Talk-show host Jerry Springer has seen his share of shouting matches and fights on his set, but he never expected what he has witnessed on the political stage in this year’s US presidential election.
"If I knew the Republican Party was going to copy my show, they should have paid me," the former mayor of Cincinnati, a passionate Democrat, said at the party's national convention in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening.
He was speaking to The Irish Times shortly after Hillary Clinton made history by being nominated as the first female standard-bearer for a major party in a US presidential election.
Clinton’s historic nomination was celebrated with tears and cheers from her supporters on the convention floor in the Wells Fargo Center in south Philadelphia, but the milestone achievement was not applauded by all.
Hardline supporters of her vanquished primary opponent, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, led a walk-out of the arena on Tuesday and booed the former secretary of state repeatedly during her triumphant acceptance speech on Thursday night.
“Understand, the people you get here at the convention – these are the absolute diehards because they are the ones who became delegates and came here, so these are the last people who are going to come on over,” says Springer.
“The average voter may have voted for Bernie but they are not banging their heads, saying, ‘Oh my God, we lost.’ This is not a cross-section of where most of the public is”
The tabloid talk-show host drew a distinction between the policy-driven disagreements of the Democratic primary and the pantomime-style theatrics of the Republicans.
“It never got down to the juvenile debate of the Republican Party where they talk about the size of your hands and you had a pee in the middle of the debate,” says the man who has made a living out of encouraging disunity and chaos.
Democrats may not have descended to those depths, but they do face a major challenge. This week's four-day convention was intended to coalesce the party around Clinton and her running mate, Virginia senator Tim Kaine, and to persuade millions of Americans watching at home that this was the winning presidential ticket that they should back in the White House election on November 8th.
There is one major problem: Clinton is not universally liked, not in her party and particularly not among the electorate at large. She attempted to recast herself in Thursday night’s prime-time address as the unity candidate for the party, but the party is far from sold on her. This poses a more fundamental dilemma as both parties prepare for the election.
A CNN/ORC poll released on Monday as Democrats arrived in Philadelphia for the convention found almost seven in every 10 Americans do not consider Clinton honest and trustworthy. It was her worst rating in that tracking poll and most likely down to the finding of FBI director James Comey that she was “extremely careless” and “negligent” in her handling of classified information by using a personal email address while serving as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
A leak of Democratic Party emails last week generated further internal unrest, when the correspondence showed how officials tried to tip the primary election in Clinton's favour, confirming the suspicions about a "rigged" race among Sanders's supporters and fuelling their anger this week.
Clinton’s popularity problem extends well into her own party. A Gallup poll this week found that 70 per cent of Democrats or Democrat-leaning voters had a favourable view of her, just two points higher than a month ago when she won enough primary votes to clinch the party’s nomination. Looking at it in reverse, almost a third of Democrats don’t view her favourably.
This compares with only 14 per cent for Barack Obama at this point in the presidential campaign eight years ago.
A saving grace for Clinton is that there is only one candidate as unpopular as her: Donald Trump. The New York businessman has a favourability rating of just 36 per cent compared with 38 per cent for Clinton, according to an average of polls collated by the Real Clear Politics website.
The Republican fares better within his own party than Clinton does in hers. Since accepting the presidential nomination in Cleveland last week, Trump’s support within the party, according to Gallup, has risen sharply, standing at 72 per cent compared with just 58 per cent in early May. This is still a dismal showing against the 89 per cent that the party’s 2008 nominee John McCain enjoyed back then.
The figures show how this White House race has become a matter of choosing of the lesser of two evils. Such negativity can be a turnoff, with the two most unpopular presidential nominees in modern US times. This makes voter turnout critical in a fluid election heavy with flip voters .
The 2016 election, for some voters, could come down to not voting for the person you dislike the most (rather than voting for the person you like the most). This was why much of the focus at both the Republican and Democratic conventions, and particularly in Cleveland, was on painting the other’s opponent in the ugliest light possible.
Republican chants of “Lock Her Up!” and “Hillary For Prison” directed at Clinton in Cleveland were matched by Democratic cries of “Not A Clue!” (on what Trump knew) and “Not One Word!” (on what you could believe out of his mouth) in Philadelphia.
“If this is a referendum on Hillary Clinton, she would be in real trouble but this is not a referendum on Hillary Clinton – it is a race between Clinton and Trump, and you can argue that it is a referendum on Trump,” says Democratic strategist Brad Bannon.
While the stand-out moments of the Democratic convention this week were the stinging put-downs of Trump, concerted efforts were made to rejuvenate Clinton in the public’s eyes, building on her campaign portrait as a life-long fighter for the rights of women and children.
The convention marked a sharp turn to the deeply personal, as Clinton’s husband Bill, her daughter Chelsea and her former boss Barack went to great lengths to talk under the theme “Hillary I know”, in an attempt to humanise a candidate considered unnatural, cool and aloof by many voters.
“In the spring of 1971, I met a girl,” began Clinton in his address on Tuesday night, before going on to describe the first time he saw Hillary Rodham in a class on politics and civil rights. He used language that could have been lifted from a Mills and Boon novel.
“After the class, I followed her out, intending to introduce myself,” said the 42nd president. “I got close enough to touch her back, but I couldn’t do it. Somehow, I knew this would not be just another tap on the shoulder, that I might be starting something I couldn’t stop.”
Introducing her mother for Hillary's acceptance speech on Thursday night, Chelsea recalled her mother accompanying her to every soccer and softball game, every piano and dance recital, "countless Saturdays spent finding shapes in the clouds." She talked about their shared love of Pride and Prejudice while Bill was a fan of the Police Academy movies.
Strangely, when it came to her mother’s speech – the convention’s final, headline act – it was bereft of the kind of personal anecdotes and folksy reminiscences that convention delegates heard and loved from an affectionate husband and doting daughter. This was at odds with Camp Clinton’s key objective of the convention: getting the public to love Hillary, or at least like her more.
During a debate in March, Clinton admitted that she was “not a natural politician” like her husband or Obama and that she had to prove herself based on her accomplishments.
Certainly, this week showed that Clinton did not reach the oratorical highs of the president, vice president or her husband, but she avoided any confessional admissions about her shortcomings in her speech on Thursday night that might have helped win over sceptical voters.
“I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me,” she said. She even tried to explain wonky Hillary – “It’s true – I sweat the details of policy.” This was a strategy that seems redundant against Trump’s “bumper sticker” politicking when fact-checking poses little risk to candidates in a populist, post-factual world.
Clinton chose not to open up on the personal front, leaving the character references to her family and her political colleagues over the previous four days. It appeared to be an opportunity missed as she heads into hand-to-hand campaign combat with Trump.
Clinton Democrats acknowledge the uphill task ahead in trying to soften her image. Campaign chairman John Podesta says Bill Clinton talking "in very loving terms" about the "real" Hillary began to "break down the stereotype", but that they still have some way to go.
“It is going to take a lot of work,” he says. “She has taken a lot of incoming for a very long time . . . We are going to address it. Sometimes she will talk about it directly, other times just by reminding people where she has been for her entire career.”
Kaine’s natural persona, affable manner and dad jokes will help sell the ticket and eat into Trump’s big lead among white voters.
Obama also took on the media stereotype of Clinton in his speech this week, explaining why she has her “share of critics” and has been “accused of everything you can imagine – and some things you can’t.” “That’s what happens when you’re under a microscope for 40 years,” he said.
The defences that Clinton has mounted around her in an act of self-preservation against attack are proving an obstacle in her path to the most ambitious target yet: the American presidency. Years of self-discipline have become a big negative for her campaign.
New York congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who describes herself as a friend, says Clinton is “warm, gracious, smart, dedicated and very caring to her friends”.
“I would hope that every American would get a chance to know her better and get to know her on a personal level and get a chance to see that warmth, that humility and that caring for others.”
Just over 100 days from the election, the challenge for the Clintonistas is to convey those traits nationally to tens of millions of viewers in the three televised debates, starting on September 26th.
“She couldn’t be more charming and friendly one to one, but that doesn’t come across on television screens,” says John Myers a long-time Democratic Party activist from Ohio.
“If they could find a way to have her connect with the average voter through the television screen, it is a winner. The easy part is to scare people about why they shouldn’t vote for Trump. The hard part is to get them to warm up to a figure they think they already know.”
On the other side, compounding Clinton’s problem, is a man who became world famous through reality television, flies above the detail with simple made-for-TV declarations (however inaccurate they are) and has a national profile. Clinton, a woman who struggles to sell herself, is facing one of America’s greatest salesmen.
On Wednesday, outside the convention media tent, Roberta Flashman (66), a delegate for Sanders from Ashby Massachusetts, has her hands up with dozens of others protesting at what she see as the Democratic Party “club” blocking somebody new from entering.
Surrounded by what Springer calls “absolute diehards”, Flashman stands out. Despite her act of protest but with the benefit of experience, she intends to vote for Clinton in November. She says that she didn’t vote in the 1968 election after her favoured primary candidate, liberal Democrat Eugene McCarthy*, lost the party nomination to Hubert Humphrey who lost to Republican Richard Nixon.
“I had to put up with Nixon and being blamed for him. I am not going to be blamed for Trump. Trump is worse than Nixon. Hard to believe,” she says.
“So yeah, I will vote for her. I will hold my nose and I will vote for her.”
*This piece was amended on August 2nd at 1.15pm to correct an error
