friendly space, and I could hear the crowd chanting, “Lock him up.”
It was a beautiful first day for the DNC. The sun was high and bright but a steady wind turned larger, handmade signs into sails, billowing and blowing around some of the protesters gathering in Union Park to demonstrate on behalf of the people of Palestine.
These random acts of slapstick were a stark counterpoint to an event more sincere than sizable. Organizers had predicted a turnout of 20,000 or more and a credulous media, convinced 2024 was the new 1968, transformed those hopeful numbers into big, scary headlines. But taking every lazy argument into account, 2024 only resembles 1968 the way a cloud might resemble Grandma. You can see her sweet smile and that weird growth on her neck so clearly up there in the sky, but no matter how much that Grandma-shaped cloud reminds you of a simpler, happier time, it’s a cloud and won’t be baking cookies for your birthday. By the 2 p.m. start time, hundreds of pre-printed picket signs remained spread across the lawn, uncollected. It seemed unlikely that the protest would attract even a quarter of its projected numbers.
The protests were more sincere than sizable. (Photo: Chris Davis)
A big reason 2024 wasn’t like 1968 is the fact that Democrats weren’t engaged in a contentious fight to choose their candidate. This certainly could have happened and even typically level-headed pundits like Ezra Klein fantasized an open or brokered convention, rationalizing that the Democratic Party could only be perfected and purified by walking through a fire certain to burn bridges and destroy alliances. But that never happened. Biden selected his Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him, just as she would should he ever become unable to fulfill the duties of office, and to everybody’s surprise, the Democrats, a coalition party rarely able to agree on anything, got fully on board with a candidate voters hadn’t much liked the one time she ran for the nomination.
’68 was a rough ride for America. We lost MLK and Bobby Kennedy to assassins who didn’t miss. Conscripted American soldiers were dying in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement and American youth counterculture were in their fullest blossom, and the angry, young protesters who made their stand in Chicago truly believed the pressure they built there might determine who’d be picked to lead the Democratic ticket. Inside the convention, things were equally fraught with many delegates shouting, “No! No!” when Hubert Humphrey, who’d backed Johnson’s escalation of conflict in Vietnam, secured the party’s nomination.
’68 is also the year when Alabama Governor George Wallace, a right-wing extremist hellbent on denying either party an electoral majority, broke with the Democratic Party to make his own run at the White House, taking a big chunk of the “forget Hell!” South with him. Outside of President Biden choosing not to seek reelection and American involvement in a foreign civil war, 1968 and 2024 couldn’t be more dissimilar.
Even President Biden, in his emotional address to the DNC said, without reservation, “Those protesters out in the street have a point.” Only, he didn’t stop there, while he was ahead. “A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides,” he concluded, glossing over the disproportionate carnage that’s led to charges of war crimes and accusations of genocide against Israel, and to normal complaints from the back of the bus.
In 2004 America held its first post-9/11 political conventions, and as it’s so frequently stated, after that infamous date, “everything changed.” Manhattan locked down when the Republican National Convention landed in town.
The National Guard greeted the bridge-and-tunnel crowd with barricades and heavier arms, while a militarized police force took to the streets, throwing up barricades faster than protesters could pour into the city. New York arrested more than 1,800 people over four days, including kids, media, and bystanders. Detainees were taken to a makeshift detention camp called Pier 57, but described as, “Guantanamo on the Hudson.” More than 300 protesters were arrested by militarized police in St. Paul, Minnesota, on the first day of the RNC in 2008, and similar numbers were arrested each subsequent day during that convention. America’s misadventures in Iraq were still on the ballot and the whole world was experiencing massive economic collapse. Protest was heavy and the police response was disproportionate.
America was still at war during the 2016 conventions, but the public wasn’t activated to the same degree. Protest diminished and, for the Democrats, it was almost exclusively an internal squabble. Although senator and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders was giving Clinton his full-throated support, his disappointed supporters refused to let go of his lost candidacy. They turned out in force to protest by taping their mouths shut, and slamming against the perimeter barricades, where they were summarily arrested by militarized police.
I mention all of this protest history because one of the notable changes in both Milwaukee and Chicago compared to past conventions is how differently they were policed. Recent police raids clearing pro-Palestine encampments in Chicago encouraged our talking heads to dream harder about the ghost of Mayor Daley and a 1968 redux. But Chicago’s old-school head-busting police aren’t who showed up to serve and protect at the DNC. Bicycle cops and police wearing their everyday uniforms circled Union Park, where the bulk of the convention’s protests originated, to observe like an audience prepared for something other than the very worst.
Riot cops did get busy for a short time on Tuesday, when a fringe protest led by groups like Behind Enemy Lines and Samidoun (vocally supportive of Hamas’ October 7th attack against Israel) got out of hand. During that one action, police made 50 of 74 total arrests spread across four days of mostly peaceful public demonstration. It’s not a perfect example, but this is progress.
So what year is it again, if not 1968? When I heard the chants of “Lock him up,” I was rocketed back to the 2016 RNC, when Hillary’s emails were big news and chants of “Lock her up” shook Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse.
Now that Trump’s a convicted felon 34 times over, the irony is too delicious, and I wanted to enjoy watching the former senator from New York and failed presidential contender enjoy her moment. But no matter how perfectly poetic, or deserved, hearing a mob calling for the incarceration of their immediate political rival is somehow no less chilling now than it was eight years ago.
But what do I know? Nielsen ratings for the DNC’s first night demolished the RNC’s opening by a margin of 29 percent and, against the usual trend, the Democrats increased viewership each night. It’s interesting to consider how only a month ago serious commentators watching the RNC’s opening night contemplated the possibility of a once-in-a-generation political realignment favoring the GOP. It’s helpful to remember how the Democrats’ increased viewership, though in the millions, might be accounted for within the biggest blue areas and reflect no electoral college advantage whatsoever. It’s important to know that almost four times as many people tuned in to watch the DNC in 1968, when real Americans watched TV, goddammit.
Critics of the 2024 convention have astutely recognized that it was largely about feelings, and feelings aren’t a plan. True enough, but politics is made out of feelings. In recent cycles, anger, fear, hope, grief, grievance, and a host of other feelings have driven voters to the polls, why not bet on joy, for a change? Policy is key, but as Al Gore will surely tell you, if you lead with it, they put you in a lockbox.
What else can I say about the Democrats’ superb execution at the United Center that won’t have been said a thousand times already by the time anybody reads this article? Has anybody else noted how even the venue’s name seemed to announce party goals every time it was spoken? A united center is literally what I saw in Chicago. The only thing that might bring normie America together harder than the unrehearsed display of love Tim Walz’s son Gus showed for his dad is the near-universal revulsion evinced when the weirdo tried to mock him for it. The 2024 convention was a credible, joyful attempt by Democrats to reclaim ideas long ago hijacked by the right: ideas like family values, patriotism, and … well … “normal.”
In the fight against Trump, J.D. Vance, and the whole Project 2025 gang, it currently looks like the only thing still dividing Democrats is Palestine. Vice President Harris’ near-flawless closing night speech promised a different approach. With its rhetoric about Palestinian self-determination, she also promised to give Israel everything it needs in the meantime.
Activists demanding disinvestment and an arms embargo remain unconvinced and uncommitted. For them, the D-bus is stalled, all they are hearing from the cop up front is fairytales, and the threat of getting off and walking is real. So the big question going into the homestretch of this, the latest most important election of our lifetime: Will the Center hold, or will we elect Nixon? — Chris Davis
CHICAGO — All the president’s men, women, courtiers, and supporters and well-wishers of all stripes were surely attuned to his appearance Monday night at Chicago’s United Center.
It was not Joe Biden’s farewell to public life — he would continue to campaign for the Democratic ticket, he promised — but it was his sayonara song as head of that ticket. For all the pre-planned choruses of “We Love Joe!” and “Thank You, Joe!” emanating from the massive arena crowd, it was impossible not to see the man’s deep regret as he spoke, dry-throated, in anapestically rising cadences, of his achievements and unfinished ventures as president: the post-pandemic recovery act, the lessoning of Big Pharma, the infrastructure initiatives, the re-establishment of NATO solidarity, and all the rest.
“Bittersweet” doesn’t begin to do it.
Nevertheless, the torch was passed, the guard was changed, and Biden’s successor as standard-bearer, Kamala Harris, would make an appearance on stage to hug and embrace and celebrate her predecessor, along with members of Biden’s personal and official families.
The evening, first of a week’s worth to come in the 2024 Democratic National Convention, was replete with snapshots from the party scrapbook, new faces and old ones alike.
There was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — “AOC” in the vernacular — wildly applauded for the progressive congresswoman’s spicy personality and her recollections of working-class origins in New York.
There was Hillary Clinton, the defeated Democratic candidate from 2016, able now to voice rebukes of her conqueror (“We have him on the run now”) via hopes for the new avatar Harris (“Something is happening in America. You can feel it!”)
True Gretch with Tennessee delegation
• That there was a palpable feeling of hope and exhilaration as this convention began was undeniable. It was obvious, too, in the daily morning breakfasts of the Tennessee delegation at Chicago’s quite posh Hyatt Regency.
On Tuesday morning, another of the Democratic Party’s new stars, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (aka “True Gretch,” after the title of her just-published memoir), came into the delegation’s meeting room to deliver an energetic pep talk. She was followed somewhat later by an energetic exhortation from New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who, after being introduced by Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen, stood atop a chair and, sans mic, declaimed his largish hopes for 2024.
The two national party figures bracketed remarks from a Tennessee hopeful, Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, who hopes to win what is certainly a long-odds contest with the ultra right-wing Republican incumbent U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn.
Who knows? For the moment, all things seem possible for the Democrats, and their mood of optimism seems certain to crest at week’s end when Kam-ala (broad “a” in the accented first syllable) takes the stage for her official acceptance address.
Stayed tuned for next week’s cover story on the Democratic National Convention.
Remember the sample ballots you always saw at election time purporting to be “endorsements” of a group of candidates by this or that “Democratic” organization? Glossy with color mug shots of the lucky “endorsees,” these broadsheets did their best to resemble official documents of the Shelby County or even state Democratic Parties.
In reality, advertisements for the candidates in question is all they ever were — advertisements paid for by their campaigns and tricked out to look like official party statements by the local entrepreneurs who sold space on them.
“Endorsements” they were not, except in the technical sense that they signified the support of the shell companies that published and distributed them, most of these with the word “Democratic” in their name.
It was the misleading aspect of these advertisements that made them targets of litigation by candidates, Democrats in the main, running legitimate campaigns for office and boasting no such false endorsements.
Now, several hearings over several years later, a judge has imposed a permanent injunction against such published products.
The ruling comes from Judge William B. Acree, a senior jurist from Jackson, after a January 6th hearing in the case of Tennessee Democratic Party and candidate John Marek vs. Greg Grant, individually, & d.b.a. Greater Memphis Democratic Club and M. LaTroy Williams, individually, & d.b.a. Shelby County Democratic Club. This was the climactic one of three hearings — the others having occurred on October 20, 2019, and October 3, 2020.
Those prior hearings had imposed temporary injunctions against the defendants and imposed penalties for renewed infractions.
Judge Acree based his judgment Thursday on TCA statute 2-19-116, which reads:
No person shall print or cause to be printed or assist in the distribution or transportation of any facsimile of an official ballot, any unofficial sample ballot, writing, pamphlet, paper, photograph or other printed material, which contains the endorsement of a particular candidate, group of candidates, or proposition by an organization, group, candidate, or other individual, whether existent or not, with the intent that the person receiving such printed material mistakenly believe that the endorsement of such candidate, candidates, or proposition was made by an organization, group, candidate or entity other than the one or ones appearing on the printed material.
Acree’s order states:
The court finds that the Defendants engage in the distribution of campaign literature on behalf of candidates seeking public office, are paid for such activity, and have violated the statute and restraining order on previous occasions. Thus, the Court finds a permanent injunction shall issue enjoining the Defendants from: Distributing literature, disseminating information, or, in any way, communicating, utilizing work, symbols, or graphical schemes reasonably implying endorsement of or affiliation with the Democratic National Convention, the Tennessee Democratic Party, or the Shelby County Democratic Party.
My chief fear, as the virtual DNC began on Monday night, was that they didn’t make the mistake of over-producing it. Not for the last time, I found myself wishing it were possible to have a real rough-and-tumble convention.
And, after a needlessly slow start, killing prime time with the kind of desultory welcoming and filler material ordinary conventions start with in the morning or early afternoon, the DNC got going and massed several strong speeches and moments. The point to keep in mind is that in normal convention years the strong stuff starts right away— at 8 p.m. CDT or 9 p.m. EDT.
Having Bernie Sanders on fairly early was a good move toward answering several questions at once. A runner-up in 2020 as he was in 2016, could the Vermont Senator, an
Bernie Sanders
icon of the progressive left, close ranks with the Democrats’ centrist standard-bearer? Though he had made a speech on behalf of Hillary on opening night of the 2016 convention, it seemed not to have cleared away doubters — either in the Clinton ranks or in his own — and the remaining sense of suspicion left a tuft of malaise stuck to the coordinated campaign.
What he said this time around, speaking on a studio stage to the camera, not only sounded fully sincere, it was less a concession than a bona fide endorsement of the candidate who had bested him, Joe Biden. Indeed, it was the first example, of many to come in the convention, of what might be called testimonials from The Friends of Joe Biden — a group of illustrious and/or affecting exemplars who could implicitly be compared to the cronies and satraps of the incumbent President.
Bernie professed himself open to liberals, moderates, and even conservatives — a statement that put him on the same unity-minded platform as Biden — and provoked this thought: Those folks who worried that Sanders could not appeal to a national electorate, what were they thinking? Nobody could have been more obscure than an Independent Senator from Vermont, and look at the national following he had inspired with his attacks on economic inequality! And, the reality of Trump now a given, who could doubt this time that Bernie’s following would come with him in full support of the Democratic ticket?
In juxtaposition to Bernie Sanders on that first night was John Kasich, the moderate former Governor of Ohio who had been in the Republican field of candidates in 2016 and now served to bracket the ticket’s potential from the other side of the political spectrum. (In a sightly jarring and probably unnecessary acknowledgment of his role, Kasich would say he doubted that a President Biden would take any “hard left” turns.)
Michelle Obama was not a matter of right nor left. Nor was the former First Lady an old-fashioned adornment to the patriarchy. She came across as a truth-teller and a judge, sounding this more-in-sadness-than-in-anger note: “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He
Bennie Thompson
simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”
One more notable fact of that and subsequent nights: Mississippi’s venerable African-American congressman Bennie Thompson, sounding agreeably Old-Southern in his role as permanent Convention chair.
How about our girl Raumesh, one of several virtual testifiers on Joe Biden’s behalf to kick off Night Two of the DNC as sequential keynoters. Remember her floor speech from Phiadelphia in 2016? (Hillary, the state Senator from Memphis memorably said, was “a bad sister.” Unfortunately, she was also, arguably, a bad candidate.)
Raumesh Akbari
Raumesh Akbari, in any case, has been sprinkled with stardust twice — deservedly.
And, one thought, lookee at Caroline Kennedy and son Jack Schlossberg in a brief camera turn. Dang, he’s got those looks, almost a double for his late uncle JFK Jr.
A future-tense candidate?
Youth was similarly served by a pro forma nominating speech for Bernie Sanders by New York Congresswoman Aexandria Ocasio Cortez — AOC, as she’s increasingly called in tribute to her out-of-nowhere celebrity as an instant eminence of the left. Her speech was less about Bernie than it was about her wish list for the political future: “… 21st-century social, economic and human rights, including guaranteed health care, higher education, living wages and labor rights for all people in the United States; a movement striving to recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny and homophobia …”
It may have been obligatory to give time at some point to John Kerry, the party’s unsuccessful 2004 nominee — or was that old footage of Edmund Muskie? Not much, in any case, was advanced from the moment. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were more effective links to the party’s past. It is impossible not to respect Carter nor to appreciate Clinton, for all the fresh tarnish on the latter’s image.
Caroline Kennedy and Jack Schlossberg
It was nice to see the friendship between Joe Biden and the late GOP maverick John McCain being remembered — not so much in the somewhat exaggerated hope of attracting fall-away Republicans as to remind the audience of Biden’s ability to work across third rails and party lines.
The absolute hero of the evening — both emotionally and ideologically — was the long-term ALS survivor Ady Barkan, who by his courage, perseverance, and very presence embodied the case for a revamping and extension of national heath care — a wider one, alas, than is envisioned (or at least publicly sanctioned) by Biden.
Jill Biden was a delight, and it was revealing to see her widen the domestic profile of her husband a bit further while giving us a preview of her likely presence-to-be on the national scene.
But, by all odds, the high point of Tuesday night was the roller-coaster ride across America in the form of the live roll call for President — the casting of the votes made sequentially from the scene of each of the nation’s 57 states and territories. What a trip, in every sense of the term! A virtue made of necessity — surely to be repeated in less pandemic future times.
Immigration had been touched on as an issue here and there on the Democratic Convention’s first two nights, but it became something more than that on Night Three when the nation was exposed to videos of 11-year-of Estela Juarez, daughter of an ex-Marine and an undocumented Mexican, crying over her mother’s forced deportation, alternating with excerpts of the President snarling about “animals” and his intention to “move ’em out.”
Estela Juarez
Yes, of course, Trump’s defenders would decry this as a trick of editing and would maintain that he was speaking of criminal elements in the illegals among us. Still, the images of Estela and her mother speak for themselves.
The evening would also see the wounded heroine, former California Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, survivor of a shooting at point-blank range in the back of the head by a zealot with a gun.
Another survivor of sorts was Hillary Clinton, the party’s 2016 standard-bearer, whose very presence, as much as her words, was a warning against complacency at the polls. It is pedantry of a sort, even nit-picking, to complain about certain kinds of style points, but here we go: “As the saying goes” is not the right way to introduce a certain famous comment by Ernest Hemingway, which, in its verbatim version, in “A Farewell to Arms,” goes, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Unmentioned by Clinton, as by most alluders to the sentiment, is the next sentence: “But those that will not break it kills.”
One very live and unbroken specimen is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who took her turn Wednesday night, as did Elizabeth Warren — both of them properly aggressive and examples of the unprecedented prominence of women in today’s Democratic Party.
At one point viewers were treated to a recitation of legislative accomplishments of Joe Biden, one of which was his sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act. This was appropriate, but also a little brazen, in that Biden, as chairman of the Senate committee looking into sexual-harassment complaints of Anita Hill against then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, had been regarded as less than properly vigilant.
The night would end with the two biggest moments — a take-no-prisoners address from former president Barack Obama who, from within his customary restrained persona, threw protocol aside and gave it back to his presidential successor, Donald Trump, followed by a This-Is-Your-Life bio of Kamala Harris, and then Harris in the flesh, to accept the vice-presidential nomination.
Obama stood before the cameras as an elder statesman, but you could still sense within him the wunderkind who came from out of nowhere at the 2004 Democratic Convention — the moderate, sensible presence that his political enemies insisted on trying to characterize as a radical Zulu. But Obama’s inner flame never materalized as firebombs; he could provide heat and light but never explosions. So it was this night:
“I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies. I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.
“But he never did. For close to four years now, he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.
“Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.”
There was no tit-for-tat to this, no understandable human response to the torrent of verbal abuse he has suffered from Trump. It was, more than anything else, a report card and a severe one.
Kamala Harris
And Harris, when she came on stage, was thereby largely enabled to eschew the tradition vice-presidential role of attacker, so as to complete the job of revealing herself to an America where she is still something of an unknown quantity. Smiling, and not without a fair amount of glamor, she described her scrambled ethnic heritage (part Black, part Indian of the East Asian variety), her stroller-view of the Civil Rights revolution, her rise in the legal world as a professional woman, and her simultaneous persona as a stepmother called Mamala. A homey presence altogether, but still a seasoned prosecutor and very much woke Senator. Someone who could plausibly say, “We can do better and deserve so much more.”
At the end of her remarks she was joined on stage by her husband Doug Emhoff, while the head of the ticket, Biden, stood awkwardly with his wife Jill a good 12 feet away. The two groups waved at each other and at the large overhead Jumbo screen showing a Zoom crowd applauding. No hands joined overhead of the two ticket heads, not in this socially distanced time. With the climactic night to come it all left an air of incompleteness. Or of expectation.
By and large, on the eve of the finale, the Democrats had managed to bring off a passable, even an impressive virtual show. Now, on Night 4, it was up to Joe to deliver. His surrogates, as well as his advance history, had created the profile of a likable, sincere and well-meaning presence. His adversary President Trump, had countered with a gaffe-prone bumbling caricature he called Sleepy Joe.
Thursday night would determine which of those personas would finish up on the stage.
Things didn’t begin all that auspiciously with some cheesy jokes in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus tried to riff on Mike Pence’s “foreign-sounding” name and declared, “I’m proud to be a nasty woman.” Functioning as the evening’s M.C., she would continue to be something of an edgy presence, only fitting into the mood of the Convention at the point later on when she spoke of her bout with cancer, thereby becoming one of the victims for whom Joe Biden is being posited as the hope.
Following a child’s reading of the Pledge of Allegiance, the erstwhile Dixie Chicks — now, post-George Floyd, just The Chicks — did the Star-Spanged Banner, and Sister Simone had to be in there somewhere because Senator Chris Combs thanked her by name when Wolf Blitzer of CNN cued him back in after a station break.
Civil rights icon John Lewis, memorialized upon his death two weeks ago, got one more lengthy reprise, and it seemed appropriate. Still, the evening was mounting toward Joe’s climactic moment, and everything else was patently build-up. Deb Haaland, a Native American member of the House from New Mexico, Cory Booker bloviating, Jon Meacham pontificating, Mayor Pete introducing all the old gang from the Democratic primaries who looked like Hollywood Squares as they traded Joe memories from their places on a Zoom screen.
Michael Bloomberg came on to boost the ticket and excoriate Trump. Smooth and fluent, he went far toward erasing the memory of that flat and defensive debate performance back in the winter that doomed his campaign and prepared the way for the revival of Joe’s.
There was a moment that mesmerized many onlookers when young Brayden Harrington, who met Biden in New Hampshire and was embraced there as a fellow stutterer, worked his way bravely through a reminiscence of the event before what he had to know was a national television audience.
Brayden Harrington
Then we got what looked like a sleepover image featuring the nominee’s four granddaughters, all smiles and fond recollections of their eminent senior kinsman. Steph Curry and his wife and two daughters would add their impressions, and the moment of truth got ever nearer as Biden’s two living children, son Hunter and daughter Ashley, prepared to bring him on with their own recollections.
Ashley is the daughter of second wife Jill, and, Hunter — he of Ukraine fame — is the survivor of two family catastrophes: a car crash that killed Biden’s first wife and a daughter and left both sons hospitalized; and the agonizing death from cancer of brother Beau, an ex-Marine war veteran and state Attorney General in Delaware on his way to higher things when the Reaper intervened.
Joe Biden’s all-too-obvious grief over Beau, coupled with the pummeling Hunter had taken from the Trump crowd, had created inevitably a sense of Hunter as a possible black sheep. He did not appear so Thursday night; in his coming-out before a national audience he looked and sounded like Joe’s son in every particular, more so than Beau in many ways. He was sympathetic and sincere about his dad, and Ashley, a bright presence, was another revelation.
And finally, after we got a filmed bio of the nominee’s life and times, the triumphs and tragedies, along with the curriculum vitae details of his long government service, there he was, all by himself, Joe Biden.
At this point, I am going to presume to borrow from a Facebook post by by former colleague and frequent partner on the campaign trail, Chris Davis:
“Joe did good. Between his lifelong stutter and a real affinity for putting his foot in his mouth, oratory never has been his thing. But tonight’s performance reminded me of the turning point in narrative cinema when filmmakers realized movies were fundamentally different than stage plays. This wasn’t the typical convention where viewers at home watched a public speaking event built to ignite a massive live audience. It has been intimate, if sometimes imperfect. One commentator positively described it as an infomercial, and that’s not a terrible comparison. I’ll continue to hold breath every time I see him on a live mic. But tonight Joe did good, and as several folks have pointed out before me, the medium really worked for him.”
Joe Biden
That’s one way of putting it. And the content of Biden’s speech complemented everything else that had been said and done earlier in the convention — in its concern for the powerless and the victims of injustice, its determination to transcend the Charleston debacle and fat-cat white supremacy and achieve at long last something resembling racial equity; in its defense of beleaguered pubic institutions like the Affordable Care
Act and the Postal Service; in its determination to revive our foreign alliances and confront the adversaries that the Trump administration has ignored or coddled; in its simple avowal that government is meant to serve and protect the American people.
“This is not a partisan moment. This must be an American moment,” Biden said. “This
is our moment to make hope and history rhyme.”
And with that the ticket’s two couples were on stage together again, waving at the applause on the Jumbo Zoom screen and, with obvious delight, turning to face the sky auspiciously exploding in fireworks.
Michelle Obama speaking on the first night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
American democracy is messy, and it always has been. In fact, it could be argued that disorderliness is a feature, not a bug, of the Founding Fathers’ system.
One of the messiest aspect is the political nominating convention. They didn’t exist in the time of George Washington. Overtly campaigning for the presidency was seen to be uncouth, as Alexander Hamilton notes about Aaron Burr in Hamilton. Parties, themselves a concept Washington despised, chose their candidates through caucuses — the mythical “smoke-filled rooms.” But in 1831, the anti-elitist, conspiratorially minded Anti-Masonic Party decided to choose their candidate in the open. Andrew Jackson thought that sounded like a good idea, and the first Democratic convention took place the next year.
The conventions became a quadrennial gathering of the party faithful. Sure, most of the decisions were made by power brokers in the smoke-filled rooms, but delegates loved to get together and hoist a few brews while talking politics. It was a good bonding ritual for the parties, and entirely in character for a country whose founding revolution was hatched and planned in the taverns of Philadelphia and Boston.
Eventually, as democratic spirit spread, state-level primary elections developed. The delegate system was similar to the now much-despised Electoral College: Voters chose a slate of delegates who would then go to the national convention to cast proxy votes for their candidates during the roll call nominating session. Thus, John F. Kennedy was elevated by the grass roots in 1960. But the conventions were still the last word, and it was — and remains, at least theoretically — possible that convention wheeling and dealing could yield a different candidate than who won the primary vote. This is what happened during the Democratic fiasco of Chicago 1968, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated after winning the California primary, and the anti-Vietnam War Eugene McCarthy, who held an lead in pledged delegates, was passed over in favor of Hubert Humphrey, who hadn’t received a single primary vote. The party was bitterly divided, and Humphrey went on to lose to Richard Nixon. Since then, other attempts at old-fashioned convention shenanigans, such as Ronald Reagan’s run at Gerald Ford in 1976, have fizzled.
The modern convention is a coming out party for the candidates, and an opportunity for ambitious young politicos to get some exposure on the biggest possible stage. The conventions routinely attract the largest audiences of campaign season, doing not-quite Super Bowl numbers, but close, even in our fragmented media world. As such, the conventions have become made-for-TV spectacles with a political par-tay attached.
But here in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has made gathering the party faithful in a big arena an extremely bad idea. Who is going to conduct a campaign if an outbreak lays low your cadre of enthusiasts? Faced with an unprecedented problem, the parties were forced to scramble for solutions. Being the party out of power in the White House, the Democratic Party went first. Instead of gathering en mass in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, they did what everyone else has done: gone virtual.
Children singing the national anthem at the 2020 Democratic National Convention
This could have been a disaster. Indeed, I was expecting a disaster when I tuned in for the first night of the Democratic convention on Monday. The festivities kicked off with a virtual “Star Spangled Banner” sung by a chorus of children who appeared only in separated images resembling a giant Zoom chat. It was a little corny, but hey, we’re talking about a political convention here, not a Cardi B show.
(Man, it would be great to be able to go to a show right now.)
For everyone who has ever had their Zoom meetings delayed by participants trying to figure out how to unmute themselves or bandwidth issues slowing conversation to a crawl, glitches are an expected feature of business and social gatherings. But aside from the occasional minor hiccup, the virtual Democratic National Convention has gone smoothly.
It has also been unexpectedly compelling, in a way that is tough to put a finger on. There is a certain primal power in a mass rally, with shoulder-to-shoulder masses cheering a single champion, elevated on a pedestal. The first person to exploit that power in moving images was none other than Adolph Hitler. With the help of his favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, he used the Nuremberg rally of 1935 to deify himself to his followers. The response in democratic societies has been mixed since the defeat of fascism in 1945. Punk rock, for example, was in its own way a response to the fascistic spectacle of arena rock. Donald Trump, more than any contemporary politician, understands the power of the rally, both to energize his followers and attract the cameras of national media outlets. But this virtual Democratic convention has seen none of that. If the Democrats are trying to differentiate their brand from Trumpism, it has worked. Instead of Trump’s seething ball of white nationalist resentment, nominee Joe Biden has been seen sitting calmly on a teleconference, listening to the problems of average Americans.
The lack of a podium has been a great equalizer. Normal people, like Amtrak conductor Greg Weaver and elevator operator Jacquelyn Brittany are exactly the same size as political power players like Bill Clinton and Chuck Schumer. There’s something bracingly honest about seeing the best speaker of the convention so far, Michelle Obama, deliver her impassioned plea for national sanity while sitting alone, just like everyone else. The convention is speaking the painfully familiar visual language of the Zoom call. The keynote address took advantage of the form by editing together 14 speakers, including Memphis-area state Senator Raumesh Akbari.
The keynote address, featuring Georgia’s Stacy Abrams (center) and Tennessee state Senator Raumesh Akbari (top right)
Best of all has been the Roll Call, the tradition where the delegates from each state are called on to formally enter their vote for the nominee. Normally, this would done on the convention floor, with delegates in funny hats shouting “The Hoosier State casts 11 votes for Bernie Sanders and 89 votes for Joe Biden!” into microphones. For the virtual convention, delegates picked spots in their states and delivered the votes virtually. The first voters, from Alabama, cast their votes from the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma, where the recently mourned John Lewis and other civil rights marchers were beaten to within an inch of their lives on Bloody Sunday. Puerto Rico’s delegates delivered their votes in Spanish. The lone Kansan spoke from the middle of a field. Rhode Island used the opportunity to introduce America to its state dish of calamari. The whole affair distilled the essence of American democracy: The real power rests not with the bigwigs, but with the normal people in their little towns, giving their consent to be governed, not ruled. The form may be different out of pandemic necessity, but it has proved unexpectedly poignant.
Classic SNL-era writer/comic-turned-senator Al Franken was the guest speaker at the Tennessee delegation’s first breakfast meeting at the Democratic National Convention.
Here are some of Franken’s comments: “I’m very excited about this convention. I’m really looking forward to the speakers. I’ll give you an example of the contrast between [the Republican] Convention and our convention. They had Scott Baio. We’re going to have President Barack Obama.
“I talked to Bernie [Sanders] last night, and I’m really looking forward to his speech this evening. I know Bernie will be urging unity because there’s so much at stake, and you know how much is at stake from watching last week’s convention. That was one of the ugliest conventions I’ve ever seen, and the acceptance speech by Donald Trump was one of the scariest I’ve ever seen. What he basically did was present a dark, ugly picture of America. There are problems with America. There’s no question about that, but he gave us no solutions to any of them. He gave magical thinking. He’s going to defeat ISIS, and it’s going to happen fast.”
Body Talk
Sexism was rampant in the streets of Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. So remember, every time you share on Facebook that picture of Donald Trump with a small penis, you make this seem okay to some people. And this shouldn’t be okay to anybody.
As a gag, the Memphis city councilman sent out an e-mail purporting to distance himself from an upstart “Myron Lowery For President” movement at the Democratic National Convention, which starts Monday in Denver.
“I’m trying to stop some of my friends from placing my name in nomination for president,” Lowery says in the e-mail. He is a superdelegate to the convention.
The do-it-yourself video link — variations of which have been circulating for several weeks — features a bogus television reporter for “News 3” talking about “a growing grassroots movement born on the Internet to elect a virtual unknown to the office of president.”
The video clip has all the requisite features, including a talk-show host and former model, mock political analyst Dr. Arnold Franklin, a reporter spouting inanities about “people from all walks of life,” and a grandmother who turns her butt to the camera and displays a “Lowery for President” tattoo on her bare lower back.
I confess that it didn’t seem implausible. Lowery, a former television news reporter and anchor, has run or thought about running for political positions including convention delegate, council member, Charter Commission member, and mayor.
The list of people who really sought or are seeking the Democratic presidential nomination this year includes (in addition to Barack Obama) D.R. Hunter, Willie Carter, Randy Crow, Lee Mercer, Frank Lynch, and Grover Cleveland Mullins. And, of course, Stephen Colbert. Why not Myron?
“You were not alone,” Lowery told me this week. He said he showed the spoof to fellow council member Janis Fullilove, and “she looked at it and her mouth dropped.”
Lowery has been to every Democratic convention but one since 1988. He has been a delegate four times. Next week he is supporting Obama, although he began the year as a Hillary Clinton supporter.
“I will not be voting for her” when her name is placed in nomination, despite several entreaties from Hillary diehards to remain true, Lowery says.
In a way, that’s too bad. National political conventions need some drama and unscripted suspense. There used to be actual battles over who would get the nomination, what the platform committee would do, whether a peace plank would be adopted, and whether some state’s delegates would walk out.
Now the conventions are giant four-day parties for political insiders. They’re programming for television between the Summer Olympics and the start of the new fall shows. Watching them is a little like attending the Memphis in May barbecue contest as a spectator and watching the tents full of people drinking, cooking, eating, and having fun.
If the Democrats or Republicans want a plank for their platform that really gets people excited, they should support moving up the opening weekend of the college football season to the first week of August, damn the heat, baseball, and summer vacation. Give red-blooded Americans what we want.
We’ve overdosed on the Olympics, and there is almost another week to go. We know way too much about Shawn Johnson’s quest for the elusive gold, about Misty and Kerri and Phil and Todd and beach volleyball, about synchronized diving and the secret to Chinese dominance.
I don’t want to read another Geoff Calkins column about the danger of cycling in Beijing, the brilliance of the Chinese in ping-pong, or the lovable losers of swimming. I don’t want to watch Bob Costas, with the seriousness of a judge at a murder trial, question Bela Karolyi about the unfairness of gymnastics judging or see Brian Williams and Katie Couric coming to you from the Bird’s Nest.
I don’t want to watch conventions orchestrated in every detail as the culmination of an endless campaign to pick the leader of the free world, appease the Clintons, and choose a running mate for a job once compared to “a bucket of warm spit.”
I don’t want a flat world and global marketing and China against the U.S.
I want a flat field and Ole Miss against Memphis, surrounded by a crowd of people screaming about something that pretends to no more or less importance than first downs, interceptions, touchdowns, and bragging rights.
