The second night of the Democratic Unconventional had a number of noteworthy statements, speeches and appearances: a searing health care segment, terse condemnations of Trump by ex-officials, hopeful exhortations by 17 young Democratic officeholders, Cindy McCain narrating a very effective video about the friendship between John McCain and Joe Biden in more bipartisan days, and more.
Dr. Jill Biden ended the evening, speaking in an empty classroom where she once taught, addressing the nearly universal concerns right now of schools in the time of coronavirus, and emphasizing her husband's ability to solve problems and heal the nation.
Of the ex-officials, fired Attorney General Sally Yates was a particular reminder of how far back the damage goes--to apprentice dictator's opening days and the attempted Muslim ban in the early days of 2017.
Of the short speeches I heard, the best was John Kerry's, speaking as a former Secretary of State: every line a succinct and eloquent indictment of Trump's so-called foreign policy.
Senator Joe Biden met John McCain when he was the military attache assigned to him on a foreign trip. The McCain video contained a wonderful moment in which the two men later swapped speeches. McCain referred to how he carried Biden's bags on that trip. "He never carried my bags," Biden retorted. "He was supposed to, but he never did." McCain was caught laughing in delight.
Furthering the Unconventional theme, Joe Biden was officially nominated--not by a Democratic politician or movie star (Tommy Lee Jones nominated Al Gore), but by an elevator operator in the New York Times building who he befriended on his trips up and down to give the requisite interview for the newspaper's endorsement he did not get. She was cool, dignified and spoke with conviction.
But the highlight of the night by far was supposed to be the most troublesome and dull duty: the roll call of the states culminating in Biden's official nomination.
I confess I've always loved the roll call of the states, even at its most excessive, when the state spokesperson, with others crushed around them in their section on the vast and crowded, chaotic and noisy convention floor, would recite an ever more lengthy list of the state's virtues before announcing the actual vote counts.
Not that there usually was any suspense about the outcome, though there was often jockeying the numbers and order of the states to be the state that put the nominee over the top, when the convention duly erupted in shouting, loud music, a snowstorm of confetti and balloons.
This time was necessarily different, though the outcome was even less in doubt than usual. Instead of the party chair or top officeholder, each state selected meaningful representatives to make the announcement, and created tableaus in emblematic locations, often outdoors. Each state had a brief, scripted message, relating their state (or territory) to a prominent issue.
It came off beautifully. It moved briskly, there were few glitches or even hesitations. Especially for a travel-starved nation, the backgrounds were often breathtaking.
The wealth of faces, voices and accents showed off the country's diversity (even to the point of having a southern accent in Las Vegas, and a non-southern accent in deep southern states.) I was most moved by the number of Native Americans, members of tribes indigenous to that state or territory. There had to be at least a half dozen.
There were symbolic touches to remind us of this year's racial history and consciousness: Black Lives Matter St. in D.C. and a Black Lives Matter mural in Tulsa Oklahoma; a Frederick Douglass statue and a John Lewis mural, and an unheralded Carol Moseley Braun, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate, representing Illinois to endorse the ticket including the first Black woman vice presidential nominee.
There were real moments: the representatives from Iowa noting that they'd planned to talk about clean energy but instead the state was still reeling from damaging storms; a lone worker in a field in Ohio not mincing words about Trump; a plea from Puerto Rico in Spanish to be respected again as Americans. And a moment of humor that harked back to the convention floor roll calls when Rhode Island bragged on (and held out a tray of) its calamari.
For me there are multiple forms of catharsis in all of this, from the recognition of the real pain and suffering that is what it is, to a kind of catharsis in renewing the recognition of empathy and decency, and the beauty and diversity of America. The rhetoric of all that gets repetitious--in speeches it works best in specifics. But the images of it are the most important. And that's the irony here: the ongoing tragedy made a regular convention impossible, and instead made possible this Unconventional, where those images dominate.
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