The 24 Seven: Teach 'em how to

The top seven stories shaping the race for the White House

Common performs during a soundcheck before Tuesday night in Chicago. (Photo Tom LoBianco/24sight News.)

LIVESTREAM TONIGHT!

Friends, join for me for a special livestream from the convention hall in Chicago tonight after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz accepts the Democratic nomination for vice president! I’ll be taking your questions in realtime.

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1. ‘Dougie’

Stole the show Tuesday night on the second day of convention. The second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, and potential first gentleman, did not deliver a stemwinder or a barnburner. Instead he walked through a personal tale at times corny and endearing, talking of his suburban upbringing in New Jersey to his nervous first call in 2014 after being set up with Kamala Harris, then California’s attorney general and already a rising star in Democratic politics. (If you’ve been set up on a blind date with a sitting attorney general, drop a note, I’m betting it will make for good copy here.)

Emhoff noted that he and Harris’ 10th anniversary is tomorrow — the day Harris is set to accept the Democratic nomination for president.

In a White House race that has been filled with history, drama, tumult and historic conflict, the Emhoff speech was remarkably lowkey and, very humanizing for Harris.

The vice president watched his speech live, in the air, on C-SPAN.

The former first couple, and hometown favorites, Barack and Michelle Obama brought the heat on the second night of the convention. As Politico co-founder John Harris wrote, the Obamas made a strategic move away from fighting former president Donald Trump as an engulfing boogeyman to presenting him as small and petty. (More on that in a bit for our paying subscribers.)

(Look for me at the Illinois delegation breakfast each morning where I’ll be stringing coverage for my friend — and now full-time radio talent — Patrick Pfingsten, founder of The Illinoize and host “Springfield’s Morning News” 92.7 WMAY-FM.)

2. The Economy

Beyond Walz’ acceptance speech tonight, I’ll be keeping a close ear on former president Bill Clinton. The “Big Dog” of Democratic politics still knows how to talk to all the factions of the party.

I ran into longtime director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics, Mo Elleithee, who in a previous lifetime was a veteran Democratic operative, who flagged Clinton’s importance tonight as the longtime “explainer-in-chief.”

The economy is still one of those big issues which polls well for Republicans and generally cuts against Democrats, although there’s been some signs that’s changing direction for Harris given her relative novelty on the national stage.

That was no accident, Vermont Sen. Peter Welch told me just outside the convention hall earlier.

“We had a sitting president United States, who won the nomination, make a voluntary decision to step aside because he came to the conclusion that that was in the best interest of the party and the country. Normally, you would think that would open up a bedlam. Instead, it was unified,” Welch told 24sight News. “Biden had managed, over the course of his presidency, to unify our party from Joe Manchin to Bernie Sanders, to take in the legitimate critiques that folks like AOC had of our failure to do better on economic issues, so that when he stepped aside, instead of there being a civil war internally, it was a seamless transition to our new leader, because she was embracing the Biden agenda that Bernie and AOC was for.”

3. Grow the Tent?

The 2024 Democratic convention has been remarkable for the number of Republicans who took the stage in support of the Democratic ticket.

Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who quit after the January 6th insurrection, appeared somewhat astounded as she stood on stage at a Democratic convention and said she’s supporting Harris and Walz

Many other current and former longtime Republicans — often moderates and neoconservatives, have thrown in with Harris after being driven from the GOP. Obama in his Tuesday urged Democrats to extend “grace” to others who may not agree with every position on the left.

(Trump and the GOP attempted the opposite themselves a month ago, giving Teamsters President Sean O’Brien a prime speaking slot at the RNC in Milwaukee, as part of the Trump Republican Party’s efforts to win over more working class households. Democrats retaliated by celebrating longtime Teamsters and denying O’Brien a speaking slot.)

It’s hard to overstate the importance of how many Republicans Trump has driven out of the party in the past decade (Trump’s team and the newish nationalist populist wing of the Republican Party have regularly stated they don’t want them inside and represent a version of the GOP which failed.)

Pence holds out hope for a vanished GOP

But the bigger dynamic in play may be Reagan and Goldwater conservatives quietly staying home, or even skipping voting at the top of the ticket.

Consider Trump’s own former vice president, Mike Pence, who despite largely being railroaded out of the Republican Party by Trump and his world, still finds a bulwark of support among veteran conservatives and even some Trump supporters who say they feel bad about how their administration ended.

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4. Repetition

UAW President Shawn Fain’s tagging Trump as a “scab” caught fire after his speech at the convention Monday. He’s been saying it for a while at rallies and campaign events, but I’ve been hearing that attack around the convention more and more since he bellowed it from the convention stage.

5. ‘Please, don’t move’

That was photographer Abbas Shirmohammadi’s instructions to the delegates Tuesday night, repeated often, as he asked thousands of very amped-up Democrats to settle down while he manned a 110-year-old camera to take the convention’s panoramic photo … after he used a digital camera to take a digital panoramic also.

He wasn’t trolling.

More from the Associated Press.

6. Past their bedtime

Democrats, not known for their internal organization and promptness have been running long each night, sending the big speeches well past primetime on the East Coast. That could make it hard for Dems looking to reach swing voters and (the many) others who still get their news from the tube.

But as many a Trump supporter noted after Trump’s long and winding acceptance speech last month, it wasn’t designed for persuadable voters watching TV (or YouTube) it was designed more for cutting on social media.

I’ll be watching to see how long Harris goes Thursday night, and how she and her team craft the speech and her central message. Her standard stump speech has tended to run about 30 minutes.

7. What is journalism

I highly recommend this latest dispatch from the always thoughtful Jon Ward

Jon Ward

who writes the “Border Stalkers” newsletter. I’ve known Ward a long time and as many readers know, he goes deep on tough issues

He spoke with veteran newsman Major Garrett, now of CBS News, long ago a print guy who has carried that print ethos to television.

A journalist is someone who typically, and certainly in my career, has worked for a journalistic organization in pursuit of facts and who is directed toward accuracy above every other consideration, every other consideration. If you are not accurate, if you are not devoted to the pursuit of verifiable facts and the collection and explication thereof, you're not a journalist, and I tell young reporters all the time, you cannot be successful if you are not religiously devoted to accuracy. You just can't. You can be many other things. You can have a following. You might make some money, you might achieve a kind of pseudo prominence, but you won't be a successful journalist and you won't enjoy the durability of good journalism. I have a phrase. It's kind of my own and it goes like this. Credible journalism will always outlast in credible politicians, and I mean incredible, not sensational, I mean lacking credibility.

I don't mean that happens instantly. I mean that happens over time because facts don't change. Commentary and perspectives from politicians change all the time, and embellishment — lying, propagandistic tendencies of political figures — come and go. But the durability of things that happened and are verified and can be pinned down not only stand the test of time, but can refute exaggerations, propaganda, lies, misinformation and the like. And I really don't know of any better long-term pursuit for a way to orient your life. It's been the way I've oriented my life since I became a working journalist in 1984. I don't really know how to do anything else and I can't imagine doing anything else.

Read or listen to the whole interview here, it’s very good.

Major Garrett talks about becoming a Neil Postman super fan, and how working in TV has given him a different POV

Thanks for reading, drop a line: tom@24sight.news