Democratic National Convention 2020

As Democrats and Republicans blasted one another during their conventions this month, one of America’s most prominent institutions could end up worse off: the US military.

At both parties’ conventions, US troops appeared on camera in uniform — in possible violation of a longstanding Defense Department policy barring uniformed, active-duty service members from participating in partisan political events. The reason for the directive is pretty straightforward: Having uniformed troops at a partisan campaign event implicitly signals that the party or candidate hosting the event is backed by the nation’s armed forces.

The 2020 Democratic National Convention was a game-changer for national political campaign events: Without a large, cohesive, in-person live gathering, this year’s DNC (and this week’s even less adorned Republican National Convention, for that matter) took a considerably more bare-bones approach. This year’s convention cost millions less to produce and communicated the Democratic Party’s viewpoints just as effectively as before, without relying on all the space and spectacle typical of the physical event.

A win-win, right?

This week’s Democratic National Convention roused more fuzzy feelings than a Hallmark movie.

From the heartwarming story of a teenager learning to manage his stutter to the endearing testament of Joe Biden finding love after losing his first wife and daughter in a car crash, the Democratic Party’s narrative arc inspired millions yearning for a return to American character and civility.

Quarantine has brought one single, simple joy into our lives, and it is this: Snooping on celebs and their taste in books.

Now as never before, we have the chance to see inside the homes of not just our friends and families and coworkers, but of famous people. Now as never before, we have the chance to judge them by the details lurking in the background of every media appearance: the house plants, the throw pillows, and, most importantly, the books. For famous politicians especially, the background bookcase has become a fundamental signifier of intelligence and erudition, and what books they choose to showcase for snoops like me to suss out is a huge signal about how they want the public to think of them.

For months now, the 2020 presidential election hasn’t felt entirely real to me.

The obvious reason is that the global outbreak of Covid-19 scrambled everything about the campaign to such a degree that it felt ever so slightly like an event happening in some other country entirely. “While this pandemic is going on, we’re going to also have an election?” I would catch myself thinking. “Really??”

Joe Biden cut right to the point on Thursday night: The Covid-19 pandemic reflects a dereliction of Donald Trump’s duty as president.

“Our current president has failed in his most basic duty to the nation. He’s failed to protect us. He’s failed to protect America. And my fellow Americans, that is unforgivable,” Biden said in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency. “As president I’ll make you a promise. I’ll protect America, I’ll defend us from every attack, seen and unseen, always, without exception, every time.”

The defining moment of the 2020 Democratic National Convention was neither a slickly produced policy video nor a speech from a former president. Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s address, arguably the best oration of his long career, wasn’t it either.

Instead, it was a testimonial from a 13-year-old boy from New Hampshire named Brayden Harrington.

It’s long been the cliché that voters judge politicians based on their likability. There’s truth to it, but in my experience, the deeper question isn’t how much voters like a politician, but whether they believe a politician likes them.

There isn’t enough charisma in the world to save you once a segment of the public thinks you hold them in contempt. The most damaging gaffes come when a politician insults, purposely or accidentally, a segment of the electorate — Barack Obama’s comment that voters get bitter and cling to guns and religion, Mitt Romney’s dismissal of the 47 percent who pay no taxes but leech off the public’s largesse, Hillary Clinton calling half of Trump voters “deplorable.” We forgive our leaders for being cold, dishonest, remote, and yes, even unlikable. We can’t forgive them for disliking us.

Joe Biden’s Democratic National Convention-closing speech went over great on Thursday night, even on Fox News.

Biden opened by promising to “draw on the best of us, not the worst,” and vowed to “work hard for those who did not support me, as hard for them as I did for those who did vote for me.” He offered blistering attacks on President Trump, using facts to criticize his failed coronavirus response and describing him as someone who “takes no responsibility, refuses to lead, blames others, cozies up to dictators, and fans the flames of hate and division.”

Thursday was supposed to be the last night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee.

Almost no part of that sentence turned out to be true. It was not just in Milwaukee; it was spread across videoconferencing setups in dozens of locations. It was not a convention, at least not in the sense we’re familiar with; it felt like half Zoom call, half infomercial.

Former Vice President Joe Biden accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president Thursday at the Democratic National Convention, at long last making him the official major-party challenger to President Donald Trump.

Biden’s political career has lasted more than five decades. His first presidential campaign was 33 years ago and ended in disaster, but his second was followed by Barack Obama’s fateful decision to pick Biden as his running mate. And now Biden has finally obtained the nomination he’s so long wanted — and he’ll officially begin a two-and-a-half-month battle to defeat Trump.

During the Democratic primary, entrepreneur Andrew Yang built a bit of a reputation as an interesting, blunt voice on American politics. So it’s perhaps not surprising that, on the final night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Yang had the sharpest analysis on what makes Joe Biden an effective candidate in this year’s cycle.

“The magic of Joe Biden is that everything he does becomes the new reasonable,” Yang said during a roundtable discussion among former 2020 contenders. “If he comes with an ambitious template to address climate change, all of a sudden, everyone is going to follow his lead.”

Michele Beebe’s Cookie Monster scrubs made her message about wanting her “kiddos” to go back to school — but not until it’s safe — go viral. “It’s kind of sad not to see the kiddos when we’re back, but I know that that will change,” she said during the first night of the Democratic National Convention.

Beebe, a school nurse from Texas, appeared at the convention virtually, by invitation from her local teachers association. The 43-year-old mother of three took part in one of the opening segments of the convention in an interview with actress Eva Longoria Baston, and the scrubs her husband helped her pick out (and that her son “loves”) were not only a topic of discussion on Twitter but became a joke on host Stephen Colbert’s show. Beebe described the whole experience to me as “surreal.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden will formally accept the Democratic nomination for president Wednesday night, issuing an address on the final night of the party’s national convention.

Although it’s been long settled, Biden’s speech will mark the official end of the Democratic primary — and the moment the party will turn its full attention toward defeating President Donald Trump in November’s general election. His address will close out the 2020 Democratic National Convention, starting at around 10:40 pm ET.

On Wednesday night, Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination to be its vice presidential candidate, becoming the second woman to be featured in that slot on the party’s presidential ticket and the first woman of color.

Dressed in a plum-colored suit, Harris brought attention to the generations of Black women who worked in politics before her, attributing her success to theirs and highlighting her unique background as a child of immigrants. Instead of donning suffragist white as some convention speakers did before her, such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and former Congress member Gabby Giffords, the vice presidential candidate opted for a shade of purple, a color that is internationally recognized as a symbol for women.

President Barack Obama’s Democratic National Convention speech on Wednesday wasn’t just a call to support former Vice President Joe Biden over President Donald Trump this November — it was a warning about the health of American democracy.

Obama, betraying his typically upbeat rhetoric, was very explicit about the stakes, claiming, “I am also asking you to believe in your own ability — to embrace your own responsibility as citizens — to make sure that the basic tenets of our democracy endure. Because that’s what’s at stake right now: our democracy.”

President Donald Trump hit some familiar notes on Twitter while responding to former President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention Wednesday night. Trump again repeated the false accusation that the former president spied on his 2016 campaign and got caught. And he needled Obama for waiting until April, when the primary was essentially over, to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden.

The tweets came after Obama offered his sharpest criticism of Trump’s presidency to date, describing him as unfit for office.

In one of the standout moments at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday, former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords retold her story — explaining how she went from being the victim of an assassination attempt to a gun violence crusader. “We are a nation ready to end gun violence,” Giffords said, endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential run. She ended her speech with a call for those watching to “vote, vote, vote.”

Biden does have a record, and a plan, in favor of gun control. In the 1990s, he was a top Democrat in getting both federal background checks and a 10-year assault weapon ban enacted. Biden has often boasted that he has “taken on the National Rifle Association (NRA) on the national stage and won — twice.”

In another world — a world where the presidential candidate who wins the most votes wins the White House — Hillary Clinton is preparing once again to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president Thursday night. Historical counterfactuals are always dangerous, but I feel confident in this one: In that world, America had competent presidential leadership for the course of the coronavirus outbreak, its own Angela Merkel.

Clinton has her faults, but her strengths would have been on display here: a deep understanding of the federal government, a belief that it is the president’s job to solve national problems, an unparalleled enthusiasm for convening experts and synthesizing their knowledge into policy, an unusual enthusiasm for the details of interagency collaboration, a relentless focus on operational details.

No president in recent memory has done as much to reshape the judiciary as Donald Trump, thanks in no small part to the Republican Party’s unprecedented efforts to prevent President Obama from confirming judicial nominees during his presidency. And, on many key economic issues, Trump’s appointees are the most conservative batch of judges appointed to the federal bench since the Herbert Hoover administration.

Democrats, however, appear to be awakening to this threat to their ability to govern. In contrast to prior versions of its party platform, which barely mentioned the courts, the Democratic Party’s 2020 party platform states that the party “will commit to creating new federal district and circuit judgeships.”

At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the Democratic Party sold itself as the real party of family values and patriotism.

It was an argument Democrats had been building toward throughout the Obama era, a muscular defense of the idea that the Democratic big tent reflected a core truth of America that the Republican party had abandoned. The country is only as strong as it is diverse, and it is only as good as it is willing to build systems that will embrace and care for absolutely everybody equitably, goes this argument. And, implicitly, it suggests that only the Democratic Party can practice that form of patriotism.

With Joe Biden officially receiving the Democratic nomination for president on Tuesday night, Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention was reserved for big speeches from just about every prominent Democrat except the candidate himself: former President Barack Obama, previous nominee Hillary Clinton, third-place primary finisher Sen. Elizabeth Warren, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris. Oh, and Billie Eilish.

The night understandably lacked the DIY charm of Tuesday’s state-by-state roll call vote for president. But it featured Obama’s harshest criticisms to date of his successor, President Donald Trump, and Harris’s opportunity to reintroduce herself to the nation at large after her failed presidential bid. And it devoted airtime to some of the policy priorities that have dominated Democratic politics in recent years: gun control, immigration, climate change, women’s issues, and child care.

Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech — a historic one, as she is the first Black and first South Asian American woman to be the official vice presidential nominee of a major party — kicked off with an homage to those who came before her: “That I am speaking tonight is a testament to the dedication of generations before me.”

It concluded with a similarly inspiring look at history — but the history America is living through today.

On Wednesday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren became the second speaker at the 2020 Democratic National Convention to deliver her speech from an empty classroom.

The night before, Jill Biden had addressed the nation while standing before the room where she once taught at Brandywine High School in Delaware — closed since March due to Covid-19. Warren, for her part, spoke in front of the colorful rug and cubbyholes (including some holding blocks spelling out BLM) at the Early Childhood Education Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, closed for months for the same reason.

Sen. Kamala Harris has made history by becoming the first Black woman and the first South Asian American woman to accept a major-party nomination for the vice presidency, delivering a powerful set of remarks from Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday.

“I accept your nomination for vice president of the United States of America. I do so committed to the values [my mother] taught me,” she said on the third night of the Democratic National Convention. “And to a vision passed on through generations of Americans, one that Joe Biden shares, a vision of our nation as a beloved community where all are welcome no matter what we look like, no matter where we come from or who we love.”