Julián Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, was given an impossible job last night. He’s just thirty-seven years old, and has been the mayor of a mid-sized city run largely by a city manager, not the mayor, for just three years. Stuck in reliably Republican Texas, his prospects for winning a statewide race for Senate or governor, and thus a perch from which to pursue an even higher office, are poor. And yet there he was being fêted by the media and his own party as the next great hope for Democrats. Inevitably, his turn as convention keynoter was compared to Obama’s, in 2004. By that high standard, it failed. It was a fine speech, but at least for me, a fairly forgettable one.
What made Obama’s 2004 address memorable was not just his personal story, one that was then new to most Americans and inherently interesting. It stood out because he wrapped his story around a theory about the state of the country. At a time when politics seemed hopelessly mired in partisan conflict, he made a case about how Americans have more in common with one another than the cynical pollsters would have it. It was an electrifying performance at a low point in the Bush years which offered hope that the two parties could make common cause.
As it turned out, he was largely wrong about all of this, but at least he managed to identify a nagging problem in American life—one that frustrated many voters—and offer his own biography as a fairly inspirational testament to the idea that differences could be bridged. The speech worked because Obama’s own story synced nicely with the political moment he described so well. He also bashed Bush and praised Kerry, but few people remember what he said about them.
Enter Castro. His speech started with a compelling and promising premise. He talked about how he was “of a generation born as the Cold War receded, shaped by the tragedy of 9/11, connected by the digital revolution.” But he never returned to these generational touchstones or explained what they meant to him. Instead, he told a very heart-warming story of his grandmother’s immigrant experience. Despite a tribute to his mother, Rosie, that brought delegates to their feet, he left out the most interesting details of her life: that’s she was a prominent radical Chicana activist who was a leader of La Raza Unida in Texas in the nineteen-seventies. The closest he came to mentioning his mother’s fascinating political background was a reference that she “fought hard for civil rights.”
Much of the rest of the speech consisted of well-written and well-delivered attacks on Mitt Romney and praise for Barack Obama. “Mitt Romney, quite simply, doesn’t get it,” he said of the Republican nominee. “I believe in you. Barack Obama believes in you,” he said about the President.
But there was no new idea about what Obama’s second term might offer and no attempt to explain this moment in American politics in a fresh and compelling way. Instead, Castro ended with a touching story about taking his daughter to kindergarten and sending her off with the same words his grandmother once told him: “Que Dios te bendiga.” (“May God bless you.”) It was a poignant moment, but one I doubt many will remember years from now.
For more of The New Yorker’s convention coverage, visit The Political Scene. You can also read Lizza on the relationship between President Obama and Bill Clinton; John Cassidy on Michelle Obama’s convention speech and Obama’s and Paul Ryan’s false statements about the economy; Amy Davidson on the gay-rights platform and whether Democrats are better off than they were four years ago; and Alex Koppelman on Obama and the American Dream.
Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo.
