DNC Day Two: The Obama Show

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The Big Story

CHICAGO — The first night of the Democratic National Convention was an exercise in turning the page on Joe Biden, thinly disguised as a loving tribute to the man who “selflessly” stepped aside. On Tuesday night, there was no need for polite fictions. It was the Barack Obama Show. 

The Scroll didn’t make it to the entire evening’s programming at the United Center. We first went to the “Shut Down the DNC for Gaza” protest outside the Israeli consulate, hosted by both local radical group Behind Enemy Lines and Samidoun, everyone’s favorite tax-exempt front for a U.S.-designated terror group. It was a bust. You can read more about it at Tablet’s DNC blog, but to sum it up briefly: Nobody showed. There were maybe 30 or 40 protesters and twice as many journalists. There were, however, hundreds of cops, who prevented the black-mask-and-keffiyeh-clad militants from moving even a block from the street where they started. The street thugs were left to burn American flags and rage at the Death and Nakba Coronation. Any radicals who mattered were on the inside. 

The protest was, basically, a waste of time but nonetheless offered an important lesson. Big-city police departments are perfectly capable of preventing radical groups from carrying out destructive and illegal protests … when they feel like it. If you’re a commuter angry about being stuck in traffic for hours because Linda Sarsour and her Rockefeller-funded “Jewish” friends decided to block a bridge, well, sorry, pal—a little “inconvenience” is nothing next to the destruction in Gaza. But Tuesday was Barack and Michelle’s big homecoming, which meant that the local antifa look-alikes were going to get the boot, and get it good and hard. 

So The Scroll arrived inside the United Center around 9 p.m. local time, just in time for Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) to share her personal story of conceiving using in-vitro fertilization—a procedure she claimed Donald Trump and J.D. Vance plan to outlaw (both Trump and Vance have repeatedly declared their support for IVF). Indeed, the mythical GOP quest to ban IVF was a major theme of the evening: Michelle Obama revealed that she, too, had conceived via IVF. We assume the messaging emphasis was inspired by Tim Walz, who has said repeatedly on the stump that he and his wife conceived via IVF, which he also claims that Vance wants to ban. Unfortunately for Walz, who is set to speak tonight, his wife revealed on Tuesday that the couple had not in fact conceived through IVF. Oops! Add that one to the lies about his combat service, the lies about his DUI arrest, and the lies about not knowing Hitler imam Asad Zaman in his growing list of “misstatements” and “gaffes.” 

But these were minor details. The arena was packed on Tuesday night; The Scroll spoke to people in line outside who’d been waiting for two and a half hours, and we had to wander the arena for half an hour to find a single empty seat. We’d thought the applause for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris was raucous on Monday night, but it was nothing compared to the reception for Michelle and Barack. The place virtually exploded when the former First Lady took the stage. 

The Obamas performed a sort of good-cop, bad-cop routine: Michelle the dark radical, Barack the grand unifier. Michelle spoke of her “palpable sense of dread about the future,” lifted only recently, with the elevation of Kamala Harris. Most of us, she said, will never “benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth”—a shot at Trump from the woman worth an estimated $70 million, following a speech earlier in the night from Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who inherited about $3.6 billion. She speculated that Trump was “threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who just happen to be Black.” And she warned the audience not to feel too good:

But remember, there are still so many people who are desperate for a different outcome, who are ready to question and criticize every move Kamala makes, who are eager to spread those lies, who don’t want to vote for a woman, who will continue to prioritize building their wealth over ensuring that everyone has enough.

Barack, by contrast, was all sunny optimism. “I’m feeling pretty hopeful,” he said, praising the sitting president for “putting his own ambition aside for the sake of the country” before announcing that “the torch has been passed.” Visibly giddy to be back onstage, he hammed it up with all the practiced spontaneity of a Saturday Night Live monologue, complete with Trump dick jokes. But the former president, and current leader of the party, was there to deliver a serious message. It was time for unity, “an America where ‘we the people’ includes everybody.” He cautioned the party faithful not to “scold and shame and out-yell the other side.” He urged them to extend “grace” to older people who still occasionally say things that “make us cringe”—because the “world is moving fast,” and “they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up.” The Democrats assembled in the room, after all, were the bearers of a historic mission:

The rest of the world is watching to see if we can actually pull this off. No nation, no society has ever tried to build a democracy as big and as diverse as ours before. One that includes people that, over decades, have come from every corner of the globe. One where our allegiances and our community are defined not by race or blood but by a common creed. 

What was that creed? “Democracy,” defined not as the will of the people expressed through the electoral process but through “the values we live by” and “the way we treat each other.” It was easy to forget, listening to Obama describe our “yearning” to restore the “bonds of affection” between us, that his own wife had cast those who refused to get with the program as liars and unreconstructed bigots or that Jews at the DNC had been reduced to holding their events in secret, lest they be disrupted by attendees seeking to give them a little encouragement to catch up. But that’s the benefit of being the king. You get to offer grace and clemency and “joy” to those who submit, however hesitantly. It’s someone else’s job to carry the stick.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Vladislav Davidzon on Ukraine’s new, Israel-inspired gamble

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Democrats in Chicago, by Armin Rosen and Park MacDougald

The Tablet news desk files daily dispatches from the convention

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Ukraine Defies the U.S. to Launch a Showy Offensive Into Russia

Observing Israel’s moves in the Middle East, Kyiv gambles on an American power vacuum

by Vladislav Davidzon

On Aug. 6, Ukrainian mechanized forces, likely a division strong, invaded Russia’s Kursk Oblast. In the process, Kyiv had recaptured the battlefield initiative, undermined the narrative that it was doomed to surrender, and caused the Kremlin obvious political embarrassment. The Ukrainian high command claims that the incursion has resulted in the capture of 74 settlements and the occupation of 390 square miles of Russian territory—more than double what the Russians concede. Moscow was forced to evacuate nearly 200,000 civilians from the Kursk and Belgorod regions, as it brought in reserves and heavy weaponry, while the Russian air force began striking the Ukrainian forces in Kursk and across the border in the Sumy Oblast. While the Ukrainian military claimed on Tuesday that it has gained an additional 15 square miles, the Russians said they have blocked any further advance.

Whatever its strategic significance turns out to be, the Ukrainians maintain they were sending a signal to the Kremlin as well as to the White House that Kyiv was finished operating under self-defeating constraints and that it would now probe red lines that had been set out by both powers. Kyiv has long been frustrated at being provided with just enough support from Washington in order to not lose—but not enough to overcome the numerically superior and better financed Russian army. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed that frustration publicly, stating that “our partners are afraid of Russia losing the war.”

Unlike last summer’s failed counteroffensive in Kharkiv, Ukraine launched the Kursk operation without first informing Washington of its plans. In fact, Zelenskyy waited a week to break the remarkable operational secrecy that had enveloped the operation.

What changed in July is that the Ukrainians, like other embattled U.S. allies, were faced with a new opportunity in Washington: The cognitively impaired president had been forced out of his reelection bid in favor of his vice president, who was now out on the campaign trail, three months before the election. With this emergent power vacuum at the White House, the Ukrainians decided to bypass both the deposed occupant of the White House as well as the staff of his hypercautious National Security Council, instead of slowly bleeding to death under rules guaranteed to produce slow-motion defeat.

“The United States government currently has no strategy for Ukraine. Zero. None at all,” a former high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence and national security official told Tablet. “That fact is apparent to the current Ukrainian government. The political decision and the timing chosen to go into Kursk were made at the political level by the Zelenskyy administration at the request of the army command. Which wanted to take the initiative.” The former intelligence official added, “This is war, and I cannot recall an example, any time in history, of a war being won while commanders were unable to make their own decisions and to take on their own responsibilities.”

The Ukrainians had planned this type of operation for a long time—reports of Kyiv’s plots to launch incursions into Russia go back to early 2023. Tellingly, however, the decision to proceed came exactly a week after Israel had carried out a pair of high-profile assassinations deep in enemy territory. On July 31, the Israelis took out Hamas’ former chief Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran guesthouse during the inauguration ceremony of the new Iranian president. The day before, they had eliminated the top Hezbollah military commander, Fuad Shukr, in the heart of the group’s stronghold in Beirut.

Kyiv observed carefully how Israel conducted its strikes immediately after Prime Minister Netanyahu returned from a triumphant speech before the U.S. Congress. In fact, earlier this week the chair of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense, Roman Kostenko, explicitly referenced the Israeli example in a televised interview. “So Israel announced that they would take the advice of their partners very seriously but would afterward make their own decisions in the best interest of their own national security. I think that we can simply mirror that approach in our own case.”

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There are limits to the analogy with Israel, which is fighting a much weaker terror group in an infinitely smaller territory the borders of which Jerusalem controls entirely. Nevertheless, Ukraine seeks to leverage the optics of turning the tables on the Russians to force the Americans to back a fait accompli on the battlefield. While the motivation behind the Ukrainian decision is clear, less so is its ultimate objective. It is far too early to draw serious assessments of Ukraine’s battlefield successes. Caught off guard, the Russians are currently on their back foot. But they may very well regroup, counterattack and drive out the Ukrainian forces. Should the Russians succeed in recapturing the entirety of the occupied Russian territory, before the Ukrainians are able to leverage their gains, the Ukrainian gamble could prove to have been a costly waste of scarce resources and manpower. It is also possible that this assault is merely a preamble or diversion for another forthcoming strike in a different theater of operations.

That said, there is no denying that the current incursion into Kursk is substantively and qualitatively different from Ukraine’s earlier, limited raids into Russia’s Belgorod region. Last year’s lightning raids and temporary raising of Ukrainian flags over a few Russian border villages were conducted using units of exiled Russian defectors to offer a modicum of deniability. The current offensive has seen detachments of elite, battle-hardened Ukrainian battalions deployed, backed by air power, and with the mechanized Ukrainian force seemingly attempting a blitz to take as much territory and as many targets of opportunity as possible: railroad hubs, energy infrastructure such as the Sudzha gas hub currently in the Ukrainian forces’ hands, and possibly the local nuclear power plant. Signaling their intention to dig in, the commander of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, announced last Thursday that Kyiv had set up a military commandant’s office in the parts of the Kursk region under its control.

The Ukrainians hoped the Kursk operation would challenge the consensus that they could not break out of a stalemate. While Kyiv intended to get the Russians to transfer some units out of front-line positions in order to make them defend their own territory and reduce pressure along the front, the number of Russian battalions likely to have been rotated out from the front lines appears to be less than what the Ukrainian general staff would have hoped for. Much of the defense of Kursk Oblast seems to be conducted by ad hoc Russian forces cobbled together from a combination of conscripts, interior ministry troops, border guards, Chechen units, national guard, and units already stationed inside the country. Furthermore, the Ukrainians also had to shift their own resources for the Kursk operation, which led to Russian gains around, and the likely fall of, the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk Oblast.

One effect that the operation has definitely had is lifting the stoic but somewhat depressed public mood, which is now at its highest point since the start of the successful Kherson counteroffensive two years ago. The Ukrainians have long desired to bring the consequences of the war home to the Russian citizens who are perfectly willing to countenance the war so long as it does not inconvenience them directly. Moreover, Kyiv hopes to showcase its capacity to deploy Western arms (including the newly arrived American F-16 fighter jets) in order to create the impression that it is more than just a romantic lost cause. Introducing a new equation that ostensibly exposes the limits of the Russian military and forces a stalemate of sorts would be the best outcome Kyiv could hope for with this operation, as both sides wait to see the results of the November election in the United States.

Putin seems to understand the Ukrainian offensive as a negotiating ploy. On Monday, he said that Kyiv, “with the help of its Western masters,” was trying to improve its negotiating position”—though the Russian offer remains a set of nonnegotiable demands (which include Ukraine giving up five provinces to Russia) and a Ukrainian surrender.

All the Russian rhetoric about Kyiv’s “Western masters” notwithstanding, the White House and the Pentagon were also caught off guard. White House spokesman John Kirby admitted that the U.S. was still trying to gain a better understanding of what Ukraine is doing with its Kursk incursion, quickly adding that “There’s been no changes in our policy approaches,” with respect to U.S. weapons and how they’re used, stating that the Ukrainians were still using the weapons “in an area where we had said before that they could use U.S. weapons for cross-border strikes.”

Kyiv’s gambit, therefore, rests on its ability to show Washington that it not only can mount meaningful military maneuvers, but that it can do so inside Russia, while also maintaining U.S. buy-in and support. A meme circulating over Ukrainian social media captured this tightrope walk: “If the United States will only let you use ATACMS at a certain distance from the border, you should simply move the border!”

For now, the Pentagon has signaled its approval by releasing a previously planned $125 million tranche of new munitions and air defense materials several days after Kyiv initiated the Kursk operation.

The Ukrainians demonstrated remarkable operational discipline in preparing this offensive—ordinary soldiers were reportedly only informed of the battle plans the day before they were sent over the Russian border. Keeping the Americans in the dark was also key to keeping the Russian intelligence services and army from being able to prepare. “We have learned some very hard lessons from the events of the previous counteroffensive,” a highly placed member of Zelenskyy’s team informed Tablet. “Last summer we told everyone what we were going to do and we all know how that turned out. Everyone knew what we were going to do and in which location we intended to strike. There is definitely something to be learned from the Israeli example of acting first and only later explaining what you are doing.”

A senior member of the British government who is involved at the highest levels of shaping British policy toward Kyiv has informed Tablet that he was pleased with the start of the operation, since the more careful American approach had not been working for Kyiv. “The Ukrainians had to change the dynamics of the war quickly or to suffer the consequences and they are now done fighting with one hand tied behind their back. So we now have the spectacle of the Russian air force bombing their own cities,” he told Tablet with bemusement. “The British have a very different approach to military strategy in which attack is the best form of defense.”

All the Ukrainian officials that Tablet spoke with expressed cautious optimism over the outcome of the incursion, despite the inherent risks of such an operation turning out badly and large numbers of elite Ukrainian troops dying for no discernible strategic battlefield purpose. The highly placed member of the Zelenskyy team was philosophical about the possibility of bad outcomes: “We will see how it will all turn out in the long run. But for now we really needed this victory. We really, really needed a bit of peremoha, or victory. People were really starting to lose their nerve.”

More importantly, the official was also confident that the Americans would not pull back support in the aftermath of the Ukrainian incursion. “We have just received the latest aid package from Washington, which represents a de facto legitimization,” he underlined. “The lesson here is that you should just behave in the way that the Americans do themselves. You should do what the Americans themselves do. Not what they tell you to do.”