Democratic Convention Final Review: Roars for Hillary
Entering and exiting to the music of Katy Perry, quoting from the hit musical Hamilton, Hillary Clinton accepted her party’s nomination for the presidency and concluded the Democratic convention on Thursday night with a fiery speech that reached out beyond her loyalists, to try and appeal to both Bernie Sanders devotees and Republicans disaffected by their own candidate, Donald Trump.
The Clinton speech was at once time-honored, old-fashioned (full of idealistic rhetoric about the greatness of America), and very 2016 in its pop-culture knowingness. In addition to the Hamilton quotation (“planting seeds in a garden you never get to see”), the line picked up and twirled around on all the cable-news channels was Clinton’s funniest sharp jab at Trump: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
There was anticipatory drama leading up to Clinton’s speech, as some Sanders supporters had donned iridescent yellow-green shirts designed to glow in the dark, as rumors glowed that Bern-ers were planning to disrupt the speech in some manner. But, as CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out, whenever the Sander-ites began booing, “the crowd overwhelmingly drowned them out.” For his part, Sanders sat sullenly in his chair, looking like a man whose wife had just told him they were going to binge-watch every episode of Gilmore Girls right now.
Clinton was introduced by her daughter, Chelsea, whose own speech was full of the fond remembrances (“my wonderful, thoughtful, hilarious mother”) we expect from the child of a candidate, but I was struck by the way Chelsea went out of her way to talk about the authors she and her mother shared a liking for: Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon), Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time), and Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice). Now that’s as fine a trio for the good works of woman-power as anyone could want.
Speaking of which, another powerful woman, TV producer Shonda Rhimes, oversaw the short film biography of Hillary, which was narrated by Morgan Freeman. It was a piece of well-edited hagiography that Fox News could not wait to cut away from as soon as it began. Similarly, Fox News refused to carry the primetime speech by retired Gen. John Allen and dozens of veterans he led onstage. All week, Fox News has played host to its own and guest commentators whose charges against the Democratic convention prominently included the complaint that there was little to no mention of the fight against terrorism. Yet here was Gen. Allen thundering, “To ISIS and others — we will defeat you!” and Fox viewers were denied that.
On the other hand, Fox’s Megyn Kelly far exceeded both CNN’s and MSNBC’s anchors in an eloquent expression of what it felt like to be a woman witnessing Clinton’s assumption of the nomination: “What a moment it was when we saw a woman, a mother, and a grandmother accept the nomination,” said Kelly, who talked of “little girls kept up late to see this historic moment” and how “important” such gestures are.
The other showcased woman this night was Katy Perry, whose enthusiasm for Clinton was nearly overshadowed by the TV cameras’ tight close-ups of her having to repeatedly shove a squirmy earpiece back into her left ear. Singing first “Rise” and then “Roar,” she shouted, “Let’s roar for Hillary!” The crowd did — some in jubilant support, some in lusty opposition. In a more conventional campaign year, we’d say that’s how democracy works. But after the two now-completed conventions, who can say how democracy works these days, and what it will look like going forward.
Related: Democratic Convention Review: ‘Come ON! We’re America!’
Democratic Convention Review: Bill Clinton Gets Married, Lena Dunham Gets Personal
Democratic Convention Review: It’s Bernie’s World, Hillary Just Suffers in It
