DNC Day Three: What Do Democrats Believe? Ask Them After the Election

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The Big Story

CHICAGO – Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention was an exercise in frustration for your humble Scroll correspondent. Journalists have been complaining throughout the week about the DNC’s logistical failures: long lines, long travel times between the United Center and McCormick Place (where “Dempalooza” panels and caucus meetings are being held), and volunteers and event staff who have no idea what’s going on. The Scroll had managed to sidestep most of the chaos by spending as much time at protests as at official events, but our run of good luck ran out yesterday. 

We arrived at McCormick Place at 9:15 a.m. for a 10:00 a.m. panel on “The American Jewish Community and Israel After October 7,” hosted by the Jewish Democratic Council of America. But there was a snag. All Dempalooza events follow a relatively simple RSVP process: You register on the website, and then immediately receive a confirmation email containing the location of the event within the conference center. Well, all Dempalooza events except those having to do with Jews or Israel. For those, you RSVP and then receive an email that reads “Upon confirmation, we will share the program’s location with you via email.” A party so pro-Jewish that Jews have to meet in secret! In any event, our email never came, so we weren’t on hand to see J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami tell the panel that “What has happened in Gaza since Oct. 7 is no less tragic than what happened on Oct. 7 in the kibbutzim.”

Then we attempted to attend a Dempalooza panel titled “Winning the Public Narrative on Safety, Accountability, and Justice.” The panel was set to feature a speaker from the Vera Institute of Justice (VIJ), a major anti-“mass incarceration” nonprofit and grant-making institution that stated in 2020 that it is “committed to dismantling the current culture of policing and working toward solutions that defund police.” VIJ has received at least $34 million in funding from progressive philanthropy giants such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Tides, and the Rockefellers, and in 2022 received a $171.7 million (not a typo) contract from the Department of Health and Human Services to provide legal assistance to unaccompanied minors seeking to avoid deportation. 

We thought it might be interesting to ask VIJ, which considers both policing and immigration enforcement to be fundamentally “racist,” to comment on the Harris campaign’s attempts to portray the vice president as a tough-on-crime “prosecutor” who will take on “convicted felon” Donald Trump. No such luck. The Scroll arrived at the room listed in our confirmation email, but the panel wasn’t there. We asked several volunteers, who didn’t know. We wandered the halls with a reporter from The Washington Free Beacon, methodically checking every conference room to see if our panel might be there. We finally found a press table, where volunteers gave us another room number, but the panel wasn’t there either. Nobody knew anything, there was nowhere left to check, and it was almost an hour past the start time, so we left. 

Not that we would have learned much. The Harris-Walz campaign has been almost comically vague in its messaging (the campaign website links to Project 2025, but has no policy page of its own). At a Tuesday Dempalooza panel on campaign messaging, even the Democratic volunteers in attendance seemed baffled. One volunteer from Arizona asked about Harris’ line on immigration, complaining that she had not received any material from the campaign and did not know how to respond to voters who were concerned about the border. All that Coalitions Media Director Maca Casado could offer was that Harris wanted to “secure the border, but treat people at the border with respect.” Another volunteer asked for some of Harris’ foreign policy achievements as vice president; Deputy Communications Director Brooke Goren said that she’d “traveled to over 100 countries” and “attended the Munich Security Conference” every year, where she delivered “powerful remarks.” 

Indeed, even sympathetic members of the press have been reduced to writing “policy” announcements like this one, from Bloomberg Government on Wednesday:

“She’s going to support policies that ensure that emerging technologies and that sort of industry can continue to grow,” Brian Nelson, senior campaign advisor for policy to the campaign, said when asked about the vice president’s efforts to engage the crypto community.

Thanks. 

And what about Israel? Those eager to delude themselves about where the Democratic Party stands made considerable hay out of two “announcements” from this week: that Harris will not “cut or condition aid to Israel” and that she will not return to the Iran deal. Except, these weren’t really announcements at all. The former came from Halie Soifer, a former aide from Harris’ time in the Senate. The latter came from Rep. Brad Schneider, and was a prediction based on conversations with Harris-Walz Jewish liaison Ilan Goldenberg. The campaign, and Harris herself, have said nothing. And while the DNC did have the decency to offer a speaking slot to the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American hostage, on Wednesday night, it also gave a slot to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who told uncommitted delegates and anti-Israel Democrats that Harris and Walz “hear you” and “agree with us.” 

The strategy, clearly, is to go as long as possible without saying anything definitive on anything, in the hopes that good “vibes” and adulatory media coverage will be enough to push the campaign over the finish line. As part of that strategy, the party is making a massive, whiplash-inducing pivot to the center—the major themes from Wednesday night were family, freedom, and football, which at any point over the past eight years would have been recognized as Republican talking points. What do they believe in? “Joy.” What will they do once in office? Whatever you want. How did Tim Walz conceive his child? IVF, no wait, IUI, no wait, “fertility treatments” ... forget about it. Have you heard about Project 2025?

Will any of this vagueness matter? Probably not. Democrats like her, and they’re energized. The question is whether American voters, who have soured on the administration in which Harris currently serves as vice president, will accept joy as a substitute for substance.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Armin Rosen on the politics of “Joy”

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The Politics of Joy

by Armin Rosen

“Joy” was the rallying cry of the most consequential loser the Democratic Party ever nominated at any of its Chicago confabs (other than maybe George McClelland). “And here we are, just as we ought to be … the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, politics of purpose, politics of joy” exclaimed Vice President Hubert Humphrey as he launched his campaign for the White House, “and that’s the way it’s going to be, all the way, too, from here on out.”

It was not that way. The 1968 presidential election and history in general went in such a different direction that Humphrey-branded “joy” has fallen out of American political memory, and lives on only as something you might underline during a preconvention rush-read of Norman Mailer’s account of the ’68 edition. “If Hubie got in, the after-hours joints would prosper; the politics of joy would never demand that all the bars be dead by four,” wrote Mailer, deeply suspicious—maybe righteously incredulous—toward any power-seeker claiming to have shackled politics to enjoyment and fun.

A political convention is not cool, and it is not fun. In our present day these events are experienced as miles and miles of temporary fencing, concrete roadblocks, exotic police units—fully-kitted sheriff officers in forest camo, barking muzzled K-9s on the subway platforms, Secret Service snipers under rooftop tenting, watching you—with occasional political content thrown in. Vast areas around McCormick Place and the United Center are cities in suspension, with no traffic and very little street life. It’s like a theme-park version of a post-disaster Chicago.

How does one feel joy in any of this? Reality buckles under the strain of it all: Chicagoans are not used to motorcades and on Monday night drivers on the I-290 couldn’t be blamed for not knowing whether to pull over or speed up or dodge lanes as the flashing black metal armada of the national leadership charged toward downtown. At the United Center, the sconces in the trophy case that usually holds the Chicago Bulls’ six Larry O’Brien trophies—spoils of the world-beating champions, paragons of America’s dominance and greatness during our nation’s brief and happy post-history—are empty for the week, though the security guard stationed to watch the empty case told me I was about the 20th person at the DNC to have photographed it anyway. The Michael Jordan statue is still there, in a lobby where the camped-out media mingles with the more populist of the VIPs. The statue is a depiction of the living god, “the greatest there ever was, the greatest there ever will be,” as it says on the pedestal: A host of disembodied cloud-limbs rises to thwart His Airness, but he vaults even further into the heavens, reaching toward a numinous goal only he can see, his lips pursed as tightly as Hillary Clinton’s were last night when the crowd broke out into a “Lock Him Up” chant. Except Jordan shows no sign of Clinton’s giddy pleasure, for he is a winner without joy, just like Richard Nixon in 1968.

The statue is the cosmically perfect place to bump into Andrew Gillum, the Tallahassee mayor who is now a famous loser, having lost to Ron DeSantis by a mere 33,000 votes in the 2018 Florida governor’s race. After that his life devolved into a sad chaos of drug abuse and alleged graft. (The charges were dismissed and Gillum is reportedly clean now, and I’m fairly certain he was at the convention as a member of the media.) Gillum is friendly and reflective and looks fantastic—he’s tall and athletic, and his former disgrace and total retirement from politics have given him a kind of world-bitten gravitas. We touched briefly on the overall theme of joy.

I asked Gillum how DeSantis had gotten so popular, given how close Gillum had been to beating him. “He won by 19 points?” Gillum said, in reference to the governor’s 2022 reelection landslide. “There's not a bone in my body that believes he’s got that kind of support in the state.” DeSantis had won by so much because of “a depression in the vote. And that depression speaks more loudly than people who do show up and vote.” Floridians had become so demoralized that they believed voting was pointless. “His actions make people feel like they are helpless,” Gillum said of the governor. The 2022 gubernatorial had been a reasonably high-turnout election by Florida standards, but whatever: Gillum isn’t entirely wrong that there is contentment in having a sense of agency, or maybe just satisfaction in the idea that people who disagree with you must abide by your preferences when you win. Maybe joy is a feeling that comes in anticipation of holding power.

Another explanation for what joy really means came from one of the leaders of the Washington state delegation, a serenely long-haired man named Sonaar Luthra who was wearing a Cowboy Kamala sash, a garment drawing a synecdochical link between the Democratic nominee and Beyonce, whose most recent album was the country-inflected Cowboy Carter. Was the sash saying that Harris was like Beyonce? What did it mean to merge these two figures—and was it not a little insulting to shackle Bey, who is extremely cool, to any politician, a person who is by nature uncool? The sashes, explained Luthra, a Truman Project fellow who focuses on water security issues, were “born out of a desire to really celebrate and embrace the joy of this moment. And they are for sale, if you want to add that.”

“I don't think I’ve seen the Democrats this optimistic since 2008,” Luthra continued, which could be interpreted as a slight on Hillary and Joe, neither of whom was ever put forward as an exemplar of joy, happiness, or any related borderline ecstatic feeling. Upon quick reflection, Luthra’s statement is factually correct. In 2016, the Democrats were bitterly divided over the Bernie Sanders socialist insurgency, which a coven of party high-rollers colluded to defeat for good in 2020. And of course Donald Trump sucks the positivity out of everything. It is hard to wage a joyful power quest when a figure as indulgently nasty as Trump stands in your way.

“It is a blessing at this moment that we found a way to make this election positive given who the other candidate is,” Luthra noted. Under the pressure of Trump and the promise of a universally beloved nominee with undeniable star power, the Democrats had repaired their own lingering divisions. “We can trust each other, and we don’t all have to agree to get stuff done,” said Luthra, sounding himself like a perfectly reasonable pol from the long-vanished Hubert Humphrey era, a time in which “getting stuff done” was generally understood by grown-ups and even some hippies to be the sine qua non of politics.

Shasti Conrad, state chairwoman of the Washington Democrats, practically burst with exuberance when I asked her to unpack the Democratic "joy explosion." “It’s grounded in an understanding of what it feels like to lose,” she explained to me when I asked where this exciting headrush had come from.

Later that night, the convention would hear from the man who had led the biggest victory these party foot soldiers had ever experienced, the one that many of the attendees in Chicago had shaped and that had shaped them in turn. Conrad had volunteered for the Obama campaign, just like half the building had, and later worked in his administration. “It’ll be like seeing your long-lost cousin or your uncle you haven't seen for a while,” Conrad said of the night’s headliner. “He always knows how to own the moment.”

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“Joy,” as I now understand it, refers to the realization of the process that Obama began in 2007, namely the merger of the donor-establishment and activist-progressive wings of the Democratic Party, the grafting of hope and power to a degree so thorough and meaningful that even neo-Mailers couldn’t afford to be too cynical about the whole without facing existential exile—a condition Mailer himself welcomed, but which few of his pallid successors could stomach. Here’s Mailer again, way back in 1968: “The party had always been established in the mansions and slaughterhouses of society … social legislation and the lubricating jelly of whores had been at the respective ends of its Democratic consensus.”

It’s still true, though, that with the right mix of competence and vision the party can make itself and the entire country forget that either the mansions or the slaughterhouses actually exist. For example, on Tuesday night, Bernie Sanders, avenging champion of the working American and enemy of the billionaire class, spoke right before Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who is worth $3.6 billion. “Billionaires in both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primary elections,” bellowed Sanders, returning briefly to his role as the guilty conscience of a party that now embraces him, and whose prerogatives he now mostly follows in return. Pritzker spent $323 million of his own money to get elected governor, but the living contradiction with Sanders’ speech from three minutes earlier disappears under the intoxicating influence of joy, which can not only contain both Sanders and Pritzker but can juxtapose them deadpan in prime time.

Where do such lofty yet strenuous contradictions find their higher synthesis? In Barack Obama, of course. The genius of Obama, the trait that makes him the greatest political talent of my lifetime, is that he can articulate an ideal of civic and human existence capacious enough to fit everyone. He talks about higher principle in a way that doesn’t sound fake, or like a cosplaying version of some earlier political archetype, which is how 95% of politicians usually sound. Whether a universally workable liberal civic compact in a country as complex and traditionally minded as ours was or is Obama’s actual objective is a question for another time. He can raise the possibility of the thing, which is hard enough.

Obama has aged to the point that I could see the dime-colored gray of his brow from the back of the 300 level, but once that familiar smoker’s baritone kicked in on Tuesday, once the crowd was riding that warm airstream of his vocal highs and lows and hanging on the music of his pauses, we were again hearing from someone who talked like no one else had talked before him, who appealed to something no other figure seeking ultimate earthly power had appealed to, and who could breathe life into otherwise platitudinous one-syllable concepts such as hope, joy, and the like.

“Democracy is the values we live by, the way we treat each other, including those who don’t look like us, pray like us, or see the world exactly as we do,” the former president declared. “We’ve all got our blind spots, our contradictions, our prejudices … Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.” This was the best possible Obama, the speaker of compact formulas that make his listeners see a better reality in spite of everything and in spite of themselves. “The ties that bind us together are still there,” he continued, summoning long, deep cheers from a reverently silent crowd. “The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided.”

The Democrats have held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years. Surely some of the current bitterness and division relates to factors that Obama, who no doubt still wields some deliberately hard-to-qualify measure of unaccountable national power, injected into American life. Maybe the idea of rapid, unstoppable social transformation under the guise of civic peace is itself dishonest and embittering. It is certainly possible that the joy of the Democrats’ subsumption of progressives into the party structure will generate its own contradictions and bitternesses, or produce a mix of policies whose unappealing and incoherent nature will only be obvious after Harris loses or her presidency disappoints. But that all comes later. Based on the paucity of detail Harris has given about her plans for America, the lack of interviews and the vagueness of her proposals since entering the race, joy might not translate into any exact policies until it is safely ensconced in the White House.