The DNC’s TV party: More democratic, less conventional

If necessity is the mother of invention, as the old saying goes, Democrats turned the necessity of convening a presidential nomination during a pandemic into the mother of socially distanced party conventions.

Instead of trying to produce the world’s biggest — and clunkiest — Zoom call, as many observers feared, Democrats dropped all pretense of producing anything but what party conventions actually have been for more than a half-century: a TV show.

Enriching that reality on the virtual stage Monday was first-night emcee Eva Longoria, to be followed on subsequent nights by fellow TV stars Kerry Washington, Tracee Ellis Ross and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

But visually the night set the stage for a Democratic convention that would be more democratic — small “D” — and less conventional. That theme was projected by a 57-member choir of mostly children from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Cheyenne Nation and five territories — a sight that moved even me with my stony heart to hum along and feel an actual tear well up in at least one eye before I blinked it back.

But almost as memorable were the personal testimonies from what we scriveners awkwardly call “ordinary Americans,” particularly Kristin Urquiza of Arizona who talked about how her father died from the coronavirus. “His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump,” she said. An ad featuring her was released Tuesday by Nuestro PAC, a super political action committee founded by former Bernie Sanders supporters to reach Hispanic voters.

Speaking of Sanders, the Vermont senator was given enough time in the evening of short speeches to make a considerably more vigorous and unequivocal endorsement of presumptive nominee Joe Biden than he gave nominee Hillary Clinton four years ago.

Let there be no doubt, he said, “While Joe and I disagree on the best way to get universal (health care) coverage, he has a plan that will greatly expand health care and cut the cost of prescription drugs. Further he will lower the eligibility age of Medicare from 65 to 60.”

The point: Sanders and other leading Democrats know that his mostly younger and progressive voters turned out well enough in primaries in 2016 and 2020 to push the party to the left on issues such as health care but have not been nearly as enthusiastic about Clinton or Biden. To them, and “those who may have voted for Donald Trump,” Sanders declared, “The future of our democracy is at stake.”

But, few would argue that the most memorably significant speaker of the evening wasn’t former first lady Michelle Obama. Her eight most important words probably were these: “If you think things cannot possibly get worse … ” before she went on to describe how much worse things could get if Trump is reelected.

A lot of people have asked her over the past four years about her most remembered line from the 2016 convention in which she said of Trump’s cheap shots, “When they go low, we go high.”

Does that really work, she said she has been asked.

As for strategy, she pointed out Monday, her advice from four years ago — “When they go low, we go high,” should not be taken to mean “putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty.” This led her to declare clearly, “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head.”

This earned Obama a predictably angry tweet from the president, although downright gentle compared to the vile tweets he has aimed at some other women. “Somebody please explain to @MichelleObama that Donald J. Trump would not be here, in the beautiful White House, if it weren’t for the job done by your husband, Barack Obama,” he tweeted early Tuesday. “Biden was merely an afterthought, a good reason for the very late & unenthusiastic endorsement.”

That was tactically smart. No reason to insult Michelle Obama when he’s really running against Joe Biden. Trump knows how to go high, too, which isn’t so hard to do when you’re starting, as he is, from a history of going very low.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)