Versione Italiana – English translation by Paul Rosenberg
What remains of the Chicago convention on the day after? The hundred thousand red, white and blue balloons covering the stalls and stands of the United Center on Friday morning spoke of a night of colors, music and euphoria, the last night of the great Democratic rally, culminating in Kamala Harris’ speech accepting the nomination for president. Abel López, a member of the cleaning team, proudly shows himself in a photo in which, armed with a needle, he pierces the balloons one by one, an image he sent via X to his relatives in Coyolillo, Mexico. Isn’t this the metaphor of the bubble, the bubble of the four-day convention, now destined to deflate in a flash? A bubble? The gathering of Democrats in the United Center was indeed a bubble. But that doesn’t mean it’s destined to pop, much less following a needle strike that Trump delivers with Abel’s dexterity.
The convention had the deliberate objective of bringing together, under the large tent of Chicago, four thousand delegates who had been freed from the mandate received from the voters in the primaries and were now charged with a great new responsibility, that of voting for another candidate who had been “nominated” by the big names of the party. This delicate and difficult political operation needed considerable choral and emotional involvement from the delegates to be successful, becoming a spectacular event for the twenty million Americans who tuned in to the convention on TV every evening. Hence the massive doses of pride in belonging to a party that includes stars such as the Obamas and the Clintons, but which is also debuting celebrities such as the new number one herself, Kamala, and her deputy Walz, and boasts many other personalities, such as Pelosi, AOC, Buttigieg, and governors and mayors who are well-known beyond their cities and states. It is the opposite of the party Trump is master of. The convention was a deliberately self-referential operation by a political force which, had Biden remained the presidential candidate, would have observed during those same days a sad ceremony of surrender to the subverter Trump. The political platform and the great issues of the moment have been overshadowed by a sort of collective ritual aimed at reconstituting, first of all, the identity of a competitive party and a leadership capable of guiding it.
The absence of discussion on important political issues, internal and international, including the cancellation of a Palestinian speaker, is also the result of a choice by the directors of a convention that is radically oriented in a self-protective and therefore self-referential sense, with a liturgical celebration of unity that must not be put at risk by issues that might cause conflict and division, and must be cemented by building a leadership that leads the recovery.
The polls are promoting the operation. Kamala is ahead and it is likely that she will be even more so in the coming days, pushed along by hyper media exposure. Another indication of her success is Trump’s nervousness, as he continues to flounder in the search for a register against his new opponent that is not a distillation of misogyny and a cocktail of lies and insults. On September 10th he will have to face her directly, in Philadelphia, in the first televised duel. From now until then, there are fifteen days of fire to reach that date in an advantageous position, especially in the twenty counties in the balance of the seven states that are decisive for victory on November 5th.
From what we saw on the evening of her coronation as the Democratic nominee, Trump will face an opponent capable of knocking him out. Harris has demonstrated that she is perfectly at ease in the role of aspiring president despite hers being a chosen and carefully constructed candidacy. She delivered forty minutes of a very well elaborated and presented speech, in which though the political positions were only outlined without ever going into specifics, they were very well argued, with the tone and confidence of a long-standing and experienced lawyer. This time, Trump will not be able to evade the “trial” that his lawyers and supreme court judges have so far managed to spare him with every expedient.
The Dems now have a ticket that can win, due to the personalities that compose it, helped by a team of expert and popular politicians ready to lend a hand. Then there are the generous donors who are making a very intense and expensive campaign possible; not only rich people, but many small and even very small donors, a phenomenon that reveals a mobilization that was unthinkable until a month ago. Of course, the challenge remains very tough. Victory slipping away when you think you already have it in your pocket is a ghost that continues to scare the Democrats, as Bill Clinton well remembered.
It’s time to face reality. If the bubble has allowed us to keep “politics” on hold for four days, avoiding it from now on will be impossible, and even if there will be the temptation to avoid them, the protesters outside the convention in Chicago have certainly not packed up their tents just to give up their fight.
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L’articolo The Balloons in Chicago proviene da ytali..
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