DNC Dispatches: Who Built It?
DNC Dispatches: Who Built It?
Paul (not Ryan)
I suppose that wearing a jacket and tie on a Sunday afternoon flight over Labor Day weekend does stand out. Paul, the flight attendant, asked me why I was dressed up. I told him that I was en route to the Democratic National Convention, and that’s how we started talking politics. Paul is from St. Louis. He presently lives in Orlando, but his heart is in Chicago, where he lived for several years, just blocks from Wrigley Field. Paul told me that he likes his fellow Chicagoans the Obamas—particularly Michelle—because, for him, they are ordinary people. He enjoys seeing an “All-American family” in the White House. When Paul said this, it struck me: the Obamas are an All-American family, at least for some, like Paul and me, for whom the sight of an African-American couple and their children waving from the White House lawn seems normal. From this vantage point, it is Romney—hair pristinely coiffed, warbling “America the Beautiful” off key, power-boating past his car elevator—who seems profoundly abnormal.
Occupy the Walking Dead
Our delegate shuttle from hotels on the outskirts of Charlotte into the city center passes a number of stately homes set back from the road across wide expanses of thick green grass—no signs of drought here. Almost seamlessly, we pass from these streets into the urban core of Charlotte. It is twilight, and the sidewalks are lined with barricades. Our bus is reflected in the smooth glass surfaces of the buildings we pass, and it is the only vehicle I see, save the police cars clustered every few blocks. There is no one walking on the street. There seems to be no one in the buildings. It’s as though we are the final bus of survivors passing through the empty Atlanta depicted in The Walking Dead. We turn to make a circuit around a park bordered by three- and four-story office buildings. Grouped near a pond in the center of the park are fifteen or twenty tents. A banner beside them reads “Occupy Wall Street”; another says “Food Donations Welcome.” We finish the loop around this park and soon buildings obstruct the occupiers from view. We are back on a street lined with barricades, in a city eerily void of its people.
Krista, Corporations, and the Youth Council
Krista is a delegate from Vermont. She was at the Youth Council meeting in Ballroom B of the convention center Monday, where we heard from Patrick Gaspard, Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee, and Buffy Wicks, Director of National Operation Vote. Both Wicks and Gaspard are names that have appeared several times in my inbox over the last year, part of the steady stream of emails from the Obama campaign. Before either of them spoke, Krista, who had worked on Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004, told me that she had been taking photos of all the corporate logos at the convention. There are indeed ever-present offers of swag bags; Krista pointed out how the handy new tote I was using featured the emblems of Coca-Cola and AT&T. “Why do we need to have swanky jazz parties?” Krista asked. She would happily forego them if it would mean reducing the corporate presence here. “At Bernie [Sanders] rallies,” she noted, “it’s potluck.”
Patrick Gaspard takes to the podium to address the Youth Council, and he tells them that “the weight of the world is on your shoulders.” Of the RNC in Tampa, he says, “some folks were talking to empty seats; others were giving empty speeches.” The crowd of young Democrats becomes increasingly fired up as Gaspard tells them that, like 2008, this is not just a campaign but also a movement. “I’m not fearing Sheldon Adelson and Donald Trump because I know we have you,” he tells the room. Gaspard seeks to address the possibility that youth are not as invested in this race as they were in the one four years ago. After the victory in 2008, “the other side didn’t go away.” In the language of movement politics, Gaspard reminds Youth Council that Republicans “want you to forget the power and agency that you have.” He offers the power of social media as an example of this agency, and as I scribble notes on my flip steno pad, I sense that the ballroom is alive with Tweeting, re-Tweeting, Facebooking, and Instagramming. In fact, the Chair of the Youth Council photographed us—the audience—from his spot at the podium for immediate placement on social media. If it’s not posted, it didn’t happen.
Buffy Wicks offers a deeply personal account of the stakes as she sees them in this election. Her own involvement in politics began in organizing anti-war protests in San Francisco in 2003. One day, she recounts, she received a call from her friend Tom, who asked her to meet him at a clinic in the Mission District. Tom had just learned that he had HIV, and one of the deepest anxieties he confided in Buffy was that he did not have health insurance. As Tom faced his uncertain and uninsured future, American bombs began to fall on Iraq. Something about our national priorities, Buffy felt, was painfully, perversely flawed.
Fast-forward to the Obama White House. Buffy has been working on passing health-care reform, and she knows that if the Affordable Care Act passes, Tom’s preexisting condition will no longer prevent him from obtaining health insurance. When the votes were counted, Buffy says, she was in the Roosevelt Room watching. She utters the words that I hear many times today: “this is what change looks like.”
“We make it possible”
It takes a moment to realize that this slogan is a response to the Republican Convention’s “We built it.” At first, I thought “We make it possible” might be the motto of the utility company in Charlotte, referring to their supplying of energy. But as I walked around the convention’s bustling Carolina Fest on Labor Day, I saw the phrase on signs and banners everywhere, clearly intended to serve as a counterpunch. But who is the “we”?
As union members and organizers marked Labor Day in this right-to-work state, “We make it possible” took on a special meaning. At a stage adjoining a street lined with t-shirt stalls and button vendors, a labor-movement speaker told her listeners that the work union members do every day does, indeed, “make it possible” for Americans to enjoy the quality of life that they have. Amid the Republican rhetoric of “job creators” on the one side and “a culture of dependency” on the other, perhaps a more fitting Democratic rebuttal to “We built it” might have been “No, we build it”—working people build it.
What is a red state?
At a gathering for Italian-American Democrats, I encountered, surprisingly, a large contingent of young folks from Oklahoma. They were from the urban centers of Oklahoma City and Tulsa and from the university center of Norman. But a few were also from small towns with names that sound like stagecoach stops. They told me that Oklahoma, one of the reddest of the red states, is turning purpler with each passing year.
As part of the New York delegation, I’m conscious of being from one of the strongest Democratic states in the nation. New Yorkers fill at least three hotels, we have our own bus system here, and we are a big, visible, vocal presence. We’re the bluest of the blue. And yet this chromatic cartography can be deeply misleading. Its leads us—or at least it has sometimes led me—to think of red and blue states as immutable entities, as if the subsoil of New York would be a deep blue and that of Oklahoma a rich red. What’s misleading about this naturalistic account, however, is that it fails to account for that most natural of human behaviors: migration.
The Oklahoma delegates expressed concern over something that plagues us where I live in upstate New York: youth brain drain. One of the OKC kids had, in fact, just relocated to DC. Others talked of possible moves to New York. So part of what makes red states redder and blue states more blue is the movement of young people, often those with college educations, from the former to the latter. It might be revealing to poll seventeen-year-olds in Oklahoma and then to poll the same cohort again when they are twenty-seven. Would such a study find that the seventeen-year-olds are fairly split between left and right but that, by the time they are polled again at twenty-seven, the group is skewed to the right because many of those who were on the left have, indeed, left?
Michael J. Brown is a graduate student in the department of history at the University of Rochester, where he studies the place of intellectuals in American political culture. He is the founder of Flower City Philosophy, the coordinator of Rochester Educators for Obama, and a New York delegate at the DNC.
