Look, I love Kamala Harris and her historic candidacy.
I love how she has electrified the electorate and how the Harris/Walz ticket has a real chance to crush Donald Trump and the MAGA anti-Democracy movement. Many of us have worked hard for a lifetime to reach this moment.
I urged Biden to pick her as his running mate four years ago, and began boosting her to head the 2024 Democratic National ticket after the Supreme Court’s cold-blooded murder of Roe v. Wade two years ago.
No one, I wrote, could articulate the issue of reproductive rights and a woman’s right to her own healthcare decisions better than Kamala Harris. Having been inspired by her cross-examination of Trump’s troglodyte Supreme Court nominees—and the bloviating Bill Barr—on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I believed that Kamala Harris was perfectly suited to prosecute the case against Donald Trump and the extremist U.S. Supreme Court, as the head of the ticket in 2024.
Accordingly, before Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, and well before he decided to bow out of the race on July 21, I was calling on Biden to live up to the promise he made to us four years ago, and pass the torch to a new generation of leadership. Kamala was always the most logical, and my first choice, to replace him.
Establishment Democrats and blind Biden loyalists attacked me for “not standing with Joe,” and for “weakening” the Democratic ticket, despite the visible truth—which shortly became fact—that it was an enfeebled Joe Biden who was weakening the ticket.
In a series of articles, my attention turned to who would make the strongest running mate for Kamala Harris not just to defeat Trump, but to crush him and MAGA, and to sweep in with her a Democratically controlled House and Senate. My choices fluctuated between Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—a strong choice—whose progressive pro-labor, pro-public education voting record is more simpatico to me than the similar records of Shapiro or Kelly.
I am all-in for the Harris/Walz ticket, have already made three separate donations, and am looking forward to doing on the ground work in Arizona, where Ruben Gallego is locked into a crucial Senate race with the MAGA Queen, Kari Lake, the eternal Fake.
That’s why—like the lightening fast and flawless start to the Harris/Walz campaign—I wanted every single night of the nationally televised Democratic National Convention in Chicago to be pitch perfect, and as well produced as the virtual Democratic Convention of 2020, a television production masterpiece.
I guess I was expecting too much.
The first night (Monday, August 19) of the Democratic National Convention was a television production bomb, with too many Democrats from too many places running up, on and off the stage, too many messages bombarding viewers, and no end insight until Joe Biden shouted himself over the finish line at nearly midnight on the East Coast. Yeeesh.
It appeared as if no one was in charge of the program and no one was running production. If someone was (David Plouffe, where were you?), why wasn’t Hillary Clinton’s prime time spot given to Joe Biden? After all, wasn’t it Biden who made Kamala Harris’ candidacy possible, not Hillary?
Instead, we got an endless, undisciplined parade of people and images—right down to Kamala Harris’ mother’s best friend’s 1966 Mustang convertible—making the event feel more like an Academy Awards Red Carpet runway, without the leveling presence of Joan Rivers.
The talent to produce a crackerjack TV show was right there, on stage, in movie Producer Tony Goldwyn, who recently produced the film Ezra (about an autistic boy and his father) and appeared in it with Robert DeNiro and Bobby Canavale. Unfortunately, Goldwyn wasn’t tapped for his production talent, though, but weirdly forced to try and fill Joan Rivers unfillable high-heels as an emcee, whatever that is supposed to be at a national political convention. The context of such a Hollywood golden boy popping up on the DNC stage was neither explained, nor made any sense.
Rather than having Goldwyn flit on and off the stage at inexplicable times, the first-rate producer should have been called up to bring the show in on time (before 11 pm Eastern Time) and to keep it on message. Wasn’t the whole purpose of the first night to have Biden pass the torch to Kamala Harris?
The show without even a show-runner ran away with itself.
Without looking it up on line, try to name all of the speakers of the DNC’s first night. Try to outline all the messages. What did Jamie Raskin say and when did he say it? AOC? Shawn Fain? Why were the women (and husband) who experienced the excruciating trauma of the Trump-inspired Chastity Belt abortion laws sandwiched in between every state or local Democratic official from Padukah, Kentucky to Portland, Oregon? Why was the biggest issue of 2024 used as a throwaway interruption?
Here’s another test for many of my Democratic friends and fellow activists and viewers: What precise section of Project 2025 did Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow refer to? What was the purpose of Senator Rafael Warnock being on stage? LaPhonza Butler? And why, why, why was the inspirational Golden State Warriors Coach (and victorious Olympic Men’s Basketball Coach) Steve Kerr—with a strong patriotic, bipartisan, all-American appeal—used as an empty time-filler?
Much of this will be forgotten on the DNC’s Night # 2, when Barack and Michelle Obama, and Doug Emhoff, and a cast of thousands of bit players, will make the party faithful—at the United Center—feel like they are the cool kids, still living inside “The Night of A Thousand Stars.”
Yes, we’ve got history on our side; we’ve got the issues on our side; we’ve got the better candidates; we’re running against a convicted felon and a fraud with no moral or personal convictions at all; we’ve got the better celebrities (who could NOT be better than Hulk Hogan?); we’ve got Democracy and diversity, and personal freedoms, and community responsibility, and health care, and jobs, and on and on and on, on our side. We’ve got the whole world in our hands, to paraphrase Mahalia Jackson.
All of which makes it more imperative that we get our act together on every detail in this election, especially when tens of millions of people are watching us.
The Democrats need to immediately put a tough, no-nonsense professional producer in charge of the rest of the Big Show, NOW and through Election Day. We need a skilled tactician not afraid to bruise a few oversized political egos, to not call upon some speakers, and to be fearless in giving high-ranking public officials the hook if they are wandering off message, or off schedule. In the end, this is a story which must be told to fit the form of media telling it.
We need a Tony Goldwyn, or someone like him, to bring the Kamala Harris story home to 329+million Americans who are not the wristband crowd at the United Center in Chicago, or the quasi-journalist cheerleaders on MSNBC.
Otherwise, as Steve Kerr brilliantly mimicked the Warriors’ Steph Curry, it’ll be “night, night,” for the Democrats, still star-struck, singing and stuck on the Red Carpet, without the honesty of a Joan Rivers to bring them back to earth.
.