Democrats expand the tent in their fight to defeat President Donald Trump.
The 2020 Democratic National Convention looked very different from past productions, with the majority of speakers broadcasting from remote locations. Even without many people in the physical arena in Milwaukee, the opening night energy was high. Unity was at the top of the agenda, with the emphasis just as much on a Biden win as a Trump loss. And the digitally broadcast event featured the voices of both everyday voters and party luminaries.
Renegade Republicans joined the party’s leftmost leader, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former First Lady Michelle Obama to champion a single message: It’s time to put differences aside for the common good of defeating Trump. Speakers underscored that goal repeatedly and in urgent terms, pointing to America’s reckoning with the coronavirus pandemic, the economic downturn and the need for racial justice.
“Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country,” Obama said in a key moment of her speech. “He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment.”
In a pre-recorded video, John Kasich, the former Republican governor of Ohio, stood at a literal crossroads as he voiced support for Joe Biden. Kasich opened by saying his lifelong loyalty to the Republican party takes second place to his responsibility to the nation. He emphasized Biden’s centrism, and his speech was followed by a montage of rank-and-file Republican voters giving their reasons for backing Biden.
Sen. Sanders, the runner-up in the Democratic primary, used his time to call on his still-loyal base to support Biden. After acknowledging their differences, the Vermont senator said another Trump presidency poses a direct threat to democracy.
“If Donald Trump is re-elected, all the progress we have made will be in jeopardy,” Sanders warned. “Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs.”
The night had several emotionally resonant moments, including a memorial for COVID-19 victims — which Trump’s convention is unlikely to acknowledge — and two personal testaments to the crises affecting so many Americans this year.
Kristin Urquiza, a voter from Arizona, spoke about losing her father to coronavirus. A 65-year-old Trump supporter, Urquiza’s father had no underlying health problems and believed the president’s spin that the pandemic was contained. He got COVID-19 after going to a karaoke bar when the first shutdown ended. It killed him within days of being on a ventilator. Urquiza blamed Trump for her father’s death, memorably saying her father’s “only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump,” she said, “and for that he paid with his life.”
The family of George Floyd led a moment of silence for Black people killed by the police, with a brief montage of Americans, eyes closed and heads down, flashing across the screen, before issuing a call for continued support of police reform and racial justice.
“George should be alive today,” Floyd’s brother Philonise Floyd said. “Breonna Taylor should be alive today. Ahmaud Arbery should be alive today. Eric Garner should be alive today. Stephon Clark, Atatiana Jefferson, Sandra Bland — they should all be alive today.”
The night ended on a high note with the most popular speaker in the Democratic roster, former first lady Michelle Obama. With signature empathy, Obama delivered a speech at once resonant, relatable and loaded with stinging blows for the POTUS. Obama made a moral case against Trump in an 18-minute address that touched on his mismanagement of the virus, stoking racial tensions and his apparent lack of empathy for others.
“If you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it,” she said
Tuesday’s speakers include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, former president Bill Clinton, and former Second Lady Jill Biden.
Emiene Wright Emiene Wright is associate editor at Cardinal & PIne. Before that she was on the 24-hour news desk of the Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press, and her writing has been featured in Crisis, the Charlotte Observer, and Our State magazine.
