President Obama Tries to Sell Hope in a Reality TV Landscape
Wednesday night, President Barack Obama closed out the night of speeches with an appeal to America’s better natures that felt wildly out of place in the narrative of Decision 2016. His address to the convention was a mic drop — not quite as jaw-dropping as First Lady Michelle Obama’s on Monday night, but only because the American people know the president’s speeches a little better than his wife’s. The two-term president was speaking at his fourth Democratic National Convention, and for the first time, the end of his elected political career is in sight. There was, as a result, a marked looseness to his manner; the swagger of a winner on the victory lap. Whatever happens now, he’s going out on a high note.
Day three of the DNC narrative puts the week in Philadelphia in almost complete opposition to last week’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Where the emphasis on the third night of that convention was on Laura Ingraham’s Nazi salute and Ted Cruz’s highly public heel-turn, DNC viewers were handed the package of former CIA head Leon Panetta, Vice President Joe Biden, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, and, of course, POTUS himself. With Panetta and Bloomberg, it was a firmly centrist deck of speakers — to the audible dismay of some of the listening delegates, who took up and discarded ragged chants throughout the evening — but one designed for maximum effect for the undecided voter. The DNC once again ran well over its 11 p.m. end time, but the time appears to be the convention’s only technical difficulty.
As illuminating as it is to contrast the DNC and the RNC, tonight was a bracing reminder that comparing one to the other is a case study in false equivalence. When I wrote last week that the RNC could stand to learn a thing or two from reality television, that was because so much of the RNC played out as farce. By contrast, the DNC has been an exercise in practiced sincerity, a hopeful appeal for unity and goodness. It’s a tone that defies the inherently detached, implicitly ironic lens of reality television. The RNC felt like a barely restrained circus; the DNC reads more like going to church, or to a very impassioned high school classroom.
Our television these days rarely has room for such sincerity. This might be one of the reasons it’s so easy for the television news media to cover Donald Trump; in our current climate, it’s easier to digest a convenient piece of spin than it is to accept the sweeping generalities about the American electorate. The DNC has done a good job of presenting an alternative to Trump’s type of media dominance, but success for them will depend not just on having an alternative, but on selling it.
Obama, who is our generation’s best salesman of the American dream, made a strong case for the Democrats’ vision on Wednesday night. In doing so he touched on themes that he has discussed for his entire political career, including calls to service and pleas for greater humanity. These appeals to rationale were all over the night’s speeches, including Biden’s invigoratingly parental speech and Bloomberg’s paean to stable competence and good business. Biden yelled out “malarkey” and Obama exhorted the audience, “Don’t boo: Vote.” Bloomberg insinuated that Trump wasn’t even a real billionaire because he had a leg-up from his father. Tim Kaine, a man who has been photographed in pleated khakis, spoke adorably gringo Spanish and made a long series of dad jokes.
Rationale is nice. It has its upsides. But it isn’t terribly sexy. Cooperation, compromise, and common sense have brought together unlikely bedfellows in Philadelphia — a plutocrat mayor with a former head of intelligence; a recently pro-life senator with a vice president who was once one of the more controversial Democrats in Washington. With an opposition so fringe and polarizing that it’s changing the shape of American politics, the Democrats have become de facto centrists — at the risk of losing the shape of their founding and unifying narratives, the story of who they are to themselves.
This came out during some of those speeches. While the messaging in the text of the speeches was all very carefully coordinated, the response to it was another matter. Panetta was halted, at some point, by protestors chanting “no more war.” It wasn’t the rowdy, almost hostile-sounding crowd of Monday night, but on a night that should have been a softball win for the Democrats — what with Trump’s unprecedentedly controversial remarks on Russia and a speaker no less than the commander-in-chief on the docket — the DNC’s own issues with rhetoric, self-determination, and unity threatened to get in the way.
Obama’s closing speech — and subsequent appearance with the newly anointed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton — shushed a lot of that dissent, at least for now. In one of the most poetic lines of the night, the president said, “In America, we don’t look to be ruled,” which encapsulates both America’s founding narrative and the concerns that many Americans have for Trump in one neat and almost biblical-sounding turn of phrase. The opposite of fear, as Obama campaigned when he first ran in 2008, is hope; whether or not hope captivates viewers is another question.
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