United States, between copies and losers the curtain has fallen on the convention-show –

Lucio Martin

August 24, 2024

In the United States, national conventions have evolved into huge multimedia events carefully planned to highlight the personalities to whom the country should be entrusted, rather than the programmatic contents. To this end, the four-day Democratic Convention in Chicago was organized into two different phases, the first of which was much more interesting than the second. The first, which spanned two days, featured the most illustrious exponents of a gerontocracy that has recently demonstrated that it controls the present and decides the future of the party to the point of being able to change long-established rules and procedures on the fly. In the second, the same gerontocracy handed over the stage to the two people chosen to maintain control of the White House: Governor Tim Walz and Vice President Kamala Harris. Both, in their acceptance speeches, stood out for their attempt to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Harris administration they have been part of since day one, and to attribute all the evils to the Republicans, ignoring the fact that three of the last four administrations have been led by Democrats.

The first day of the convention was dedicated to the two biggest losers of the entire Democratic establishment, namely Hillary Clinton, defeated in the 2016 presidential elections, and Joe Biden, destined to go down in history as the only candidate to have lost the White House in July of the election year, instead of in November like all the others. Hillary Clinton, once again, demonstrated that she was unable to overcome the defeat suffered at the hands of Donald Trump, so much so that the most relevant part of her speech was a direct attack against the former president. Biden, a true party man, behaved as if he were a president at the end of a second term and, as such, unable by law to run again, rather than a president forced, very reluctantly, to withdraw from his own entourage. The place reserved for losers by the Democratic Party was made clear by a schedule that excluded Hillary Clinton from the peak time slot and buried the incumbent president under an almost endless list of minor speakers, so much so that he was only allowed to speak at 11:30 in Chicago and 12:30 in New York, so that very few people would be able to follow him live in a speech with which Biden effectively closed out half a century of his political career.

The second day was instead the domain of the big winners, having as protagonists, obviously at very different times than those reserved for Biden, personalities of the caliber of Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer and the Obamas. The common goal of their speeches was to argue that Kamala Harris is both ready and prepared to assume the office of president of the United States. Perhaps because of their undisputed prestige, Sander, Schumer and the Obamas did not perceive the need to support this statement with any element, other than the trust placed in them by their public, despite the fact that in the four years spent in the Senate Harris stood out for not having proposed a single bill, while in the three and a half years as vice president she did if possible even less, so much so as to have long fueled not a few doubts, within her own party, about the opportunity of her presidency. Overall, the Democratic convention in Chicago was a relatively boring event, devoid of any real news even from a media point of view, especially in the eyes of those who still remember the convention in Denver that sanctioned Obama’s candidacy for the 2008 presidential elections. Even “yes she can”, the slogan around which the event was structured, is directly borrowed from that “yes we can” which was Barack Obama’s battle cry.