You know the first two nights of the Republicans’ virtual national convention have gone well when you see that Politico’s Playbook led off with a lame joke aimed at reviving Democrats’ conspiracy theory about the Postal Service, that the agency is hiring a new lobbyist. Har har har.
The more pertinent news is that both parties have adapted deftly to the virtual format. Democrats invented an amusing roll-call procedure, showing people from each state touting its virtues, and Republicans even improved on it a little.
Democrats did a good job of highlighting Joe Biden’s attractive personal qualities by showing people he’s helped and comforted. Republicans showed President Trump’s attractive qualities — he actually has some — by showing him interacting with people as he pardoned one reformed bank robber and swore in five new citizens.
The Republicans had the advantage of going second, as the incumbent presidential party traditionally does, and they capitalized on it. After the Democrats confidently assumed that everyone thinks Trump is a racist and xenophobe, his convention spotlighted former Gov. Nikki Haley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India, and Sen. Tim Scott, whose family “went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime.”
The message is that America is not permeated with “systemic racism,” as the New York Times’s 1619 Project would have you believe, but rather is a land of opportunity. Even Haley’s and Scott’s South Carolina. And progress is both possible and, in fact, happening. Scott holds the seat once held for 35 years by segregationist “Cotton Ed” Smith.
Another contrast: Democrats had their virtual sessions introduced by Hollywood figures, one of whom somehow got the idea that it would be funny to mispronounce the current vice president’s one-syllable surname. Republicans interspersed their first two sessions with ordinary people from target states who have come to support Trump strongly.
There may be some demographic groups that value the insights of Hollywood figures with multimillion-dollar mansions in Bel Air or Brentwood. But probably more voters will be swayed by the pro-Trump testimony of lobsterman Joe Lane of Damariscotta, Maine; dairy farmer Cris Peterson of Grantsburg, Wisconsin; and trucker Geno DiFabio of Youngstown, Ohio.
What goes unmentioned is sometimes as important as what’s mentioned. Viewers of the Democrats’ virtual proceedings heard much less about abortion than viewers of their more conventional conventions, even though it’s an issue that, according to dial groups, helped Democrats in previous presidential and vice presidential debates.
One reason is that Democrats have moved way left on the issue. Joe Biden has abandoned four decades of opposing government-funded abortions. And Democratic legislators have delighted in passing laws authorizing abortions in all nine months of pregnancies.
Republicans’ Tuesday speakers included former Planned Parenthood clinic head Abby Johnson, who provided “pretty graphic” descriptions of abortion procedures. The best a squirming Washington Post “fact-checker” could do, as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru noted, was to argue that there aren’t that many (actually, several thousand yearly) post-viability abortions.
Left utterly unmentioned by the Democrats were the continued violence and the sharp increases in murders in major cities across the country — in Portland and Seattle, Minneapolis and Washington, Chicago and New York, and in smaller places, such as Kenosha, Wisconsin, this week.
They may have hoped that friends in the “mainstream media” (or at least that’s the term employed by the famously libeled Covington Catholic teenager Nicholas Sandmann) would continue to shield viewers from uncomfortable footage of rioting, assaults, and arson, as it’s been doing. They may hope that they won’t notice that reports describing “mostly peaceful” demonstrations are standing in front of raging fires or when CNN yanked a chyron from the screen and deleted the adjective “violent” before the noun “protest.”
The broadcast networks and cable also-rans MSNBC and CNN obviously hope that viewers won’t notice horrifying damage that reflects badly on the partly Marxist-led Black Lives Matter movement or the Biden-Harris campaign. They had some basis for believing that covering up the news would work when, in the immediate aftermath of the death of George Floyd on May 24, polls found that most voters supported Black Lives Matter and were sympathetic to its argument that American policing is “systemically racist.” But current polling, after nearly three months of violence and destruction and rising murder rates, shows much less support for depolicing cities large and small.
In 2016, Democrats were smugly confident, until 9:00 p.m. EDT on election night, that demographics would guarantee them victory. This year, they’ve been confident that Trump’s low job approval, COVID-19, and the lockdown’s economic devastation would do the same, even as Democrats stake out extreme political stances that Bill Clinton in his prime would have shunned.
Maybe they have grounds for such confidence. But maybe not. This week, Trump’s Republicans are having their say.
