Forming a more perfect (union.)
Monday, August 17th, 2020
I tried a minute or two of MSNBC and NPR talking about or in some cases over the TV show/streaming thing that was the Democratic national convention, and maybe it’s the year we’ve had, or maybe it’s the poor audio quality and compounded delays of what passes for live broadcasting these days…
…but my reaction, overall, was impatience.
DNC, I am sold. I do not need to be persuaded. You’ve had my vote almost from the day Trump took office.
I do understand the theory that there are persuadable people out there, but barring research to the contrary, I find it hard to buy that there are any voters who will tune in the Democrats and the Republicans and say “well, let’s just see how good a case they’ll make.” Any voters.
It does my heart good to see and hear Americans from all over read chunks of the preamble to the Constitution. It does my heart good to see Eva Longoria host a program that has some of the feeling of Live Aid without the rock and roll, but again, I think I’d rather watch a tightly edited montage of attorneys, poll watchers, congresspeople, and voting rights advocates suiting up, ready for just and legal and (I would hope extremely) nonviolent battle.
It does me less good to hear John Kasich of Ohio talk about why he just couldn’t stomach Trump in 2016 (yet did he vote for Clinton? Oh no, he did not.)
I do not need to hear from Republicans who will, although they agree very little with the Democrats, hold their nose and vote for Joe because Trump is worse. Happy for their vote, but do we really need to hear their anguished calculations?
It definitely does my heart good to read the words (and there’s a video too) of a former Trump administration Homeland Security official who confirmed that yeah, collectively we aren’t crazy, all this really awful, illegal crap happened behind the scenes at the hand of the current President and oh by the way, he really does have the breadth and attention span of a piece of pepperoni.
By rights, we should have dozens of former Trump officials lining up behind the microphone from here to the horizon making clear how messed up the situation inside the White House walls is, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from these past almost-four-years, it’s that people aren’t quite as honorable as you would like them to be, when you would like them to be.
If they start to appear in numbers, that would be a fine October surprise.
