Democrats have Oprah and Tom Hanks. Republicans have Scott Baio and Angelina Jolie’s dad. Yet somehow, the latter pulled off the impossible, putting together a mostly virtual Republican National Convention at the eleventh hour with nearly seamless production value. It was shockingly better than last week’s Democratic National Convention.
The RNC suffered from inevitably disjointed messaging with the dissonance of Tim Scott and Nikki Haley’s both traditional and forward-thinking manifestos versus the angry diatribes of Donald Trump Jr. against an extremist straw man of Joe Biden. And of course, the whole thing was plagued by President Trump’s inability to let party politics mean anything other than Trump. But as a matter of pure production, it’s hard to imagine where there was room for improvement. Save for the charmless string of delegate votes rushed through rather than celebrated at the DNC, the whole RNC’s production was largely indistinguishable from a cable news prime-time production. And that’s a good thing!
Biden successfully ran as the return to normalcy candidate. As such, he could afford to have a slightly less seamless convention than in normal years. But the Democrats didn’t have a slightly less seamless convention. They had an audio and visual assault, an utter production disaster of both practical and artistic implications. During a time of crisis, voters don’t want grand and formal conventions replaced by strangers awkwardly Zoom-calling Diana Ross’s daughter who’s standing in the same room I’m pretty sure Billy Mays once used to sell OxiClean. And it sure as hell doesn’t inspire confidence that the mayor of D.C. couldn’t even properly read a teleprompter during a livestream. And quite frankly, the mix of Democratic politicos posing outside in horrific filming conditions and those on cringeworthy Zoom calls just felt unprofessional. It beggars belief that the DNC didn’t put Lorne Michaels and Trevor Noah on speed dial to coordinate prime-time production value.
The RNC just showed how it’s done. Speakers standing at a podium with pristine filming conditions felt dignified, even if some of the speeches were not, and those who did film from separate locations all looked professionally done, as it should be. This isn’t a virtual high school science fair. It’s a national convention with a tradition dating back to before the Civil War.
The DNC felt, at best, like an infomercial and, at worst, tawdry public access television. The RNC felt like a cable news production, and sans Jon Voight’s opening voice-over, they did it without one assist from Hollywood.
