The populists had their night, but it’s Clinton’s party now
If you tuned in only for the opening of this Democratic convention in Philadelphia Monday, you might have been asking yourself who really emerged from the primary season in control of the party.
Even as protesters turned the streets of Philadelphia into an Occupy Wall Street rally, even as the party’s chairwoman handed over her gavel and fled the arena to avoid further humiliation, Bill Clinton sat in the balcony, opposite the main stage, and pretended to cheer as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders effectively excoriated his entire economic philosophy.
Energized delegates waved signs denouncing the latest free-trade pact and erupted in jeers at Wall Street. It must have felt to Clinton as if he had drifted back in time to the Democratic conventions of the Humphreys and Mondales, and here he was, hovering above the stage like some unexorcized ghost.
Hillary Clinton was the nominee, but it seemed for all the world as if Sanders’ argument had carried the day.
If you looked at the program for the entire four days, however, you might have realized that all of this was by design. Just as the first night of the Republican convention a week earlier seemed to be all about washed-up TV stars, the opening of the Democratic confab, which began with a lineup of union leaders, was effectively conceived as “populist night” in Philadelphia.
The unstated theme of the night seemed to be: “OK, people, just get it all out now.”
By Tuesday, the party had turned to remembering the roaring ’90s. Bill Clinton took back the stage for his eighth consecutive major convention address (this has to be a record), reminding the delegates — and the audience at home — of his own stewardship during better economic times.
Clinton’s appearance seemed intended as a pivot point, from the unyielding ideology of the populist left to the more pragmatic politics of the last two Democratic presidents.
And now, on these last two nights of the convention, when the television audience will reach its apex, the lineup of speeches will leave little doubt about whose Democratic Party this really is and whose brand of liberalism has actually prevailed.
On Wednesday alone, Democrats will pack in more powerhouse speakers than Donald Trump managed to assemble for his entire convention. (By day four in Cleveland, the whole thing pretty much felt like little more than a family reunion, except that you didn’t know any of the relatives before they showed up and started rearranging the furniture.)
The most symbolically important speaker of the night will be a New York mayor — which shouldn’t surprise anyone, since New York is now the geographic center of a presidential campaign, on both sides, for the first time since 1944, when Thomas Dewey ran against Franklin Roosevelt.
But the mayor on stage won’t be Bill de Blasio, who once ran Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign, and who, along with Sanders and Warren, forms the left’s populist triumvirate.
Instead, Clinton’s team will hand over the podium to Michael Bloomberg, who hasn’t been a Democrat for many years now, and who stands for much of what the left detests. He is a reform-minded billionaire, a titan of Wall Street, an empire builder who champions free enterprise and fiscal restraint.
Bloomberg, who apparently likes Trump even less than he likes very large sugary beverages, will validate Clinton to the national audience, vouching for her pragmatism and gravitas, while de Blasio sits in the cheap seats, suffering in silence among all the bewildered Bernie Bros.
After that, viewers will be introduced to Tim Kaine, the vice presidential candidate whom the party’s left flank was less than enthused about. That’s mostly because, until last week, he bravely supported the president’s trade agenda.
And then, before the night is through, the party will turn to its Gehrig-Ruth combination (might as well stay with a New York theme): first Joe Biden, who wrote and championed the Clinton crime bill the populists now vilify, and then President Obama, chief proponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, who raised more money from Wall Street than Mitt Romney last time around.
I would not expect either man to use the phrase “political revolution.”
And on Thursday, of course, Clinton herself will take the stage, where I doubt she’ll say a whole lot about the sharply leftist party platform that Sanders and his acolytes have been crowing about for a week.
Because despite what you may have heard, platforms aren’t actually governing documents. They’re more like that legal waiver you scribble your name on when you go to the bouncy house, even though both you and the kid behind the counter know that if you break your back on a collapsing slide you’re going to sue for every last Minion toy in the claw crane machine.
No, the only governing vision that counts now will be the one Clinton articulates Thursday night. And my guess is that it will be aimed squarely at more typical working-class and minority voters, as well as independent voters, rather than at the activists who seemed to have taken over the hall earlier in the week.
Clinton is counting on Trump to galvanize those hard-core Sanders voters on her behalf, and in the end he probably will.
For all the images of protest in the streets and “Bernie” signs gyrating in the arena, the truth is that the Clintons and their Democratic allies have played this convention perfectly, and they’ve shown once again how the two parties diverged this year in their handling of populist uprisings.
Republican leaders allowed their party to be overwhelmed and carried away by an antiestablishment tsunami, because they couldn’t get control of a sprawling field and a chaotic process, and because they made plain their contempt for Trump’s legion of new followers.
Democrats, on the other hand, kept a tighter rein on the process, and Clinton locked down her core constituencies even as she mouthed just enough populist rhetoric — like changing her stance on the Pacific free-trade pact — to mollify some voters on the left.
When we look back on this week, we will not see the convention where Sanders and his uprising redefined the Democratic Party, but rather the moment when Clinton and her high command took it back.
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