Day 3: Less Exciting, but still in Great Style

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It is difficult to keep featuring fabulous speakers, but the DNC (Democratic National Committee/Convention) is managing to come close.  Here is a selection of the speeches, the few that I happened to actually see and hear.  [I try to give a fuller description of who these people are, due to the fact that, inexplicably, some of our readers appear to be Russian]:

Joe Biden [Vice President, and former senator from Delaware].  After several minutes of explaining why Hillary Clinton deserves the nomination, Joe Biden (as expected) gave a scathing criticism of the character and the style of Donald Trump.  Many on the Left (which is very center left, at the moment) find Donald Trump so hard to take that their complaints tend to be increasingly emotional and incoherent.  But Biden was a lot more reasoned, even given that the hall was filled with people who could be assumed to agree with him anyway.


Michael Bloomberg [multi-term mayor of New York City, millionaire businessman, and presently a political independent]:  Announcing that he was an independent, Bloomberg listed why he supported Hillary Clinton, both because of how suitable she was for the job, and, not least, because of how unsuitable Donald Trump would be, both from the point of view of temperament and experience.  He said that, being a successful businessman himself (who, unlike Trump, did not have an enormous financial boost from his parents), he knew just how poorly Trump's businesses were run, and why his promises meant little or nothing, and why his threats were ridiculously inappropriate.  (Special attention paid to the phrase "You're fired!" from Trump's reality TV show, The Apprentice.)

Tim Kaine [former senator from Virginia, and Vice Presidential Candidate]:  Choosing to essentially repeat his speech from Florida, at his introduction as Hillary Clinton's running mate, Tim Kaine also repeated many of his phrases at least twice!  We must hope Kaine gets over being overwhelmed to be the VP pick quickly, and begins to speak to a wider range of issues.  The problem is that the two speeches were too close together in time, and there were no events to respond to between them.  But this endless repetition has to stop.  On the plus side, he did make mention that the Republican Party had grievously strayed from its roots as the Party of Lincoln, and that many Republicans and former Republicans (including his in-laws) are dismayed at what is happening to that party.  He said that the Democrats will give disenchanted Republicans a home.

Sharon Belkofer [private citizen]:  She introduced herself as the mother of a fallen serviceman, whom Obama had comforted after she had been informed of her son's death.  She had been inspired to run for the local school board, and get into public life.  She was a good speaker, well able to stick to her points and keep her cool.

Barack Obama [US President, 2008-Present]:  Obama walked on stage (after a slightly embarrassingly romanticized documentary of what it was like to have been president for the last eight years).  He framed his speech of support of Hillary Clinton in terms of what it took to be president of the US, our foreign policy, what remains to be done in terms of domestic policy, especially fiscal policy, health and economic justice, gun violence, and immigration.  He also made several closely argued remarks about the candidacy of Donald Trump.

I can hardly imagine what more the DNC has to offer tomorrow, the day on which Hillary Clinton accepts the nomination.  I suppose Chelsea Clinton will speak, but there will not be a great deal of star power on the closing day of the Convention.

CNN chose to fact-check many of the speakers at the DNC, and you can read for yourself how much the statements by various speakers were supported by the CNN investigations.  This is interesting, because it sheds a great deal of light and supplies an enormous amount of detail about the claims concerned.

Among other things, Trump has now conceded that the minimum wage must go up.  Trump is slowly changing his mind on several issues.  But he has no problem about being flaky on issues at first, and studying them later.  In other words, he seems to be pandering to guys who like to carelessly shoot off their mouths, implying that now they will have a president just like them, in that way endorsing careless speech, a sort of extension of anti-PC-ness in public discourse.

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