Chicago
Everyone in the Democrats’ Convention centre – a bleakly corporate sports stadium on the edge of Chicago – is giggling. It’s an atmosphere properly described as bonkers. The Democrats have gone from wake to wedding party with no intervening period of sobriety. People whoop as they meet, knowing how miserable they were prepared to feel with Joe Biden still on the ticket, and how freed from misery they are now.
I thought Chicago an oddly dangerous choice for the Democrats (1968 and all that) but I was wrong: I had forgotten what a great city it is. The centre is grand, the hotels capacious and snooty, one of them the actual place where the phrase ‘smoked-filled room’ was coined – by a wire reporter covering a party meeting. It’s a city with heft and history and space: yes it is troubled and crime-ridden but it contains seriousness to counter the giddiness.
On our Americast podcast last year I predicted that neither Biden nor Donald Trump would make it to November on the top of their party’s tickets. My reasoning was simple: horrified fundraisers who had attended private events with the President were telling friends (including me) that Biden was fading fast; if he went, then surely the Republicans would ditch the candidate most likely to lose to anyone but Biden. I got the timing wrong, or to put it another way, Biden got the timing (accidentally) right. It would be difficult for Trump to be ejected now, but what if he chose to go? If he continues to sink in the polls, I wonder if he might prefer a grand storming out to a second electoral beating. I should stress I have no money on this outcome. But I’m not giving up on it yet. If it happens, I will use Americast to predict lottery numbers.
One of the underlying factors hidden by the whole bucking bronco of America’s political summer is that the Democrats are actually quite popular. In the Senate races to be settled this November, seven states are genuine toss-ups. Republicans are only leading in one of them – Montana. At this stage of the cycle they ought to be ahead in more. The GOP also did badly in the 2022 midterms, and badly in various rag-tag elections since. Without Biden on the ticket, in Congressional and state polls, Democrats do well. No wonder Trump hankers after his old partner in crime. The noise and fuss about Trump obscures what a tough job he has if he is going to win: Mitt Romney had a higher proportion of the popular vote in 2012 than Trump did in 2016. He threaded a needle and must do it again.
They plonked me next to Fox News Radio (‘America is listening!’) in the media lounge. This Convention is hostile terrain for Fox of course – there’s no question that Kamala Harris is the new love of the mainstream American press corps. But it isn’t always the Democrat who gets the nod from what’s left of the Fourth Estate. In 2004, when I was covering the Bush re-election campaign against John Kerry, there was a tangible annoyance with Kerry among the big cheese journalists. They thought he was phoney. They rather liked the Bush nicknames, they had grown comfortable with the schtick. And Bush had humour – genuine humour – that disarmed. A pal of mine was introduced to him once, and was asked: ‘Haven’t we just met?’ Bush had confused him with another representative of the same newspaper but my friend was too tongue-tied to tell him and blurted out: ‘Er, yes, we might have done.’ Bush, quick as a flash, turned to an aide: ‘You’d have thought he’d have remembered.’
I wonder whether the real problem for the Republicans this autumn is that wavering voters’ anger with inflation, with illegal immigration, with drug-fuelled inner-city crime, has all been reduced, soothed, by something that has nothing to do with any of these things. It was Biden himself who made them sad. Not just sad about him, but about everything. He projected eschatological gloom. It put folks in a bad mood. Now, with smiley Kamala they’re in a good one. Inflation, immigration, crime, whatever: nothing has changed but everything has changed. My dear old mum would have called them flibbertigibbets and given them a stern look, but she died before smartphones were invented so knew nothing, thankfully, of our modern condition.
Justin Webb presents the podcast Americast on BBC Sounds.
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