Sen. Tim Scott spoke during the first night of the Republican National Convention, Aug. 24.
Photo: Susan Walsh/Associated PressIt was a real insane-a-thon. It was genuinely moving. It didn’t avoid big issues. It led with a lie. It was a success in that it will have pleased the base and done some degree of outreach to others.
The parts of the Republican National Convention that were crazy included but were not limited to:
“Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization,” said Charlie Kirk. “The frontier, the horizon, even the stars belong to us,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz. I’m still recovering from Kimberly Guilfoyle’s screaming. It was like seeing Eva Peron in an extended manic episode running from balcony to balcony warning the descamisados to stay armed, the oligarchs are coming. This was unfortunate because it was the first night and if Ms. Guilfoyle seemed insane, Republicans seemed insane.
They reduced the White House to a stage set for a political convention, which had never been done before. Had it never been done because all previous presidents were unimaginative? Why, no. It had never been done because they had some class. By tradition and long custom the two parties are political constructs that exist outside and apart from the peoples’ house. Maintaining the boundary protected that house’s standing as a place higher than politics to which all have recourse. “I fly from petty tyrants to the throne.”
Republicans will see the civic sin of this when the Democrats do it, as they will. For now they say, “Huh, it’s all politics there anyway.” It is, pretty much. But it’s healthy to pretend otherwise. “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” You’ll miss that tribute when it’s fully gone.
Some speakers decried elitist-insider nepotism. Others introduced the Trump children.
We are not a third-rate banana republic but at the moment we’re imitating one.
The president’s leadership in the coronavirus epidemic was lauded as timely and visionary. This is the big lie mentioned above. He denied the threat, lied with an almost pleasing abandon, especially about testing, and when forced to focus held bumbling daily briefings that only made things worse.
It was a mistake to insist it was a success. That ship has sunk.
***
What lifted the convention was the normal people who spoke, who were moving and provided the policy ballast the politicians often did not. More than half the speakers were homespun policy nerds in the way Americans learn to be now. We heard—and it was compelling—about U.S. timber and forestry regulation, lobster quotas, FDA protocols regarding permissions for the terminally ill to access experimental treatments, and breakthroughs in tele-health services. It was not all granular. Rebecca Friedrichs, a veteran California public school educator, painted the teachers unions as a reactionary force. “They spend hundreds of millions annually to defeat charter schools and school choice.” They do. It’s odd we don’t speak of this anymore since school choice is so crucial to so many.
Maximo Alvarez, who fled Cuba when young, looked at the protests that have been sweeping our cities for three months and said, “I have seen people like this before. I’ve seen movements like this before. I’ve seen ideas like this before.” It reminded him of a man long ago: Fidel Castro.
A convicted bank robber, Jon Ponder, became a religious man, changed his life, and started a prisoner re-entry program. He was issued a pardon by Mr. Trump, live, the FBI agent who’d befriended Mr. Ponder standing with him. If you weren’t moved by it you don’t do moved.
Abby Johnson, formerly of Planned Parenthood, gave the most compelling speech on abortion, explaining why pro-life people stand where they stand, that has ever been given at any convention anywhere. Nick Sandmann, the libeled teenager who did nothing wrong when the Native-American activist banged a drum in his face, spoke, entirely believably, on why Americans do not trust the media.
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina was impressive.
He too spoke for school choice. “A quality education is the closest thing to magic in America.” It had changed his life. He and his brother were sons of a single mother; they lived with relatives and slept three in the bed. He got an education, went into business, ran for Congress in an overwhelmingly white district in Charleston and beat the field, included the son of former-Sen. Strom Thurmond. How did a black man who started with nothing do that? “Because of the evolution of the Southern heart.” That is a beautiful phrase.
Mr. Scott said his grandfather would have been 99 this week. That old man had suffered indignities; no one had even bothered to teach him to read and write. But he lived to see his grandson become the first African-American elected to both the U.S. House and Senate. “Our family went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime,” he said, with an air of what seemed fresh wonder.
It was beautiful, and affectionate about America to the point of tenderness.
The Republicans confronted what the Democrats at their convention glossed over: rising crime, looting and rioting in city protests, increased unease about personal safety, and besieged police forces. They hit on the one fear shared equally now by the rich, the poor and the middle: that when you call 911 you’ll go to voicemail. Someone literally used that image.
Social media is sharing the videos of diners at outside restaurants being swarmed by BLM protesters who try to harass and bully them into raising their arms in affiliation. There are videos of protesters marching on so-called gentrified neighborhoods at night, telling those who live there, through bullhorns, that they’re guilty of appropriation. There aren’t a lot of these videos but they carry a suggestion of where things are going. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D. Mich.), made an acute observation this week to Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. She said in her district there are a lot of signs saying Blue Lives Matter—cops matter too. On voter sentiment she quoted a viral social media post: “I used to think I was pretty much just a regular person. But I was born white into a two-parent household, which now labels me as privileged, racist, and responsible for slavery.”
This country is full of law-abiding people of all colors who are appalled by Donald Trump. It is political malpractice to push them toward him.
Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the controversial couple who recently met protesters on or near their property in St. Louis with guns, looking in the photos provocative and nutty, gave their side of the story: They were trying to protect their home from what they thought was immediate danger. They spoke against violence, defunding the police, and ending the cash bail system.
Andrew Pollack, the father of a teenage daughter killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., eviscerated the liberal school and police policies that he believes contributed to his daughter’s death. “Far left Democrats in our school district made this shooting possible.”
Democratic political professionals must have found all this pretty powerful because almost immediately Democratic candidates began to decry the violence with what might be called increased vigor.
The president spoke also. The headline on his acceptance speech was the staggering degradation of the White House as his rally prop. The subhead is that he smacked Joe Biden around like a ruffian. It’s going to be something to see them debate. That will be one intensely human encounter.
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