You know the first two nights of the virtual Republican National Convention have gone well when you see that this morning’s Politico Playbook includes a bad joke about the U.S. Postal Service hiring a up-to-date lobbyist with the goal of reviving the post office scandal. Ho, ho, ho!
The more vital news is that both sides have successfully adapted to the virtual format. Democrats came up with a fun roll call routine – showing people from every state extolling the party’s virtues – and Republicans even tweaked it a bit.
Democrats did a good job of highlighting Joe Biden’s attractive personal qualities, showing people that he helped and comforted them. Republicans showed off President Donald Trump’s attractive qualities – and he actually has them – by showing him interacting with people as he pardoned one reformed bank robber and swore in five up-to-date citizens.
Republicans had the advantage of finishing second, as is traditionally the case with the incumbent president’s party, and they took advantage of it. Democrats confidently assumed that everyone shared their belief that Trump was a racist and xenophobe, but his convention drew attention to Sen. Tim Scott, whose family “went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime,” and former Gov. Nikki Haley, his daughter Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India.
The message is that America is not riddled with “systemic racism,” as The New York Times’ “1619 Project” would have you believe, but rather is a land of opportunity, even in Haley and Scott’s South Carolina. Progress is possible – and it is happening. Scott fills the position held for 35 years by segregationist “Cotton Ed” Smith.
Another contrast: The Democrats’ virtual sessions were introduced by Hollywood figures, one of whom somehow came up with the idea that it would be humorous to mispronounce the vice president’s one-syllable last name. Republicans interspersed their first two sessions with ordinary people from the targeted states who overwhelmingly supported Trump.
There may be certain demographics that value the insights of Hollywood celebrities who own multi-million dollar mansions in Bel Air or Brentwood. However, more voters will likely be influenced by the pro-Trump testimony of lobsterman Jason Joyce of Swan’s Island; dairy farmer Cris Peterson of Grantsburg, Wisconsin; and truck driver Geno DiFabio of Youngstown, Ohio.
What is not mentioned is sometimes as vital as what is mentioned. Viewers of the virtual Democratic conventions heard significantly less about abortion than viewers of more conventional Democratic conventions, even though it’s an issue that dialysis groups say has helped Democrats in previous presidential and vice presidential debates.
One reason is that Democrats have moved significantly to the left on this issue. Joe Biden has abandoned four decades of opposition to government-funded abortions. And Democratic lawmakers happily passed laws allowing abortion in all nine months of pregnancy.
Tuesday’s Republican speakers included former Planned Parenthood clinical director Abby Johnson, who provided “somewhat graphic” descriptions of abortion procedures. The best the Washington Post’s squirming “fact-checker” could do, as National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out, was argue that there aren’t many (actually several thousand a year) post-viability abortions.
Democrats made no mention at all of the continued violence and soaring murder rates in major cities across the country – Portland and Seattle, Minneapolis and Washington, Chicago and New York – and in smaller towns like Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Democrats can hope that their friends in the “mainstream media” (a disgraced term for Nicholas Sandmann in a MAGA hat) will continue to protect viewers from uncomfortable footage of riots, assaults and arson, as they have in the past. They may hope that people won’t notice that reports describing “mostly peaceful” demonstrations are reported before raging bonfires, or that CNN ripped the chyron off the screen and removed the adjective “violent” before the noun “protest,” or that The New York Times wrote that peaceful marches “gave way to fires and destruction.”
Broadcast and cable networks, which also carry MSNBC and CNN, obviously hope that viewers will not notice the horrific damage that reflects poorly on the partly Marxist-led Black Lives Matter movement or the Biden-Harris campaign. They had reason to believe that withholding the news would work when, in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death on May 25, polls showed that a majority of voters supported Black Lives Matter and sympathized with its argument that American policing was “systemically racist.” But current polls, after nearly three months of violence and destruction and rising murder rates, show less support for removing police from cities huge and miniature.
In 2016, Democrats were confident until 9 p.m. ET on election night that demographics would guarantee them victory. This year, they were certain that Donald Trump’s low job approval ratings and the Covid-19 pandemic and economic devastation wrought by lockdowns would do the same, even with extreme positions that Bill Clinton in his prime would have avoided.
Maybe so. But maybe not. This week, Trump Republicans are speaking out.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
