David Michael Miller
I have been doing all that I can to ignore the goings on in Philly this week.
Political conventions are so 1968.
What I mean by that is that 1968 was the last time a convention changed the outcome of an election. You can make the case that the eruptions inside and outside the Democratic convention in Chicago that year cost Hubert Humphrey the election and sent Richard Nixon to the White House.
The massive discord in Chicago not only showed the Democrats to be deeply divided, but it played right into Nixon’s narrative as the candidate of law and order. Humphrey dug himself out of a huge hole coming out of Chicago and was gaining on Nixon by November. It turned out to be a close election. A case can be made that without the mess at the convention, Humphrey would have won, Nixon would have lost again, and the nation’s history would have been dramatically different (and better).
But since then have conventions mattered? Not so much. In 1972 the Democrats were a mess yet again. George McGovern couldn’t make his acceptance speech until the wee hours of the morning, when only insomniacs were listening. But McGovern was way out of touch with where most of the country was by that point anyway, and he would have lost by a mile regardless of how his convention went.
In 1976, the fight between the bland but reasonable Jerry Ford and the charismatic if right-wing-crazy Ronald Reagan made that year’s Republican convention good drama. But in the last analysis it wasn’t the convention that cost Ford the election. It might have been his pardoning of Nixon and his failure to grasp and harness the Reagan Revolution.
And Barack Obama made his name at a convention, but it was the 2004 convention, which nominated John Kerry. Obama gave the keynote address and became an instant contender for 2008. That convention contributed to what happened four years later, but it didn’t make or break Kerry, who was probably broken by the appalling “Swift Boat Veterans” attacks that followed in August.
Today’s conventions seem like just a lot of shouting and snide attacks on the other guys. For real partisans it’s a pep rally. But for most Americans it won’t move the needle at all.
This election comes down to a simple choice between the establishment, represented by Hillary Clinton, and the anti-establishment, represented by Donald Trump. It just doesn’t matter how good Michelle Obama’s speech was. If you hate the establishment, you’ve already made up your mind.
We should realize by now that Trump voters just don’t care that he gets his facts wrong and that he says one outrageous and ludicrous thing after another. Heck, the guy could even ask the Russians to do better at spying on us — something akin to treason — and not suffer for it.
What matters to Trump voters is that a vote for him is a sharp punch in the face to the establishment. Many of them acknowledge all that’s wrong with him, and yet their anger is so intense, they’re willing to risk our national security, our economy, the very foundations of our nation, just to send their message. They block out all details and hear only that Trump shares their hatred for the status quo.
So the Republican convention, for all its chaos, just reinforced the big theme that Trump is different. And the Democratic convention (while not without its drama) was, well, conventional. Yeah, the Bernie or Bust folks made some noise, and yes, the DNC chair was forced out, but for the most part it was a convention like any other convention. Which, for the Democrats, is precisely the problem.
I often think that we might be heading for a post-partisan America where the two parties, as we know them, are history, along with their conventions. You can imagine a political world of loose, virtual associations of smallish groups that coalesce over a candidate for one election, then disperse and re-form in a different coalition at the next election.
Maybe that’ll happen, or maybe not. What’s for sure is that what happened in Cleveland and Philadelphia this month will be long forgotten come November.
