Tonight the thrill ride ends, and the hard work begins

It’s been something, hasn’t it, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago?  Can you think of one thing you’d have done differently?  I can’t.

Do you know how difficult it was to pull off, especially with just a month to rejigger the whole thing from President Biden to Vice President Harris?  Thirty days!  A new theme, new placards, new speakers with new speeches and a new schedule to present them, and all kinds of backstage maneuvering to smooth the way, soothe wounded egos, and invite a whole new cast of bit players like the former players on Coach Walz’s football team and probably Oprah Winfrey herself, who has endorsed only one candidate for president before this – Barack Obama in 2008.

Not to mention new music, special new filmed testimonials by people from the lives of Tim Walz and Kamala Harris, new montages and home videos from their lives, travel and lodging arrangements for the new cast of players onstage and on the convention floor...

I could go on, but suffice to say that there were many, many sleepless nights endured by many, many Democratic Party officials and workers since July 21 to put on the spectacular display of party unity and outright celebration and, yes, joy that we have witnessed this week.

How successful was it?  You need look no further than Donald Trump’s sparsely attended rally in North Carolina yesterday and his robotic remarks the day before to a few hand-picked cops in a parking garage beneath the county sheriff’s office in a Michigan town that was once the state headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.  Signaling much to his drooling racist base?  He went all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign launch in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the scene of the racist murders of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in 1964 to revisit the patented Republican campaign idea of featuring racist landmarks.  Trump’s rants went from “I’m a better looking person than Kamala” last Sunday to claiming on Fox and Friends this morning that President Biden “sent comrade Kamala to see Putin in Russia three days before the attack on Ukraine,” an assertion that even Fox News had to issue a correction about after Trump’s call-in ended.

Halting, disoriented, confused, and enraged describes Trump’s reaction over the last four days to the Democratic National Convention.  Some wag even posted side-by-side videos of the roll calls of the states at both conventions, with all-white gaggles of country-club Republicans desultorily reading off the name of their states and the state birds and flowers before casting their votes for Trump, compared with the euphoria of diverse state delegations at the DNC passing the mics around as a DJ on stage played songs picked for each state and the convention hall erupted in cheers and applause.  It was a contrast not just of two political parties but two Americas, fitting the theme of the Democrats in Chicago – this is who we are, this is the way the freedom we believe in looks, come join us.

I’ve spent the week watching the cynicism of hardened old political reporters crack and then disintegrate as they watched first the emergence of Kamala Harris and then her convention.  Listen to Frank Bruni of the New York Times, a no-nonsense reporter who once wrote a hard-assed profile of yours truly when one of my books was published and who, during our interviews, never uttered a personal word or comic aside trying to draw me out:

“I can’t stop noticing and basking in her happy face. Actually, happy doesn’t do it justice — it’s exuberant. Sometimes even ecstatic. When she made her surprise appearance onstage in Chicago during the prime-time portion of the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, she beamed so brightly I reached for my sunglasses. When she high-fived her running mate’s wife, Gwen Walz, during a campaign rally in Rochester, Pa., the day before, she sparkled like a gemstone. Even when she talked about the economy — the economy! — in Raleigh, N.C., two days before that, she found places and pauses for her mouth to widen and her eyes to light up. Those smiles of hers communicate an elation that I immediately want to share, an optimism that I instantly want to embrace…Which presidential candidate would I most want to have a beer with? Harris — hands down. She’s the fun to Donald Trump’s fear-mongering, the fizzy wine to his flat whine. She might even let me talk a bit, to judge by her stump speeches, reasonable in length and restrained in self-obsession. He’d just insist that I listen to a litany of the injustices done to him and nod and nod until I finally nodded off.”

I mean, does the word “gushing” work here, or should we go straight to “worshipful”?

Bruni isn’t the only one.  Political pro Joe Klein, who wrote “Primary Colors,” a roman-a-clef about the Clintons and the 1992 primary campaign, along with a raft of political columns for TIME and The New Yorker, will have to sentence himself to time in a Pilates studio to recover from the twists and turns he has negotiated trying to keep himself from gushing over the emergence of Kamala and the outright excellence of her campaign over the last month.  Steve Schmidt, the never-Trumper and former Republican political operative who managed the John McCain campaign in 2008, has simply and admittedly embarrassed himself in his Substack column with his enthusiasm for first Kamala Harris and then Tim Walz.

Watching the convention this week, I have looked down several times to find my own political cynicism in pieces at my feet.  How could I not?  Tracy and I have bruised ribs from nudging each other and cracking up as we sat on the couch listening to speakers like Hillary and Michelle and Barack score one zinger after another on Trump without even seeming to try. 

I’ve read a few cautionary columns saying that Kamala will have to be careful how she “defines herself” in her speech tonight, and I have to say that I’m so sick and tired of all the talk about “defining” Harris, I could croak.  The New York Times even weighed in yesterday with a story by the Trump Whisperer duo of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan titled, “Democrats Use the Convention to Try to Define Trump as a Self-Interested Fraud,” ignoring the obvious fact that Trump defines himself every single time he opens his mouth.  That his handlers have spent the last month trying to keep Trump focused on the teleprompter with little success tells you all you need to know about how worried they are that some of Trump’s own self-definition has begun to break through and is showing up in his plummeting poll numbers.

Tonight is the Big One, of course.  I will hazard a guess that some of the most relaxed people on the planet are on the Harris speechwriting team.  She could get up there and read the phone book with that smile on her face, and the crowd in Chicago and watching on television around the country would go wild. 

But self-assurance and a great smile isn’t enough, even for the best political candidate Democrats have had since Barack Obama.  Don’t forget that in 2008, Obama’s victory was ascribed afterwards to the success of the fund raising by his “digital team” and the excellence of his get out the vote efforts.  Kamala Harris has the fund-raising thing well in hand, and reports from the battleground states say that her get out the vote machine is well-oiled and already going at top speed.

Trump once again said the quiet part out loud when he told a rally in North Carolina yesterday that they didn’t have to worry about voting because “we have enough votes,” and his focus will be on Democrats “cheating.”  That sort of arrogant self-confidence can be read in only one way:  they aren’t trying to turn out their own voters as much as they will be trying to stymie Democrat voters as they try to register and vote between now and the election.  After election day, they plan on challenging the vote count and when the recounts don’t go their way, they’ll allege fraud and try to muck up the assignment of electoral votes in battleground states, and if that doesn’t work, they’ll try to challenge the certification of electoral ballots on Jan. 6.

Sound familiar?  Of course it does.  The Harris-Walz campaign already knows that they will have to win in battleground states by record numbers if they are going to win this election and be inaugurated next January 20.  That’s the work ahead of us.  Watch Kamala’s speech tonight with joy in your hearts and then roll up your sleeves tomorrow.  There is a lot of work to be done between now and November 5, and if we do it and we do it well, we will win this thing.  How about that!