Last Sunday, in a long lament with the Hunter Thompsonish title “Feel the Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent of the New York Times Magazine, put his finger on something:
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Leibovich connects his joylessness to the campaign’s “free-floating hostility” and to “how bad off the country felt and how outmatched our politicians were by the severity of our problems and how obvious it was that the proverbial ‘tone’ of Washington wouldn’t change no matter who won.” But a lot of people who don’t fully share that diagnosis recognize the symptoms. Maybe I’m just projecting, but it seems to me that a lot of Democrats and liberals have been suffering from a kind of low-grade political flu, an intermittent psychic headache that’s equal parts helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness, and listlessness.
The huge, pleasant surprise of the first day of the Democratic National Convention was how thoroughly, efficiently, and exuberantly it banished those feelings.
Michelle Obama’s speech was as good as everyone is saying it was. Yes, it was heavy on the mom- and dad-mongering, but this time, somehow, that didn’t bother me. But by the time she strode out in that beautiful dress the buoyant mood had been building for more than five hours, for most of which the only cameras were C-Span’s. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s speech was rousing, but so was Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s, three and a half hours earlier. San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro’s keynote, with its gentle jabs at Mitt Romney, delighted the crowd. But, earlier, so did the not-so-gentle jabs of Ted Strickland, the ex-governor of Ohio. (Strickland’s best bit: “Mitt has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport. It summers on the beaches of the Cayman Islands and winters on the slopes of the Swiss Alps.”) Michelle Obama’s stories brought tears to many cheeks, but so did the testimonies of Lilly Ledbetter, the gritty Alabama fighter for equal pay, and Stacy Lihn, the beautiful young mother of a beautiful little girl born with a heart defect.
The real stars, though, were the thousands of people in the hall. This was a much livelier crowd than Tampa’s. In Tampa, the most prominent emotion, apart from indifference, was anti-Obama indignation verging on hatred. In Charlotte yesterday, the emotions were as varied as the hues of the faces that expressed them. It was like a giant consciousness-raising session. These Democrats seemed to be discovering, to their delight, that they are proud of their Party, proud of what they now happily call Obamacare, proud of their values, proud of their varieties. Proud of themselves, and proud of their President.
Obama’s biggest political problem, apart from the sluggish economy and his own campaign’s relative penury, has been morale. Paul Ryan’s crack about lying around staring at faded Obama posters had hit a little too close to home. Last night that changed. The question is whether the joy—and that’s what it was, palpably—will turn the Dems into happy warriors for the rest of the campaign, or whether it’s just a sugar rush that will soon fade to lassitude.
For more of The New Yorker’s convention coverage, visit The Political Scene. You can also read Ryan Lizza on Julián Castro’s keynote address and 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 First Lady’s speech, 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 Benjamin Lowy via Instagram.
