The John Logan memorial statue in Chicago’s Grant Park was erected in 1897 and stands as the totem of the disastrous, riot-strewn Democratic convention that took place in the city in 1968, a summer when the United States itself seemed ill. The photograph of hundreds of protesters, mostly young, obscuring the mound and even climbing on the Union general’s stone horse, with the cityscape in the background, is an imperishable image of a turbulent time.
The Democrats have held their convention in the city just once since, in 1996. Now, they are back. The next week in Chicago will at least see the beginning of an answer to a question that will inevitably be rattling around in the back of even the most fervently enthusiastic Democratic minds. If, during the wintertime party primaries that Joe Biden swept with no plausible opposition, Kamala Harris was deemed to be unpopular and a weakness as his vice-presidential running mate, why is she now so wildly popular as his successor? Is the torrent of goodwill based on a deep belief in her potential or is she merely a conduit for the relief among Democratic voters that there is at least a fighting chance to avoid a second Trump administration?
The organisation and energy and stunning fundraising efficiency of the first three weeks of the Harris campaign have already begun to cast her in a new and promising light. After all, her role as vice-president necessarily consigned her to one of vaguely defined support act. Her faltering 2020 presidential campaign meant that she took office under the suspicion that she didn’t have the right stuff, the intangible ability to connect with the public. Reviews of her increasingly rare public appearances were sometimes scathing. It was only this year, when she became the White House’s leading advocate for the protection of women’s reproductive rights, that she seemed to recover the verve and poise and the prosecutorial skills of her years in the legal profession.
But once the euphoria dies down and the teeming days of August give way to autumn and the electorate reconciles itself that this the contest will be bitterly fought and desperately close, Harris will have to answer those doubts and she will have to do so in the face of concentrated hostility from the rival candidate, Donald Trump, and the Maga Republican grassroots. Only then will the full ramifications of the internal Democratic Party operation to persuade Biden to step down become apparent. In ushering their 81-year-old incumbent aside, they have placed their faith in someone whose political skills have at best divided opinion and whose rise was attributed by sceptics to a glaringly obvious example of diversity, equality and inclusion.
In 2020, Harris spoke at a Democratic convention that took place in the deep freeze of the pandemic: a sterile empty room, the state-name signs spread around an eerily empty hall and no cheers or human energy. Rewatching that speech now is to be reminded of the hollow desperation of that time. But Harris spoke well and reflected on what is a remarkable immigrant story, recalling her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who arrived in California from India at the age of 19 to study medicine. She met Harris’s father, Donald, a Jamaican, at Berkeley.
“They fell in love in that most American way while marching together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s,” she said. “In the streets I got a stroller’s eye view of what the great John Lewis called ‘good trouble’.”
Her parents’ relationship did not last. Harris was raised by a single mother. She was just four years old during the poisoned election year of 1968, too young to remember the series of shocking events: the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4th; the Columbia University protests and riots; the killing of Robert Kennedy on June 5th; the deep, ideological and generational split caused by the US’s involvement in the Vietnam War and then the riots at that fractious Democratic convention in Chicago. Too young to remember, but indisputably a child of that era and environment who, by 2020, had improbably risen to accept the party nomination as Joe Biden’s vice-president.
She spoke also that evening about her rival in this election.
“Donald Trump’s failure of leadership has cost lives and livelihood. We are a nation that is grieving – grieving the loss of lives, of jobs, of normalcy. There is no vaccine for racism. We’ve gotta do the work. For George Floyd, for Brianna Taylor and too many others to mention. None of us are free until all of us are free. We are at an inflection point. The constant chaos leaves us adrift. The incompetence makes us feel afraid. The callousness makes us feel alone. And here is the thing: we can do better and deserve so much more. We must elect a president who will do something different and do the important work, a president who will bring all of us together – black, white indigenous. We must elect Joe Biden.”
Elect Joe Biden they did. And in many ways, his legislative accomplishments have been immense. But the idea that his presidency might harmonise the country has proven wishful thinking. The re-emergence of Trump and his reimagining of the entire Republican Party in his own image and ideological opportunism has led, in recent months, to several alarmed comparisons to the febrile environment of 1968.
Once again, student politics took hold on campuses across the US, including Columbia, where House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson appeared in late April to denounce the pro-Palestine protests. Once again, a Robert Kennedy was campaigning for president. Once again, an assassin’s bullets interrupted the campaigning, with Trump narrowly avoiding death in Butler, Pennsylvania. Once again, a sitting president decided not to run for a second term. And once again, the Democrats would convene in Chicago. But a mood of abject gloom has been replaced by rampant optimism, something close to Democratic euphoria. Can it last?
“Lyndon Johnson in many respects was a very, very good president,” Bernie Sanders remarked in a CNN interview in the spring, when the Gaza college protests dominated the headlines. “He chose not to run in ‘68 because of opposition to his views on Vietnam, and I worry very much that president Biden is putting himself in a position where he has alienated not just young people but a lot of the Democratic base in terms of his views on Israel and this war.”
Now, Biden is working to broker a Middle East peace deal that, however welcome, will not reverse the slaughter visited on some 40,000 Gazans. Persuading Arabic Democrats that they have not been betrayed by this administration is one of the critical tasks facing Harris. She also has to reassure the electorate that she can bring down the prices of groceries, of petrol, of the cost of the mundane necessities that have gone stratospheric in the past three years. She has to successfully repudiate the Republican charge that she is the “border tsar” responsible for a failed immigration policy. And she has to continue to convince the public that she is a leader in her own right: that she has been hiding in plain sight all along.
Because of Biden’s transformative decision to step aside, the Democrats will arrive in Chicago this weekend in buoyant mood. In that way, it could not be more different from 1968. One of the last consequences of that doomed convention was the establishment of a commission, chaired by George McGovern, to change the internal rules to select delegates. It led, argues George Packer in an Atlantic magazine essay, to a profound change in the profile of the party, placing the party machinery in the hands of college-educated activists, more affluent and more progressive than their predecessors, and moved by issues such as war, the environment, abortion, corruption and the rights of the marginalised.
The reforms disempowered less-educated Democrats more concerned with bread-and-butter issues. So, the party began its long journey from the New Deal to the New Politics, from the working class to the professional class, from Truman and Johnson to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, from Humphrey to Harris. The post-1968 reforms, a necessary response to the injustice of a convention rigged by the establishment rather than determined by the voters, gave birth to the Democratic Party that most of us grew up with – the one that listens to its movie stars and holds “White Women for Kamala”, “Black Women for Kamala” and “White Dudes for Kamala” placards.
“Hiding” was a word Donald Trump used during a two-hour press appearance outside his club in Bedminster on Thursday, when he showed signs of recovering his equilibrium and dogged energy. He made no secret of his intent to cast Harris as a “left-wing San Francisco radical” who will “destroy the country” if elected.
“They’re hiding her, no different than him, because I believe she is deeply incompetent,” he said.
It was just a preview of what awaits Harris in the months ahead. But first to Chicago for what will be a celebratory salute to a campaign reborn and an opportunity for Democrats to prove to themselves that 2024 is nothing like 1968 – if only for a week or so.
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