Welcome to this weekend’s edition of the Surge, coming to you live from an airplane out of Chicago where the air conditioning only half works. It’s hot—just like politics!
This week, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at a convention for Lil Jon. Nancy Pelosi roamed the halls of the convention with a nightstick, looking for any other presidential nominees who might be thinking about staying in the race. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cashed in his chips. The Pennsylvania boys are scrappin’ again. And how about that Hilldawg?
Let us begin, though, with the Democratic presidential nominee. This one looks like she’s actually staying in the race.
By Jim Newell
1. Kamala Harris
She pulled it off.
There were a couple of major concerns for the Harris campaign and convention organizers heading into the DNC. First, could they successfully rejigger the long-planned Biden convention into a Harris convention over the course of a few weeks? They’d have to change everyone’s speech and bring in a slew of new speakers, shoot all-new videos, print all-new banners, and manage the boom in interest that Harris’ candidacy prompted. (The Surge would say they did a certifiably horrible job managing media logistics, but no one cares. You should! Care, dammit!) And second: How much would protests, either outside or inside the United Center, overwhelm coverage of the programming? The programming, however, went off mostly without a glitch, with Harris closing out the event with a well-structured, sobering acceptance speech Thursday night. And protests near the United Center fizzled out after the first day of the convention, while internal disruptions never materialized into anything major. It was significantly less of a mess than the previous in-person Democratic convention, in 2016, when delegates for Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were at loggerheads to the point that major protests played out both inside and outside the convention center. This was the second convention that the Surge went to this summer at which attendees felt invincible heading into the general election. A lot has changed over the past month. You can’t even begin to imagine what surprises await over the next two.
2. The Obamas
Oh, hey, it’s you guys again.
The Obamas lead a private life, giving speeches here and there and otherwise building idyllic compounds on the best land in the world, in which they sit on beanbag chairs stuffed with 100-dollar bills. Not that different from the Surge’s lifestyle. The Obamas reemerged onto the political scene this week, though, to give back-to-back remarks at the DNC in their first major hard-politics appearances in quite some time. We can officially report that they’ve Still Got It (are good at politics). Both Michelle and Barack Obama were prepared with zingers, with the former president making—maybe? Certainly?—a dick joke about Donald Trump. Michelle Obama, meanwhile, landed the line of the convention: “Who’s going to tell him,” she said of Trump, “that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” The Obamas also addressed Democrats in a way few if any can: by almost lecturing them. Michelle Obama instructed Democrats not to have a “Goldilocks complex” by picking apart imperfections with their ticket. Barack Obama, meanwhile, said Democrats need to do a better job listening to voters of different political persuasions and to meet them where they are. All in all, a busy night’s work, and off they were to make a private-jet return to their money palaces.
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3. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Trump campaign gets that jab.
The independent candidate dropped out of the presidential race on Friday and endorsed Donald Trump. Kennedy, who had basically stopped campaigning for months, was sinking in polls and was running out of cash. He had been trying to cut a deal with either of the two major parties who’d have him. Once Harris took over the ticket, though, Kennedy had significantly more leverage with the Trump side. Many of the people with whom Kennedy had the most appeal—disaffected younger voters and Hispanic voters—were those who most quickly fell back into the Democratic fold once Biden dropped out of the race. Polling since the Bidexit showed, for the first time, that Kennedy was taking more voters away from Trump than he was from the Democratic ticket. The endorsem*nt could provide Trump a point-or-two boost to counteract the Democratic convention bump. But that itself might be countered by the message that Kennedy—one of conspiratorial kookery and dead-bear-cub gimmickry—brings to the Trump campaign. Trump could use the backing of more-normal people, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not a normal gentleman.
4. Hillary Clinton
They love me! They really love me!
Democrats have an uneasy relationship with the “Lock him up!” chants that break out whenever a speaker mentions Donald Trump’s felony convictions or other ongoing criminal investigations. The party spent years lambasting the “Lock her up!” chants at Trump rallies as wholly inappropriate for political gatherings. So every time the chant breaks out at Harris–Walz rallies—and it does happen at every rally—the principals on the ticket try to tamp it down. But let’s just say, the calculation is a little different for Hillary Clinton. When Clinton came out to deliver her speech on Monday, she was greeted with an overwhelmingly raucous standing ovation that lasted for minutes. (Clinton would later describe the experience as “cathartic.”) And when the “Lock him up!” chants began during her speech, Clinton—who had been, after all, the subject of the “Lock her up!” chants all those years—didn’t lift to a finger to stop them, instead struggling to suppress a smile while they played out. Hillary Clinton’s appearance was one of the most riveting of the whole convention! 2024 is really something else.
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5. Nancy Pelosi
Another week of stirring the pot.
A reasonable plurality of the credit for there being a Harris–Walz nominating convention in the first place goes to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And so she was walking around the DNC like she owns it, which she does. On Monday, she made sure to sit in the very first row of the California delegation when President Joe Biden spoke, not 20 yards away from him, holding and waving her “WE ❤️ JOE” placard. It was a somewhat-over-the-top effort to show her respects after shoving him out of the presidential race—then going on a subsequent press tour for her new book, during which she was asked about her role over and over and over again. (There were many more interviews this week.) Pelosi did, also, speak at the convention in a prime-time slot on Wednesday—a jittery, brief address that she got through way too quickly. But her behind-the-scenes talent is still there!
6. Josh Shapiro
Are you and John Fetterman “good” with each other, though? Doesn’t really seem like it??
One interesting subplot this summer has been the display of tensions between a pair of Pennsylvanians who, ironically, are two of the Democrats most targeted by the left over their shared outspoken support for Israel amid the war in Gaza. That rift broke out during the brief Democratic veepstakes, when Politico reported that Sen. John Fetterman’s advisers told “Harris’ team that the senator believes that [Gov. Josh] Shapiro is excessively focused on his own personal ambitions” and warned against picking him. Further reporting from NBC News bore out that the “increasingly volatile relationship” between the two ambitious Democratic politicians from the country’s most important swing state has been spilling further into the public view. It certainly did at the DNC. At a roundtable on Wednesday, Shapiro was asked about the nature of his beef with Fetterman and said, “I have no idea. You’ve got to ask Fetterman. Or I would say you should ask his spokesperson, but I think they're not on the same page either.” That was a reference to an unusual episode this week in which a communications staffer for Fetterman broke with him on the record over his position on Israel. Later in the day, Shapiro attempted to clear things up, saying in another interview that he and the senator are “good” and that “folks have made too much of this.” The Surge’s thought, though, is that the two might not be “good” with each other. They don’t seem good with each other at all! Oh, well.
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7. Beyoncé
All right, so what happened here?
The megacelebrity was the talk of the DNC this week, despite not being there. Ever since Harris began using Beyoncé’s “Freedom” as her campaign anthem, there’s been speculation that the singer would perform it live at the convention. Rumors abounded Thursday that there was an open time slot on the schedule for a special guest and that the secret was being kept to a very tight circle. Websites like TMZ—which usually gets things like this right!—reported that Beyoncé would in fact be performing. Then, sometime around 10p.m., well after they could have shot down this speculation in the first place, a representative for Beyoncé officially said she would not be performing, nor had she ever had plans to do so. You might be wondering: Why couldn’t that announcement have been made at, say, any other point in time? Was Beyoncé really dangled as a possibility to keep people interested in watching television, or had everyone independently lost their minds into believing that something that was never going to happen would, indeed, happen? Is Beyoncé even real? Are you? Have a good weekend!
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