The Press Box - From Chicago: The Best and Worst of the Democratic Convention With Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan is live out of the United Center in Chicago along with Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin, and they recap the Democratic Convention. They assess Kamala Harris’s speech and then hit on 10 topics: Defining Kamala Harris (8:08) How the Democrats talk about Donald Trump (10:47) The Democrats’ embrace of celebrity (15:34) Thoughts on the rollout of Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate (17:55) The return of the Obamas and Obama-isms to the Democratic Party (21:27) The Democrats claim patriotism as their own with the USA chants (25:57) Their favorite speeches (28:30) Speeches that whiffed (32:11) The vibes in the convention (35:25) What they are looking for after this convention (37:31) Plus, David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Benjy Sarlin Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck Senior Political Correspondent and host of Somebody's Got to win. Brought to you by The Ringer and Spotify. The 2024 election has been upended with Joe Biden off the ticket and Donald Trump facing a new challenger, Kamala Harris. If you want to hear what the insiders are really saying about the race, join me Tuesdays and Thursdays as I break it all down with lawmakers, journalists, and political strategists. We'll go deeper than the headlines to the anxieties at the highest levels of power. And of course, we'll chew over all the hot political gossip as we head into this historic election. Be sure to follow. Somebody's got to win at Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers.

Welcome to Press Box from the Democratic Convention. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with my producer, Brian Waters. Let us bring in our guest host who is sitting with me in a building right outside the United Center. He's semaphores Washington editor. He is this pod's official politics insta reactor. when he fights, he wins. Benji Sarlane, welcome back to the press box. Thank you, Brian.

I'm so glad I have finally attained this official title. I worked hard for it. Don't you feel like real reporters now? We're sitting in this building. People are filing. Wes Moore just walked right by us, the governor of Maryland. It's quite an evening here at the Democratic convention. Yeah, I mean, it's, you forget sometimes that it's a convention.

It is just Democrats all congregating on the city in a tiny space to just hold events and meet with each other all day long. You're just going to be running into, you know, for example, my own state's governor, you know, nonstop. All right, let's talk about Kamala's speech, first of all. You and I just watched it inside the United Center. What did you think? It was very, very, very, poised is the first word I think of, which is the overwhelming impression that Kamala gives off, which I think is what Democrats were so desperate to get from Biden and were not. is that she takes this job seriously. She's there to win, and she can accomplish the basic things you need to do in order to win.

So this was a speech that was like practiced within an inch of its life. It was every single line was punctuated and you could tell had been practiced over and over again into a mirror in front of, you know, whatever stage of staff, you know, who were watching it and giving notes. it did exactly what they wanted it to do. Now, what struck me most about the themes here is this was very much the Kamala Harris that I think a lot of us expected to see in 2020 when she first ran, which was,

oh, she has this very obvious story to tell. She's a prosecutor, and she's going to prosecute the case against Donald Trump. There was just one problem. Democrats were not in a particularly prosecutor-friendly mood in 2019 when she launched. her campaign. She ended up downplaying it, went with kind of different themes. This was leaning into the prosecutor role as hard as she possibly could, specifically to make the case against Trump

with the style, with the cadence, with the organization of the kind of courtroom lawyer that voters are used to seeing on TV. So that's, I think, what struck out to me as the most stuck out to me as the most common, a specific aspect of this, the way it was just this very lawyerly recitation of the facts aimed very specifically at swing voters against Donald Trump.

I totally agree. And you know, a lot of times we've seen political speeches where you bring them up and then you bring them down. You have a big serious passage and then you have some jokes and let the audience breathe a little bit.

This was a very, very serious speech. There were not a lot of moments of levity built into the speech. This was, I'm going to go up there and I'm going to give you a very, very plausible

president of the United States. You're going to look at me, she is saying to swing voters, hopefully, and hopefully see this person can be president. Here we go. Because, you know, this is the other thing that struck out to me is this is all happening so fast. Joe Biden dropped out one month ago yesterday. So you think, like, first of all, voter whiplash, like, okay, now Kamala Harris is the candidate for president. Okay, she has locked up the nomination. Now she is speaking at the Democratic Convention. And a lot of them might not know her all that well, even though she's been vice president, they might not have heard her speak at length like this other than the last convention. So here we go. Yeah, and she had to at least acknowledge it a bit in the

speech. She had a line about how, you know, her life is used to unlikely circumstances or things like that or change a twist of fate. I can't remember the exact phrase she used. But there was like a quick acknowledgement to people who she knows are seeing her for the first time possibly, that I get this is weird. It is weird that you hear that the president is going to be here. And then all of son it's who's this lady. But she used that to pivot into kind of this quick introduction of her life story, which she framed around her mother. She did not have a very biography heavy approach to politics in her previous run for president. This was actually pretty detailed here. And she framed it as in a very Obama way. I have this unlikely American story, but I'm also middle class like

you. And it's like there's a lot we can relate to each other on here. And it does an amazing story that, you know, a child of two immigrants, you know, from different countries who met in America can produce the next president of the United States. You know, it was like a very, very kind of quick run through of it. So you get the basic details on her. Though her mom kept coming back, she would talk about values, right? She would use her mom to sort of frame the entire story. So it's biography section, but then when she's talking about, here's how I would deal with this. Here's how I would deal with that. Her mom came back. It was really interesting. A lot of foreign policy in the speech, which is very, very striking, not just the war in Gaza, those lines will

make news, but just the whole approach to foreign policy. We'll talk about patriotism of the Democrats in a second, but you can tell she's setting all this up, right? We're the patriots here. We're the ones engaged with the world. He's not. And it makes me wonder how she got to that. Because I know there were definitely some in the peanut gallery

who were really groaning that you have this big prime time moment on the last night of the convention. And they spent a bunch of it on Leon Panetta, the former defense secretary, who it cannot say is someone like the average Democrat. We didn't get Beyonce, but we did get Leon Panetta. Yes. And like we've been talking about this.

You know, the story this whole week has been Democrats have really acquired this very deep bench of charismatic speakers who a lot of them could imagine being president someday. You saw, for example, Gretchen Whitmer got, you know, huge applause when she came on. That's just one of them. Wes Moore, who we mentioned earlier, you know, did pretty well in his speech to someone who's often talked about as a potential future candidate. But they went with Leon Panetta in a very foreign policy prime time, heavy prime time in general. They also had all these Democrats who were veterans come out, led by Ruben Gallego, and give this similar kind of tribute to the military and how Harris would safeguard veterans and stand for national security. What I wonder about is who that was

for. And I have suspicion that Harris downplays that she would be the first woman president. You don't hear that from her a lot. I have a suspicion that whatever focus group they're looking at, this is something they feel it's important to bolster. The idea that she gets it, she would protect the country. It's someone like Hillary Clinton had decades to kind of establish herself as like a strong Margaret Thatcher type, which is sort of kind of the standard image with female leaders that I think a lot of Americans think of when they imagine a female leader, even though we haven't had one. And Kamala does not have a national security background the same way. She doesn't have a foreign policy background. I think they felt that it was important to get

that kind of validation early on. I'll still this point a little bit from CNN. Donald Trump Trump's entire case against Joe Biden was, I am strong, he is weak. Physically strong, physically weak, strong on whatever issue Trump pulls out of the air. He is weak on all those things. So she comes in and says, here's a speech that says, I am strong. I'm running against a guy who's going to tell you the opposite and probably already has. I got 10 topics I want to hit with you. We're going to go speak through.

Let's just go down the list, yeah. Number one, defining Kamala Harris. We've seen a lot of polls. Her numbers have gone up since she got the nomination, but she still remains undefined to a lot of voters. How do you think the Democrats filled in those gaps over the course of this week? Well, they again use the kind of prosecutor theme with this idea of for the people, which is something carried over from her last campaign, but kind of had a new edge to it. She situated her mother's story as teaching her about standing up for injustice.

There was a very dramatic story about a childhood friend who was being sexually abused, who she took into her home. It was one that I believe one of her friends or relatives also recounted at one point earlier in the convention. This is seen as kind of like this signal moment of this who, this is who Kamala Harris is. She's a protector. She's there protecting you on behalf of the people and prosecuting the case against the people who would threaten you, keeping them out of harm's way. It's someone you can count on to do the job for you. Now, what job she is going to do is still left a little vaguer. In terms of policy you're talking about. Yes, in terms of policy. They've

set it up as kind of a general, vaguely populist message of, you know, Donald Trump will help out his rich friends and his extremist cronies. I will cut taxes for you, take on companies that raise prices, or, you know, try to build more affordable housing and hold accountable people who, you know, try to deceive you or, you know, with fake mortgages or raise your rent to unconscionable levels. It's very kind of, you know, bread and butter stuff, even as the details are still being filled in. But the basic idea is there, which is Donald Trump is for himself, I'm for you, and then let the voters maybe fill in the gap a little on what that means. They talked about issues, if not policy specifics, right? So we heard a lot of abortion.

We heard a lot of about, as you say, us versus the powerful. He and his powerful interest, us fighting for the people. Also a lot of biography filled in when we talk about filling in the gaps, you know, sitting there listening to the, the short parts of the biography you said that she gave at the beginning of the speech day, I'm not sure how many Americans could recite that from memory. So we learned a lot about that. We heard the words middle class many, many times over the course of this week to describe our upbringing. We heard her talk about working or people on her behalf talk about working at McDonald's.

Got to hear Bill Clinton get that line and she's going to be the president who spent more time of McDonald's than I did. Yeah, your Clinton impression from the 90s is still pretty good, Brian. Well, you know, it's holding up. You mentioned Trump. So that's topic number two for me. How did the Democrats talk about Donald Trump? The big question for the Democrats, always, how do we, how do we get this guy? How do we wrap our arms around him?

How did you see him doing that this week? It's been somewhat different than the prior races against Donald Trump. It feels like they're taking a bit of a new approach. And it's kind of building a layer cake of assumptions that they think will seem credible to you based on your decade with Donald Trump that they can kind of use on top of each other. So one is they're trying to portray him more as kind of small and ridiculous than this scary and menacing force, which is a tough balance because they're also trying to warn you who's incredibly dangerous. So in this case, the interesting line, and you mentioned there were like not a lot of laugh lines, one of the few ones when she just dismissed him as an unsurious man or an unsurious person. I forgot one of those two, right?

One serious person then brings it around to, but his policies have serious. Exactly. And then immediately pivots to really the meat of the speech, I thought, was just this extended list of the reasons he should be disqualified from being even considered and the absolute dangers he would bring if he returned to power, that he would be Trump without guardrails, as she put it. So they've been trying to balance this task of portraying Trump as kind of a ridiculous person who is just not. doing the basics of this job and who's really only interested in himself and his vanity and feuds, while also warning that this guy's going to be dangerous. Now, that gets to another part of the layer cake, which is, you know, Trump is even vaguer on policy than Kamala Harris, who's only been the nominee for 32 frigging days, right? This is someone who's very hard to pin down.

He'll change on a dime from one interview to the next, you know, when you do get him on a focused policy question, which is not often. And he doesn't seem like someone who has some personal, highly specific ideological agenda, right? That's always, it's always been a tough thing for them to bridge. He seems like Donald Trump, he kind of lives in the moments. He's kind of just this, you know, over the top character. That's where Project 2025 comes in. You know, wait, are you talking about what my friend Chris Solentrop compared to the giant Harry Potter spellbook that was brought out on stage? Yes, repeatedly by multiple speakers that use this same prop. It was wild. It was kind of like,

and Torned into a whole game show, yes. And so this is something where I think even Democrats are surprised by how much success they've had, which is like, look, if he's not going to fill in these details and we can't convince voters that, you know, Donald Trump has this 500 point plan, what we can do that we think is more believable is that Donald Trump will just reward these allies who flatter him with donations and

attention and just give the country over to whatever they want to do. That's how you ended up with abortion illegal, for example. But Allen is one thing, but saying, hey, it's in this book. It's in this semi-secret book, which also happens to be on the internet. And it's full of all the boogeymen we want to tell you that are in it. You know, as a political thing, it was literally a prop this week, but as a political prop, pretty effective. Yes. And like the ideas, as some of the speakers acknowledge, Trump has tried to distance himself from this. Many times. But they're also building on this layer, which is that, I mean, if there's one thing polls

consistently show is that people do not trust Donald Trump, his denials are a lot weaker than they would be from another politician. And so they've been trying to make the case that like, look, this plan here exists. It's chock full of policies. You're not going to like them. And we think it's pretty believable that he would just lazily hand the country over to these folks to implement this agenda because they've already worked for him and already are, like I mentioned, the kind of allies who flatter him. And they got a huge boost in this from

J.D. Vance, who is someone who absolutely reads as someone with a highly specific plan that he has thought of the intellectual foundations of in detail and has all these philosophical premises, you know, that he can recite for why it must be this way. And, you know, it spent years going to school. This is probably what he was studying at Yale, how to implement his perfect, you know, ideological agenda. They found a very good way to attach that to Trump as well. And so that's like another part of the layer kick that they're trying to bring in here. And another thing I'd just add is the simple, you know, we're not going back catchphrase. Trump is the past. Trump is this other thing. Trump is old, something that you heard come up a couple times very slyly. You know,

didn't think even Barack Obama mentioned his age. He is a 78 year old man. The past, the other guy, we're going forward. Another word we heard a lot this week. Topic number three, the Democrats It's embrace of celebrity at this convention. Well, we sort of lost our hook, didn't we, Brian? We did, but even without mystery guest to be named later, we had Kerry Washington, Tony Goldwyn, D.L. Hugley, Ava Longoria, The Chicks, and Pink. All tonight. That was just tonight. I thought the convention at times felt a little bit like an award show.

I say that without judgment. Award shows are very, very fun. What did you think of celebrities and the Democrats embrace it? This was jumping off what they did in 2020, where they also had, in fact, some of the same people kind of hosting individual nights. And 2020 was an incredibly weird non-convention where there was no audience. It was basically just a TV show because of the pandemic. So you kind of had to have, they decided to use kind of professional TV actors and hosts to kind of keep things moving along, like you said, exactly like an award show. It's very different. So they sort of kept it this time.

They didn't do too much. They each kind of had their one little, hey, you know me from scandal. And then, hey, you know me also from scandal. But over the course of the week, there was Oprah, right? There was James Taylor got cut for time. It was just incredibly funny. There were quite a lot.

And again, you're trying to win not only the TV audience, right, but social media moments. Oh, look. Yeah, there was, I know. And there was also this rumor buzzing all tonight that Taylor, comma James would do a surprise performance

and just electrify the world. Anyway, but, yeah, we did have an overword Twitter joke. Oprah was indeed, I think, the most significant

of the celebrities. Also gave a fantastic speech, by the way, and then did her signature, Oprah, you know, sort of vocal performance at the end,

Kamala Harris. We did have an overwork Twitter joke report from our friend McKay Coppins. The real mystery guest tonight was the friends we made along the way.

It's true. It was absolutely all over Twitter. I also have this weird fascination, you know how they put a little snippet of a popular song when a politician walks out to the stage, kind of like on a late night talk show. I just want to know the thinking behind what song did you pair with what politician. Like who said, okay, Karen Bass, I'm walking on sunshine. That is absolutely what goes with that particular politician. Sure, Los Angeles. It's very sunny.

Yeah, I need a 4,000 word feature on that. Topic number four for you. After Wednesday night, what did you think of the rollout for and the charge? choice of Tim Walls as Kamala Harris is funny made. I think his speech really went about as well as it could have. I mean, it was like, you really got, I don't know if he was the perfect choice of the long list she had. As we just said, they have a very deep bench. There were a lot of very attractive candidates who had people making the case for them that you saw at this convention.

But Tim Walz was showing why you picked him at least, which is he paid. He paid. cares very well with Harris kind of culturally, demographically, stylistically. They're also the same age, which stuns people every time they hear it. They do not look at. This idea that, look at this, you have a black and Indian, you know, woman from Oakland. This is how she's been describing it at rallies together.

And you have a son of rural Nebraska, who is, you know, high school football coach, who's a gun owner who codes in every possible way, as you know. Notes how to fix headlights on cars. Yes. Yes. I told us yesterday. America's, you know, dad, as they put it. A dad in plan.

And very specifically, yes, a certain kind of dad, a white Midwestern dad, that you have them together and fiving so well and they share so many overlapping values. And they all can agree on this common theme of freedom, which is really what she has set as the theme of the campaign, this idea that we are, the one thing we can all agree, on is that we don't like government poking into our business. It's a very libertarian-sounding idea, which is we don't like them poking into our doctor's offices. We don't like them screwing around with our libraries. We don't them like them deciding, you know, which kind of health care treatments we can get. The idea is that they connect very well on that. And I think

his speech really showcased that. I mean, they really lean into the high school football ball coach angle. I'm at least nominally a sports writer. That was a lot for me. I mean, seeing the middle-aged football players up there, Al Bundy style in their jerseys, kind of doing a flying wedge around the podium before he came up, all the coach chants in the auditorium. There were at least two speakers who had the words coach walls in their prompter, but not Tim Walls in their prompter. Bill Clinton did not actually deliver the line because Bill Clinton was just talking, but the lean into that and saying this is our coach, this is what he's doing. And of course, Walls leans into it even more in his acceptance speech. How many football metaphors did he work

in their fourth quarter? He just straight up did a half time. rally speech at the end. He just announced he was doing it. I'm going to give you the fourth quarter he said. I'm going to give you like the fourth quarter speech here. You give a pep talk. I think that was all very interesting. But notice the one thing that people took away from that speech, the only clip I saw a thousand

times over was not him. It was his son. Oh, that was such a moment. Crying, saying, I love you, dad. That's my dad. That's the image they were hoping to get out of Tim Walls, is that this is, again, a America's dad. You can trust him. I'll give you one more line from that speech.

Never underestimate a public school teacher. Cool. I mean, that's one. You know, my parents were both public school teachers, my grandparents are public school teachers. Let me tell me text I got after that. My grandfather, too. Funny enough. I mean, it's just one of those where, you know, as coach is this kind of universal American archetype. So it was public school teacher, somebody who devoted their lives to that before you got into politics. Number five for you, the return of the Obamas and Obamaism to the Democrat.

credit courty. What you make of that? Obamaism. What is it, right? Let's get into some of the basics here. For one, there's the Obamas themselves who delivered two of the most significant speeches, I'd say, of this entire convention. They are incredibly powerful speakers, both because they're two of the best speakers of their generation, if not the best, but also because you don't see them that often these days. They've mostly stayed removed from politics, which is fair. normal for ex-presidents and first ladies, but also feels a little strange because they left so young and they've been visible in this kind of, you know, Netflix-producery way as kind of more of like a lifestyle brand a bit. But it means when you do deploy them talking about serious

politics, people pay attention. They want to hear what is their take on this moment? And so what is Obama's in this case? It's a kind of raw, raw patriotism around plural around the idea that Americans, let's put all this politics aside, really we have a lot in common, this partisan stuff. It's all kind of a myth. We all, you know, our neighbors, we all love each other. We just kind of disagree on what's the best thing to do. And, you know, if we just work together and don't listen to those people trying to divide us, we can do great things because just look at American history. We've been doing great things the whole time. It's very Hamilton. And this is a style that's really been out of fashion the last decade in a lot of ways.

It got challenged pretty severely from the left and the right, and a lot of it by Trump himself, which is that it sounds kind of naive to say that we are on this course of gradual progress when all of a sudden someone like Trump gets elected in 2016. We tried that and look what happened. Exactly. And the second half of it is that Democrats, it's not like this. kind of speech went away entirely. But Democrats did not feel like hearing that their friends and neighbors wearing red hats were just having an ordinary disagreement over politics. It felt a lot more

existential. It felt like they were doing something to them. It felt like they were being attacked by their neighbors. I mean, obviously on January 6th, they got kind of like a literalization of this. The idea that, you know, that red-hatted uncle of yours could one day just be storming the capital. It was kind of hard to make that pitch on an emotional level. Things were just too divided. And I think some of the messaging, and really a lot of the messaging, including from Oprah, by the way, was one of them, was about returning to this idea that, look, it's been nine frigging years.

Your Fox News watching Uncle is going to stay. Your Fox News watching Uncle. We all have to kind of accept each other a little bit and just talk to each other in broad universal appeals based on strong American values and just not get too much into ways of talking that maybe are a little divisive between us or about slicing us up or pitting us against each other. Obama used the word grace. We have to extend that kind of grace.

Just like your uncle says something in politic at the dinner table, you extend a certain amount of grace to them. Do that to other people in the United States as well. Absolutely. And Oprah's version of it was, one, identifying herself. as an independent and speaking directly unacited voters and saying those people of political disagreements with you would also, if they're your neighbor, run to help you if you had a problem. You know, like let's not forget. These are fundamentally decent people. And I think that theme

carried over in a new way, including to Kamala's speech. Kamala Harris's speech also really emphasized at multiple passages that she would be a president for all Americans, this idea of moving past this Trump era and just coming together across factions to try to build something new. What is that new thing? We'll find out. How possible is it to build a new thing? Yes. At this point in history?

Yes. If we come together, we can at least give herself a shot to turn the page on this divisive era, the politics of the past, which is a very, very big Obama 2008 theme. In his case, it was the politics of the Bush and Clinton wars. You walked us right up to point number six was the Democrats claiming patriotism as their own. I have not heard this many USA chance Benji since a 1980s WrestleMania. I mean, and this was baked into the convention. We're going to hand out the USA signs, said today, I was watching one of the prompters and it said lead USA chant. I'm pretty sure that was

Ruben Gallego at the end of his speech. Democrats leaned into this. What did you make of that? Yeah, those chants were breaking out all over the place. It turns out when there's a candidate Democrats are excited about. their inner patriot just comes like screaming out. I mean, this was very reminiscent of, again, the Obama elections, where you really would hear USA chance breaking out, which at the time it was commented on like, wow, can you believe this?

This is such a Republican thing. This is what you expect at a George W. Bush rally. And yet, Democrats managed to reclaim that mantle. And Kamala Harris's speech had a few really big moments that were designed to hit that as hard as possible. there was a line where she talked about America being the greatest democracy in the world and also the privilege and pride of being an American

and the room absolutely lost their shit at that. That was like one of those like people are ready to hear that patriotic message in the party right now. They really are prime for it. And it was at first Walls-Harris rally in Philly right after she picked him as her running mate that the USA champ broke out. And I think they were surprised by that.

But then all the Democrats who are listening and go, oh, we like this. We like this. We want that back. we don't want to cede that ground to Donald Trump, just like we might have ceded that to George W. Bush and we're on terror, right? We want that back for ourselves. So funny how they built to that,

how they plotted that as part of this convention, that it would happen. They knew it would happen. As you say, they have speech lines that were meant to set that off. But it was a big part of this week, very, very interesting way. Yeah, and especially, I would add the one other thing that fit that theme. They had a lot of Republican speakers spread throughout the week with very prominent slots,

including this one with Adam Kinsinger is probably one of the most polished and charismatic of them. And the appeal from all of them was, you got to vote Democrat this time because patriotism. Like this is a question of patriotism. If you believe in the basics of American democracy, then we're not going to endorse any part of Kamala's policy agenda. But we are going to tell you, you have to kick out Donald Trump. And this is the path to do it. You had the big line tonight. They, meaning the Democrats are patriots just like we are.

Hintziger. Number seven, my favorite speeches, I want you to either agree, disagree, or just correct me as I go down this list. Michelle Obama, obviously, Maryland Governor Westmore was fantastic on Wednesday night. Oprah, for the reasons we laid out. Hillary Clinton didn't think she'd be on the list. That was got to be one of the top three Hillary Clinton speeches. Certainly in the room, it was just extremely well received right from the go. Smile when the crowd starts chanting, lock them up, and you just see. her in her mind, you know, turning over these phrases she had used against her back in 2016. That was a moment. I thought Tim Wals was very effective, especially at only 15 minutes. That was a

very, very brisk convention speech. Josh Shapiro was a hit in the room. Representative Jasmine Crockett from Texas was a pretty big hit in the room. Big hit. Steve Kerr's humor was a little subtle for the convention stage, but I thought that worked pretty well. He's kind of a dry wit, yeah. The sign off, the night night sign off was pretty great, especially for basketball of fans like you and I. Alexandria Casio-Cortez had quite a speech. That was one of the, you know, three, four, five most significant, I think.

She really got a new look, I think, from Democrats with that speech. It was fascinating. One, the context of her showing up was interesting, which was that in the run-up to this convention, when Joe Biden was on the ropes, she was one of the biggest named Democrats who just unabashedly, unapologetically say, I'm sticking with Joe Biden. This is our guy. Drop it.

Now, Democrats are for the most part overjoyed that Biden did leave. But I think she got looked at in a new way from a lot of kind of ordinary Democrats because of that. Because the knock on the squad, two of them basically just got primaried successfully with this being the major message against. them is that they are not team players. They are not part of the party and they spend most of their time just telling you why the party is failing and creating problems, you know, bad mouthing Biden's agenda. That was the message that worked when primaring Jamal Bowman and Cory Bush. I think people like seeing AOC say, no, I'm going to take one for the team here and stick with Joe Biden, even though he's not, I think at one point AOC said that if they were in a European system,

she and Biden wouldn't even be in the same party. You know, they were not a natural, So that just set the basis for her showing up and immediately getting this huge energetic response from a room full of Biden delegates. Remember, everyone there was elected to be a delegate for Joe Biden. There was no Bernie Sanders running this time. This was 100% raw, like hardcore Joe Biden supporters. Her line about the bartender was so great too. Republicans keep saying you got to go back to being a bartender, get out of Congress. This is the other key.

This was an incredibly focused speech. there was no vague academic language or some laundry list of like leftist policy ideas or interest groups that she had to go through one by one. This was just purely seven minutes or so of Donald Trump is a billionaire who will sell the U.S. for a dollar, which was a really memorable phrase. And Democrats, including me, are the party of bartenders or the party of anyone with a job. And it gets back, by the way, to this Obama politics, targeting her language to the broadest audience possible, literally anyone with a freaking job, rather than trying to think of how to split up, you know, America into a series of narrow interest groups that you have to target a

specific message to, you know, this was her going big. Just like, here is a very simple frame in plain English for how to think about this election. Number eight speeches that WIFT or weren't quite as successful as those. Bernie Sanders, I thought he had the bad task of talking a lot about COVID at the beginning, which is not, you know, something that's going to really light up the room. I thought that was a pretty muted Bertie Sanders speech as they go. Jamie Raskin talking about Jan 6th, just a very kind of blunt force. Donald Trump bad guy speech that I thought was not my favorite.

Chris Coons talking about Biden, not his fault, but it was like one of three toasts. We had to Biden. It was really late. I'm going to put that on if I ever have trouble sleeping in my life. Joe Biden's speech, effective in some way. It was just very, very long and very state of the union laundry listy. Chuck Schumer's dancing I put on the bad list, but your mileage may vary, Benji. What did you think of Bill Clinton's speech?

That was got to be the strangest speech of the entire convention. Well, it's, it's tough. Bill Clinton's gotten, and he talked about this in his speech, he's gotten pretty old. I mean, he joked about it a little that, you know. Still younger than Trump and Biden, but he was. He, because he's so clever, he even weaponized it, because he mentioned like, hey, I'm younger than than Trump because he

knows that he does not look like the bill. The only vanity I will assert is that I'm younger than Donald Clinton. But he knows, as he said, he knows he doesn't look like the Bill Clinton, you remember, who was youthful and energetic. I actually rewatched his entire 2012 convention speech ahead of his speech, which is a lot of people cite that is one of the best

convention speeches ever given. Just because of the moment in time that he had such a tall task of trying to sell. His job was to sell a Americans on Obama's handling of the economy at a time when unemployment was still extremely high and their recovery had not been going well. And he knocked it out of the park by doing a kind of rambling, improvised like economics lesson, which on paper sounds like the worst freaking

idea anyone's ever heard. And it went extremely long. It was 49 minutes. And yet, like, everyone was over the moon about it. It was seen as this big turning point in the election, whether true or not, that really like set up a frame for the rest of the election. I remember that very vividly, by the way. And if I made you just one more Bill Clinton impression, it was just like, you know, we ran surpluses when I was president. Republicans called that. I can't remember what he said. I call it arithmetic. Yeah, arithmetic. That was the big line. And then as he mentioned, Obama appointed him secretary of explaining stuff after that. But the thing is that this speech was similar in that sense where it's like, here comes Bill Clinton. There's no teleprompter. He's just going off notes. He ripped up his speech the night before like he always does. He's going to improvise. But it's not, you know, they're like it used to be. I mean, the audience was wrapped because it's like you're seeing this iconic person here. He had their attention. But it was like not filled with applause lines exactly. It was. It was. It was a little hard to follow. Yeah, and his voice was so soft that the audience was really, really quiet because I'm trying to hear every line. But as you point out memorably, the teleprompter just froze near the end of the speech where he was supposed to give his windup.

I don't have a timer on it, but it felt like five to ten minutes. It just stopped and he was just riffing. There was this whole windup about Kamala Harris that he just never wound up delivering at all. I wrote down some of it. Number nine for you as we get out of here, vibes. vibes. We talked a lot about vibes. Tim Walls talks about the joy Kamala Harris brought back to this campaign. Are vibes worth anything in this election? Well, I'll tell you what they are worth. They're worth $500 million in donations in less than 30 days, I think, which is freaking ridiculous.

So the one thing they are saying is like, yeah, I mean, Democrats are just like, take my money. they're also showing up to volunteer. They're showing up at these rallies and craze. I mean, do you think Joe Biden could be packing a 15,000 person arena with like people in line outside? No, this is the most you've seen from any Democrat in quite a while. So, you know, the energy is good. It's also translating obviously to people engaged on on social media, talking to their friends, miming Kamala. Now, does that translate to votes?

I mean, I don't think it hurts. obviously she's gone up in the polls it means you're more likely to get that attention from those more marginal voters that was harder for Biden to get just because they're hearing

about it through more places, through more people, through more friends and family members. So the vibes matter. And I will say compared to 2016, when they were absolutely riven by this Bernie versus Hillary Clinton split that ended up kind of derailing

the convention, this was a very, very united convention. There was one area of contention, which was Israel. I was outside at the sit-in among uncommitted delegates, a group of delegates who were elected pretty much with the express purpose of

protesting, you know, President Biden's approach to Israel. But even that was very respectful. There were not crazy protests outside either. They ended up being extremely disappointed, actually, in the turnout, the organizers. There wasn't a lot to rain on their parade. I mean, this was

a place where the vibes were immaculate. So interesting. Turns out vibes are better when you don't have a primary at all of fairly, at least one that picks the actual candidate. All right. Last one for you, number 10. What happens next? What are you looking for coming out of this convention?

So there's a few milestones we need to hit. As you mentioned, Kamala Harris, it still is just kind of like Kamala Harris, the idea. And I think she was really leaning into that in the speech even of being like, yes, please, project your hopes and dreams onto me. I'm not going to go disabuse you of them by, you know, getting. getting too specific on anything. But there has to change at least a little bit, right? She's already putting out some economic plans.

I don't know how much more of that she'll give out or how much more she even needs. But at some point, she's also said she's going to do a sit-down interview by the end of the month, in fact, which is, you know, pretty soon. August 22nd today. So, you know, the next seven, eight days, that'll be a big one. And we all know the big question she's going to get asked, right? of them. We're going to find out whether she has a good answer for why did you take all these left wing positions the last time you ran for president that Donald Trump's whacking you on every day on the airwaves. And why do you have different positions now? And what does that say

about your judgment? So we're going to see what our answer is to that, which is surely going to come up in the debate too, which is the next big thing. We got the debate. I would be very worried if I wrote Donald Trump watching this. I mentioned the courtroom prosecutor style. You know where it's a good place for that? Debate, especially one where there's now rules where I believe they mute your microphones when the other person is speaking. Yeah, she really nuked Mike Pence four years ago.

The thing that was driving people insane watching Biden that cost him the nomination is that Democrats feel like they have a very strong case against Donald Trump. And he literally could not get the words out of his freaking mouth, not just in the debate, but just really in general in a consistent manner, just say in a concise, compelling way. It doesn't have to be the world's greatest speaker, but just in a generic Democrat kind of way, why Donald Trump cannot be president. Kamala Harris looks like someone who is more than capable of quickly pivoting from whatever question she gets and just doing that for an hour and a half. And to what you pointed out about her speech tonight, being very, very

rehearsed, locked in, know what she's going to say, know what she needs to move to, have all the points ready to go and just be really prepped in a way that Joe Biden was not. Yeah, if she comes out of a debate and people are like, oh, it was so canned, I don't think Democrats will care. It's like they want it said. Exactly right. All right. Benji Sarland, check him out at Semaphore. Got a piece coming up? Yeah, I think it might be up even by the time you read this. I have a piece on the return of Obamaism, in fact, and how this convention kind of reinforced it. All right, we'll see you for that debate next month. First Harris Trump debate to do a little Insta React pod is because you now are the official Insta reactor. I take my duty.

very seriously. I do them for the people. Fantastic. Benji, let's get home or let's get a drink. Thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you, Brian. All right, it's time for the second weekly edition of David Shoe Maker Kisses. The Strained-upon headline. I've just been sitting here enjoying the highs and lows of the DNC,

as you promised last episode. Weird how all the background noise from the media tent just shut off during the segment. Oh, we get these good high-quality recording equipment here. Monday's headline about the return of Abercrombie and Fitch, which David did not guess. No. Was the Fitch is back. Today's headline comes to us from a number of people.

I'm going to give it to M.W. Hunt Esquire. It's hopefully this listener's real name. Definitely not a real name. It's from the New York Times, David. And it's a very funny story that got passed around a lot on Twitter by Jennifer Schusler. And it's about Colonial Williamsburg. a favorite destination for you and your family. My wife and I had a long-running joke about wanting to open up a tourist destination in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just called Colonial Williamsburg, where like people would show up to Williamsburg.

Like, what's this Williamsburg? Because people would just turn up off the subway. It'd be like, is this Williamsburg? And I just wanted to have like, you know, like a covered wagon waiting for them with like people in costume inviting them aboard, you know, like. go show you the candle making. Here's one of the gentlemen that could have been on your cockide scheme here. He is a historical reenactor who plays Lafayette. He's got kind of a big, I can't quite tell if it's a bicorn hat or a tricorn hat,

but he's got a big hat. Lafayette, as I'm sure everyone remembers, is the French aristocrat, the Times reports, who arrived in America at age 19 and became a hero of the American Revolution. It's a 200th anniversary of Lafayette's triumphant 1824 farewell tour of the United States. Okay. But this gentleman is engaged in a big moment for his chosen historical subject, Lafayette. You need to have Lafayette's title, David, in your mind, as you ponder.

What was the New York Times as strained upon headline? He was a French what? Well, do I need to guess? give you that or do you want to Oh, I thought you already said it. Yeah, what's a good French title? Damn. He was in,

he was in Hamilton too, right? Like, there should be a level of pop culture awareness here. Maybe French, maybe the same title that Count. That De Saad had.

Oh, marquee. Yeah, there we go. So this is a big time for Lafayette. It is a, Oh, marquee, uh, uh, marquee here,

marquee, uh, the, what is it? Mark, Mark, Mark, I think we've got the pun here.

I'm going to give this to you. Markey event. Oh, marquee event. For the man who plays Lafayette, it's a marquee event. Good job. New York time.

That's a really good one. That's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Producter magic by Brian Waters. Uh, let me direct you to the ringer.com where I have been writing daily dispatches about this convention. Got one more to go. Tomorrow morning, last

yesterday, as if you're listening to this on Friday, was about Coach Walls and the very sportserific unveiling of the vice presidential candidate. We are back Monday in LA and I'll be talking with David where we will have more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic.