Giffords, Biden, Obama: The Scale of the D.N.C.

The problem for the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night was one of scale and proportion. It started with the musical acts, which had been chosen when the event was supposed to be in a football stadium that held more than seventy-thousand people: because of rain or security or some combination, though, it was moved to a much smaller basketball arena, holding about fifty thousand fewer people. Around the time that Mary J. Blige sang, at around six—nearly five hours before Obama was due to appear, and about an hour before the Foo Fighters—the gates were shut, and, soon after, access from the galleries to the floor was cut off. The stage was too small for Earth, Wind, and Fire, and so they were scratched; and yet it seemed enormous when Gabrielle Giffords, the former congresswoman, who is still recovering from a gunshot to her head, slowly walked across it, to lead the delegates in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz stood close enough to catch Giffords if she fell. Speaking and walking are still hard for Giffords; reciting a short text represents long months of work.

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There was, too, what Bill Clinton might call an arithmetic problem. Barack Obama was elected President just about four years ago. He has a certain list of accomplishments; is that number a lot, given the passage of time, or a little? Underlying it was a philosophical question: What do we owe each other? How do we apportion credit when something is built, and reckon our obligations? Then there was the scale of Obama’s speech, which had to play to the hall and also to television screens: How grand, rhetorically, should it be, and how grand should it make him? Mitt Romney was upstaged by a chair: Obama had to follow not only Mary J. Blige but, in no particular order, Scarlett Johansson, Eva Longoria, John Kerry, John Lewis, and Jill and Joe Biden.

Johansson talked about growing up eating reduced-price school lunches. Brian Schweitzer, the governor of Montana, said that Mitt Romney had once raised taxes on milk. John Kerry said that Romney sounded “like he’s only seen Russia by watching ‘Rocky IV.’” Kerry also spoke about the sacrifices of soldiers, and said, “No nominee for President should ever fail in the midst of a war to pay tribute to our troops overseas in his acceptance speech.” He was talking about Romney.

Between speakers, there was a video about finding jobs for veterans. (“Reference: the President of the United States.”) The Obama team seems to have worked diligently to turn defense into a domestic issue, rather than foreign-policy one—and, more than that, into a social-welfare issue: having an Army must mean caring for veterans, and it should also mean having a G.I. Bill. The Republican convention, in Tampa, had a steady rhythm, provided by the staccato repetition of “I built that,” “you built that.” The Democrats didn’t have that kind of catchphrase, though “got your back” came close; the harmony emerged from a lot of people telling stories about coöperation—the help that they got, what they wanted to return.

Then came Joe Biden. He is nobody but himself, and Thursday night that was fine. On Twitter, he was given a hard time for his word choice and general Bidenism, but in the confines of the convention hall he was effective. The crowd was waving signs printed “Fired Up/Ready for Joe.” He offered a series of measurements: the distance of his office from Barack Obama’s (“I walk thirty paces”); the dimensions of their relationship (“the enormity of his heart”; “the depth of my loyalty”); the number of times he had proposed to his wife before she said yes (five); private-sector job growth (four and a half million jobs, he said); and a simple formula: “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” (John Kerry had a variation: “Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago.”)

And Biden managed to weave a story he has told many times, about his father, an “automobile man” who had to leave town to find a job, into one about Mitt Romney, “another son of another automobile man,” who perhaps “grew up loving cars,” but didn’t “understand what saving the automobile industry meant to all of America.” Biden blamed “the Bain way.” Above all, he said, there were two visions: one embedded in an American community, and one oblivious to it. That encompassed undocumented immigrants, particularly those brought here as children who might have benefited from the Dream Act: “they’ve done right by America and we should do right by them.”

All of this was a setup for Barack Obama to come out. Michelle introduced him; she kissed him twice and steered him toward the audience. The speech he gave, which was mostly about others, was in some senses reserved, and at least one of the anecdotes, involving a lottery winner, was incoherent. But in another way the speech was deeply confrontational: he drew the themes extended in many of the other speeches into the outline of a battle plan, the proportions of which fit the Republican challenge fairly well. The task he seems to have given himself was to explain the theme of coöperation—what he meant to say when he stumbled on “you didn’t build that.” Presenting himself as a heroic figure, the kind of guy whose unfaded poster a teen-ager has on his wall, might not actually have been the best way to go about that. The personal appeal was still there: as John Cassidy notes, one of the biggest applause lines was, “I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President.” But a whole section of the speech might have been given the heading, “I didn’t build that” (“It was about you…. You did that”); he also told a story about the owners of a family business who “understood that their biggest asset was the community and the workers who helped build that business.” What he built up to was a certain theory of civic moralism:

We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

And, like the other speakers, he was willing to mock Romney, saying “you might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally.” This might signal even more of a willingness to mix it up than all the talk about Bain: Romney has been almost touchingly proud of his Olympic connection. As an orator, Obama was not, this week, on the level on Bill, or even Michelle. But he is running against Mitt, who gave a speech involving the man on the moon and roses for his mother.

The speech ended in a riot of confetti—the balloons were apparently still at the other stadium. The Bidens and Obamas all came out; Malia is now taller than Jill Biden, and almost taller than Joe. Early in his speech, Obama had told his daughters that they’d still have to go to school on Friday. The camera caught Sasha giving her father a look of supreme skepticism. The President may have some small skirmishes ahead of him, along with a very big fight.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

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