Freedom freedom I can’t move. Freedom, cut me loose. As those lyrics from Beyonce’s song “Freedom” echoed throughout Chicago’s United Center, Kamala Harris greeted the Democratic National Convention. Cutting loose was the attempted theme of the DNC: from Joe Biden’s legacy, from Harris’s past policy positions, and from the bitter political combat of the past decade.
The presumptive nominee until just over a month ago, President Joe Biden has now been sent to a political Elba by his own party. On Monday, he didn’t get to speak until almost 11:30 p.m. in the East, and he was not at the convention in person for Harris’s acceptance of the nomination. In her speech, Harris mentioned him only a few times. Aside from calling Biden’s record “extraordinary,” she offered little defense of it. Indeed, she barely talked about being vice president at all.
Biden’s speech on Monday struck a different note than many of the other DNC addresses. Falling back into the patterns of the Senate, Biden unfurled a laundry list of his policies and specific proposals. Biden’s shouting delivery matched the speech’s angry tone. Many other primetime speakers instead led with broad strokes about patriotism, opportunity, and Harris herself.
Like the Republican National Convention last month, this year’s Democratic convention was organized around the idea that the persona is the political. Harris’s acceptance speech focused on her biography, not a set of policy proposals. She has tried to present herself as the change candidate, and the only way to do that is to avoid talking about her time in federal office—she is, after all, the sitting vice president of the United States. She delved into her record as a prosecutor and as California attorney general but glossed over her Senate years. Harris’s speech signaled that she wants to make this election a contest of personal qualities (an arena that favors her, according to many polls) rather than policy specifics.
In her failed 2020 primary bid, Harris tried to win over the progressive Left by laying out specific proposals. This year, she’s doing the opposite by coasting on aspirational statements. She pledged to create an “opportunity economy” and “end America’s housing shortage,” without explaining how. There’s something very California about Harris’s campaign. Because Democrats have an electoral lock on the Golden State, the real battle for political power often happens in the backrooms, not the public square. Hence, Harris’s approach to political economy is more about organizing support than sketching out policy. Her economic vision somehow would bring together “labor and workers, small business owners and entrepreneurs, and American companies to create jobs”—never mind the details.
Even the official Democratic Party platform is muddled. Many parts of the text still refer to Joe Biden’s “second term,” and much of the language consists of a retrospective survey of his actions as president. Its concrete promises are rarer than its complaints about Donald Trump. Despite the “land acknowledgment” that opens the document, the platform is to some extent less “woke” than its predecessors. Both the 2016 and 2020 platforms railed against “systemic racism,” a term that does not appear in the 2024 platform. Perhaps to counter the perception that Democrats are soft on crime, this platform also drops the call to abolish the death penalty (which had been featured in the two preceding platforms). Like so much else from the convention, the platform seems designed to avoid unpleasant soundbites.
If political conventions are messaging operations, this week’s performance offers some insights into how Democrats view the political landscape. They recognize “wokeness” circa 2020 as a vulnerability. Multiple speakers—including Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—urged attendees to be more respectful of the opinions of those who disagree with them. During Donald Trump’s presidency, elite progressive institutions often succumbed to the message that the United States was fundamentally tainted from its inception. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, appointed by Biden to be ambassador to the United Nations, said in 2021 that “white supremacy” was woven “into our founding documents and principles.” Calling the United States “the greatest nation on Earth,” Harris forcefully rejected this “tainted America” worldview last night.
Democrats also seem to be gambling on abortion as a key issue for driving out their base. Harris and many other speakers highlighted the issue. In a tacit admission of the political dangers of the border crisis, Harris tried to position herself as a supporter of border controls (even though the border deal she supports may have more teeth in appearance than reality). Democrats pushed a message of economic populism, and—especially on the night featuring vice presidential nominee Tim Walz—tried to send some small-town cultural signals.
Watching the Democratic Convention, I was reminded not so much of Chicago 1968—a replay of which some feared—as River City 1912. In Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, the traveling salesman Harold Hill comes to the fictitious Iowa town to sell music instruments for a boys’ band that he has no intention of forming. He has to save them from the moral danger of the pool table, after all: “Trouble, with a capital ‘T’ and that rhymes with ‘P’ and that stands for “Pool.” The Music Man celebrates these twin American loves of small-town life and customer service. Hill is a master of delay and promising substance that is—don’t worry—just around the corner.
This DNC could be seen as the Music Man convention. When the former players of his championship-winning high-school football team came out in their jerseys to introduce Walz, I almost expected to hear “Seventy-Six Trombones” play. Instead of the pool table, the great threat to America was Donald Trump: we’re not going back, with a capital “B” and that rhymes with “T” and that stands for “Trump.” Harris has avoided on-the-record interactions with the media, and even her policies get adjudicated mostly through spokesmen. As Nevada senator and Harris ally Catherine Cortez Masto told RealClearPolitics, “we need to continue to ensure that we are flexible when it comes to solving the problems of this country.” The Harris campaign has so far angled to keep her policy program in the same place as Harold Hill’s music lessons: the imagination.
The Harris campaign is betting on America’s exhaustion with the politics of hyper-polarization, but it remains to be seen whether she will be able to deliver Americans from it. Harris has not been Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, zigging when other Democrats zag. Instead, she has generally positioned herself on the party’s leftmost edge. She embraced “wokeness” in its high-summer days and, now that the weather has cooled, has joined other Democrats in trying to insulate herself from it. But while her campaign gestures at turning the page on toxic political conflict, she has endorsed Biden’s “court reform” package and indicated willingness to use the nuclear option on the Senate filibuster. Undermining separation of powers, these positions would make American politics even more fraught. The same institutional dreadnought that constructed this week’s enthusiasm in Chicago also built the policy record that Democrats now so “joyfully” leave behind.
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