Democrats pitch a very big tent
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is a progressive movement leader, but he used much of his time Monday to make a case against Trump that will appeal far beyond the left.
“This election is about preserving our democracy,” Sanders declared. “As long as I am here, I will work with progressives, with moderates and, yes, with conservatives to preserve this nation from a threat that so many of our heroes fought and died to defeat.”
And four Republicans, including three prominent women the GOP used to brag about, made the case that others in their party should be comfortable voting for former vice president Joe Biden. “Many of us can’t imagine four more years going down this path,” said former Ohio Republican governor John Kasich, who reassured members of his party that Biden would not “turn sharp left.”
If there was something peculiar about a convention transformed into a Zoom meeting, the format certainly had its benefits for the Biden campaign. It was able to distill its message without the distractions of a convention floor, dissenting delegates or commentators regularly breaking in to opine on the proceedings. By the end of the night, three of the campaign’s goals were unmistakable.
First, the Biden team is not playing at the edges. It is going for a landslide by igniting core Democratic constituencies and then reaching out far beyond them.
If this felt like any convention, it was the 1964 Democratic gathering when Lyndon B. Johnson’s champions painted Barry Goldwater as an extremist far outside the political mainstream. This time, Trump was cast as a president who ignored the norms and values that all of his predecessors had, in principle at least, honored.
The evening was thus a series of juxtapositions.
The first hour focused heavily on support for new movements of racial justice, sending a clear message that Biden did not take Black voters, the Democrats’ most loyal constituency, for granted. But it was followed by the Republican testimonials — from Kasich, former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, former New York representative Susan Molinari and Meg Whitman, the chief executive of Quibi. Voting for Biden, they said, was an act on behalf of the nation, not a party.
Sanders carried both sides of this message himself. He stressed how progressive many of Biden’s proposals are. He praised his movement for transforming the nation’s political conversation and moving ideas once considered radical into the mainstream.
But more than any other speaker, he spoke forcefully of the threat Trump poses to democratic government itself, coming back again and again to concerns that motivate opposition to Trump among dissident Republicans and conservatives.
“Under this administration, authoritarianism has taken root in our country,” Sanders declared. “The future of our democracy is at stake.”
The second goal is closely related to the first: National unity will be a resonant Biden theme. All the speeches, songs and personal stories drove home the need to overcome the divisions of race, party and ideology that Trump has aggravated.
Militancy for civil rights was linked to racial reconciliation. Overcoming a pandemic, as New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) argued, meant linking an empathetic public devoted to service to competent government.
Or, as Obama put it: “I know the goodness and the grace that is out there in households and neighborhoods all across this nation. And I know that regardless of our race, age, religion or politics, when we close out the noise and the fear and truly open our hearts, we know that what’s going on in this country is just not right.”
The third goal is obvious but no less important for being so: This year, Democrats will prosecute the case against Trump with a relentlessness that their often fractious party has not been able to muster. Thus did Obama put a footnote on her uplifting motto that, when others go low, “we go high.”
“Going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty,” she said Monday. “Going high means standing fierce against hatred while remembering that we are one nation under God, and if we want to survive, we’ve got to find a way to live together and work together across our differences.”
If nothing else, Monday night portrayed a party determined to “work together across our differences.” And it was Trump, not just the format, that worked this miracle for Democrats.
Read more:
