2020 Democratic National Convention Discussion Thread (August 17-20)
- Thread starter mc_brew
- Start date
Tony D'Amato
It's all about the inches
Maga gear is made in china
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Good night for Joe
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
@Secure Da Bag
On June 27, 2019, viewers of the second night of the first round of the Democratic presidential debates enjoyed what appeared to be a light diversion. There were 10 candidates crowded onstage, including the future presidential and vice-presidential nominees, and they tended to get in each other’s way. Amid the confusion and early campaign fumbling, the most entertaining figure was the longshot candidate and bestselling author Marianne Williamson, who combined a startling boldness—”The Democratic party should be on the side of reparations for slavery”—with some fuzzy-seeming spiritual poetic rhetoric, in a way that sounded wholly out of place.
Her closing remarks, in particular, were nothing like what anybody else was saying:
I’m sorry we haven’t talked more tonight about how we’re going to beat Donald Trump. I have an idea about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not going to be beaten just by insider politics talk. He’s not going to be beaten just by somebody who has plans. He’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea of what this man has done. This man has reached into the psyche of the American people and he’s harnessed fear for political purposes. So, Mr. President, if you’re listening, I want you to hear me please. You have harnessed fear for political purposes and only love can cast that out. So, I, sir, I have a feeling you know what you’re doing. I’m going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field and sir, love will win.
It was oddly stirring, but self-evidently kooky. Not something you’d hear from a real, professional politician. The campaign season carried on, and Williamson, as expected, got bumped off the stage when the debate qualifying rules tightened up. The more normal candidates, with their more normal messages about legislative records and policy proposals, took over. It was time to be serious about the election.
Thirteen months after that debate, Joe Biden gave his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, as the overwhelming choice of the voters and the party establishment. He opened by warning the viewers that the president “has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division.” Twenty-some minutes later, he circled back to that image for his grand conclusion:
With passion and purpose, let us begin—you and I together, one nation, under God—united in our love for America and united in our love for each other.
For love is more powerful than hate.
Hope is more powerful than fear.
Light is more powerful than dark.
This is our moment.
This is our mission.
May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight as love and hope and light joined in the battle for the soul of the nation.
And this is a battle that we, together, will win.
I promise you.
Marianne Williamson’s message is what the Democrats are carrying into November.
On June 27, 2019, viewers of the second night of the first round of the Democratic presidential debates enjoyed what appeared to be a light diversion. There were 10 candidates crowded onstage, including the future presidential and vice-presidential nominees, and they tended to get in each other’s way. Amid the confusion and early campaign fumbling, the most entertaining figure was the longshot candidate and bestselling author Marianne Williamson, who combined a startling boldness—”The Democratic party should be on the side of reparations for slavery”—with some fuzzy-seeming spiritual poetic rhetoric, in a way that sounded wholly out of place.
Her closing remarks, in particular, were nothing like what anybody else was saying:
I’m sorry we haven’t talked more tonight about how we’re going to beat Donald Trump. I have an idea about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not going to be beaten just by insider politics talk. He’s not going to be beaten just by somebody who has plans. He’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea of what this man has done. This man has reached into the psyche of the American people and he’s harnessed fear for political purposes. So, Mr. President, if you’re listening, I want you to hear me please. You have harnessed fear for political purposes and only love can cast that out. So, I, sir, I have a feeling you know what you’re doing. I’m going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field and sir, love will win.
It was oddly stirring, but self-evidently kooky. Not something you’d hear from a real, professional politician. The campaign season carried on, and Williamson, as expected, got bumped off the stage when the debate qualifying rules tightened up. The more normal candidates, with their more normal messages about legislative records and policy proposals, took over. It was time to be serious about the election.
Thirteen months after that debate, Joe Biden gave his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, as the overwhelming choice of the voters and the party establishment. He opened by warning the viewers that the president “has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division.” Twenty-some minutes later, he circled back to that image for his grand conclusion:
With passion and purpose, let us begin—you and I together, one nation, under God—united in our love for America and united in our love for each other.
For love is more powerful than hate.
Hope is more powerful than fear.
Light is more powerful than dark.
This is our moment.
This is our mission.
May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight as love and hope and light joined in the battle for the soul of the nation.
And this is a battle that we, together, will win.
I promise you.
Marianne Williamson’s message is what the Democrats are carrying into November.
NZA
LOL
1. solid content. there was some specifics on the virus that might mean something to the only possible undecided voters at this point which would have to be some segment white middle class suburbanites in the northern part of the country.
2. joe sounded far healthier for a longer amount of time than i remember in years
3. my god that RNC speaker lineup has to be some kind of joke. that has to be. there is no way that is serious. my god
2. joe sounded far healthier for a longer amount of time than i remember in years
3. my god that RNC speaker lineup has to be some kind of joke. that has to be. there is no way that is serious. my god
He touched all the bases. In his acceptance speech last night, Joe Biden was the economic fairness guy; no Democratic presidential nominee since Harry Truman has highlighted unions more in his acceptance speech. He was the Black Lives Matter backer, recounting his talk with George Floyd’s six-year-old daughter. He fused the green and the red, vowing to combat the climate crisis (elevating it as the fourth overlapping crisis we face, alongside racism, the economy, and the pandemic), creating millions of jobs in the process.
Strategically, Joe Biden put the pandemic right where it belongs: at the center of the election. Trump’s failure to deal with COVID, Biden argued, is the reason why the economy can’t start up, why schools must be shuttered, why schoolchildren’s parents can’t go to work. It’s not that way, he pointed out, in Canada or Europe or Japan.
In a sense, the pandemic has taken the traditional divide between the two parties, over the role of government and the role of markets, to a new level that plainly advantages the Democrats. The absence of a government policy to combat the pandemic has discredited Donald Trump’s (and Mitch McConnell’s) Republicans as surely as the absence of a government policy to combat the Great Depression discredited Herbert Hoover’s. Then, laissez faire equaled poverty; today, it equals death.
Biden cited Franklin Roosevelt early on in his acceptance speech. “Stricken by disease, stricken by a virus, FDR insisted that he would recover and prevail,” Biden said, “and he believed America could as well. And he did. And so can we.”
In Roosevelt, Biden has found a model for his own role. The convention featured numerous references, in speech and image, to the tragedies that Biden has endured. How could it not? It documented Biden’s understanding of grief and despair, and his remarkable capacity to offer counsel and hope to those experiencing them. He actually did that in his acceptance speech, directly addressing those who’d lost loved ones to COVID. And then, as perhaps a new kind of Roosevelt Democrat, he talked to a nation also in grief and despair and set forth plans and a rhetoric of healing, as if to say, as he’d argued Roosevelt did, “I came through adversity, I understand yours, and we can come through it together.”
In a way not common to presidential campaigns, the personal became the political. And one of the many damning attacks on Trump is that under him, the political—and the presidential and matters of state—has become entirely personal. As Biden noted, the sole measure of Trump’s policy is whether it’s good for Trump.
While it’s clear the vast majority of progressives will vote for Biden, many remain wary of him, and understandably so. Malleable but no down-the-line liberal, politically attuned but not the product of any great social movement, pro-labor but not one to overturn power relationships: the critiques are both familiar and valid. But the pandemic has given Biden the opportunity to champion activist government in a way that all but Trump zealots and die-hard laissez faire nutcases will support.
For all the various shortcomings in Biden’s programs, they remain the most progressive any Democratic presidential nominee has embraced in half-a-century. Moreover, Biden has one clear political advantage over his colleagues on the left when he promotes them. As Andrew Yang said during last night’s discussion among this year’s other Democratic presidential hopefuls, “the magic of Joe Biden is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable.” There are clear differences between AOC’s Green New Deal and Biden’s pledge to invest $2 trillion to arrest climate change, but when he and AOC support the same particular plank of climate policy, it sounds a lot less radical coming from Biden because he’s Biden. That won’t stop Republicans from attacking that plank, but it could swing enough centrist Democrats to turn it into law.
It was not a flawless convention. It was needlessly light on Latinos and the young, the very constituencies where Democrats will have to work hardest to turn out the vote. But it did a good job of skewering the eminently skewerable Trump (Michael Bloomberg, I’m compelled to say, did a first-rate job of that last night). And it projected Biden as what he is: a guy from the postwar white working class (which may reassure some swing voters) who’s experienced enough adversity to understand America’s particular travails inflicted by racism, sexism and the post-postwar economy. Aided by a sufficiently keen political sensibility, he’s cobbled together a program that would considerably ease some of those travails. Personally, he is a very decent fella, as about a thousand people from all walks of life echoed throughout the week. And by the evidence of his acceptance speech, he’s not sleepy at all when everything’s on the line.
Running against a dangerous racist narcissistic buffoon in a year when the certainties of normal life have gone missing, that should suffice. But it’ll take a helluva lot of work from a helluva lot of people to nail down the victory the nation so desperately needs.
Dusty Bake Activate
Fukk your corny debates
I clearly did watch and everyone saying candidates don’t say anything policy at conventions, please stopyou clearly didn't even watch
pathetic
Yes they do. I’ve been watching conventions for years and this was a substance-less convention speech. Go back and look at Obama in 2008.
NPR Choice page
Not to mention policy is way more critical than ever now because this is the worst crisis mode we’ve ever been in going into an election in a couple of generations and the status quo is clearly unsustainable.
Lol this doesn’t make any sense. When was it ever either/or? He doesn’t mention policy and he’s senile. His cognitive decline didn’t show last night though.You know the elections over when the holdouts have started to move the goalposts.
Went from “he will get destroyed he has dementia, this is elder abuse” to “he doesn’t even mention policy”
Oochie Wally or One Mic?
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Secure Da Bag
Veteran
Dusty Bake Activate
Fukk your corny debates
Objectively that speech was devoid of substance compared to even Obama in 2008, and this is during a time when institutions are breaking or broken and unsustainable in the middle of a pandemic the worst economic collapse since the great depression.
He said absolutely nothing but “Trump is bad and where a mask.” Demand better from your elected representatives, instead of bending your knee to some old racist cac. I’m supposed to applaud a bunch of platitudes about the “soul of this nation”? Yall’s sheepish acquiescence to power is pathetic. This section can be just as bad as TLR just in a different way.
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That's just silly. You wanted more substance, yes but Americans have had life dumbed down for 4 years. To be fair, Biden probably wasn't trying to reach you, he was trying to reach the average American who doesn't research and is going to vote with the person who resonates with them, regardless of policy.
You may want to argue about whether or not that decision is reasonable but you need to take it in the context of the last 4 years of Trump and the fact that people want a return to normalcy as opposed to radical change.
Also I don't think the poster was telling you to shut up or calling you a bytch. That was directed to Katie Harlper. The same Katie who dropped this gem of a reach today.
Outlaw
New Hope For the HaveNotz
Listen to your daddy Bernie and vote for Biden. There’s no point in whining at this point when we’re running against an incumbent who is literally trying to destroy this soul of this nation
context matters, Biden isn’t running against Mitt Romney where both are seemingly decent politicians but have clear policy differences
Scranton Joe did it
BIG BOY BIDEN DID IT!!!!!
That was great in every aspect.Addressing multiple demographics, races and age groups. Being pro union, talking about being middle class in a way that appealed to white voters which worked, stressing unity, being a empathic figure by sharing his grief to show why he understands people's grief. Having strength and conviction in his voice and strength as a leader by standing up to dictators. Could go on.
Many people seek the moment. This moment was seeking Joe. I'm convinced.