There were 36 people shot, including seven killed, in Chicago during the four days the Democrats convened in the Windy City to crown Queen Kamala as their last-minute candidate in the presidential election of 2024.
The rampant gun violence didn’t affect the delegates who, unlike the rest of the city, were safe during their deliberations behind several rings of steel.
Nor was there anything exceptional about the carnage. It was just a typical week for the undisputed murder and street crime capital of America.
Naturally no convention speaker referred to the blood on the streets beyond the confines of their hermetically sealed convention hall. Nor did the party’s countless allies in the media draw attention to it. They were too busy cheerleading from the sidelines, all semblance of balanced reporting abandoned.
The Democrats have run Chicago uninterrupted since 1931. When you’re bidding to rule the country it’s hardly sensible politics to highlight the fact you can’t keep the streets of the country’s third most populous city safe.
Kamala Harris claims to have been ‘immersed in the civil rights movement’ even though she wasn’t born until around its peak in 1964, writes Andrew Neil
It is, perhaps, a curious omission when the head of your ticket in November’s elections is boasting about how tough she’d been with the bad guys when she was a prosecutor. But it was only one of many hypocrisies on display.
Donald Trump was lambasted as a plutocrat (admittedly an easy target) even though the Democratic stage was awash with billionaires (talk show queen Oprah Winfrey, Illinois governor JB Pritzker) and mere multi-millionaires (the Clintons, the Obamas, Eva Longoria of Desperate Housewives fame, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi).
The Democrats harbour the charming notion that they’re still the party of blue-collar workers when in reality it is now the wholly owned subsidiary of the wealthy liberal elites who dominate politics, business, academia, entertainment and the media.
The hypocrisy didn’t stop there. Barack Obama referred to Joe Biden as ‘my brother’, even though he’d been the one sharpening the knives and handing them out with instructions to tell poor old Joe the game was up. Michelle Obama, in the speech of the convention, was more honest: she didn’t mention Biden at all, having her own personal gripes with the First Family.
Bill Clinton was the most oleaginous. Like so many keen to assuage the pain Biden feels at being forced out against his will, he depicted Biden as a mixture of Franklin Roosevelt (likening his famous New Deal to Biden’s handling of the economy) and George Washington (for putting country before self).
Comparisons which convince only if you ignore the fact that American living standards have been battered by rampant inflation, the economy is visibly slowing and the federal government is drowning in record debt.
As for Washington, he did indeed voluntarily step down after eight years. Biden, on the other hand, was still holding on to the Oval Office curtains as his party’s powerbrokers dragged him out.
The Vice President will face a series of debates with Donald Trump, starting next month
No matter. Democrats think they’re on to a winner with Kamala Harris and, despite the encomiums, Biden is already yesterday’s man who can’t be allowed to get in the way of her victory – hence the decision to consign his farewell address on the first night of the convention to long after bedtime for most Americans, never mind Joe himself.
Nor are the Democrats wrong in thinking they have a potential winner on their hands. She has gone, in the eyes of the Democratic faithful, from a rather useless – even embarrassing and unpopular – vice president to a Wonder Woman presidential frontrunner. It is a succession story without peer, one of the most remarkable transformations in American politics, even if it is largely an invention.
The Democratic Party and its media allies are cock-a-hoop, having spent most of the summer in the slough of despond. Now all she has to do is convince the American people. That might be more of a challenge.
It remains one of the great mysteries of the universe what she would do in power. Her set-piece address to the convention on Thursday night gave few clues. These are not occasions for policy detail but a plethora of platitudes overwhelmed even the slightest nod in the direction of substance.
Yes, she can read the teleprompter with confidence, which is more than Biden can manage and Trump has the discipline to do. But most national politicians can do that. It is a necessary skill for the job. With Harris it was the words which disappointed.
No boilerplate rhetoric was left untouched. She promised ‘opportunity’, a ‘new way forward’, bringing ‘together labour and business’, no ‘going back’ and, in a rare nod to specifics, lower grocery prices.
There was no hint about how any of this would be achieved. Even her recent enthusiasm for price controls was curiously absent from the script. It was, as one commentator put it, the politics of the ‘empty pantsuit’.
Instead of policy, we got a reimagining of her life story. She’s depicted as a poor kid growing up in tough surroundings. Yet both her parents were professors and she mainly grew up in Berkeley, California, and Montreal, Canada, neither famous for its ghettoes.
She claims to have been ‘immersed in the civil rights movement’ even though she wasn’t born until 1964, around the peak of the modern civil rights movement.
But this is to carp in an old-fashioned manner for we are now in the politics of the vibe, where a general feel-good factor and an infectious joy are more important than policy or facts, or so we are told. Whether such vibes translate into votes is something we’ll discover in the next 12 weeks.
The omens are good, at least for now. She comes out of Chicago with political momentum behind her as the campaign proper begins. The polls in the swing states are moving in her direction, the Trump campaign continues to flounder, clueless about how to deal with her and pining for the return of Sleepy Joe.
Even Robert F Kennedy’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Trump will not necessarily save him. The seriously flakey nephew of JFK was polling between 4 and 6 per cent in the swing states and, while Trump will pick up more votes than Harris, it’s unlikely to be enough to win him the election.
Barely a month ago the election was Trump’s to lose. Now it is hers. Her biggest ally is Trump. Her optimism, however unjustified, is more appealing than his relentless negativity, which grates. His juvenile name-calling merely rebounds on him. People are fed up with this sort of schtick.
The heavy lifting required to highlight her repeated policy flip-flops – from Right to Left to Right again – has so far been beyond him. In his most recent campaign stops he’s looked tired, dispirited, more rambling and unfocused than ever, lacking in fight or even the will to win. His people are not oblivious to this. They just don’t know what to do about it. ‘It’s a complete mess,’ a leading Team Trump figure wearily confessed to me.
Yet ‘which Kamala Harris would govern from the White House?’ is an entirely legitimate question and, as yet, we have no idea what the answer might be.
She is not running on the record of the Biden-Harris administration, perhaps because it is nothing to write home about.
She affects to have junked all the Left-wing positions she adopted only a few years ago but has never been taken to task about them since she has refused to do any proper sit-down interviews with journalists who are not cheerleaders. She is clearly trying to run more from the centre now but we don’t know what that means because she won’t tell us.
But at some stage she will have to stop hiding behind the teleprompter and a complicit media and be properly interrogated. Nor can she avoid the debates with Trump, starting next month, which could be his opportunity, provided he sticks to exposing her policies (or lack of them) and doesn’t make it personal, which would only remind moderates why they didn’t vote for him in 2020.
And if he doesn’t change, I asked one of his closest confidants, what’s the Plan B? ‘Call 911. Or the Holy Spirit,’ he replied. I’m not sure he was joking.